They’ve certainly picked a surprising venue for it. Lives Less Ordinary, an exhibition that critiques and claims to rectify the representation of British working-class life, occupies the wood-panelled, gothic-windowed mansion Two Temple Place, built in the 1890s as a London pad for millionaire William Waldorf Astor. Photos and paintings of common people are hung around a hall that looks like the grand staircase of the Titanic.
It’s a curious sight and even curiouser exhibition. The British working class, says the press release, are seen in art “through the reductive and distorting lens of the middle-class gaze. Working-class subjects have been … stereotyped or sensationalised. Working-class artists have been misinterpreted, pigeonholed, or overlooked altogether”. Which artists are they accusing? Richard Billingham, I suspect, whose photobook Ray’s a Laugh portrays drunken squalor inside the council flat where he grew up, and Martin Parr, whose pictures of seaside life tend to be toe-curling. Yet both are lyrical, memorable artists of real British life. Just not with a sufficiently positive attitude.
It’s soon clear this exhibition has set itself an impossible, quixotic goal: not only to correct how the working class are seen but actually to find that class as a single, stable body with an authentic identity across 80 or so years from the 1940s to now.
Working-class authenticity keeps spinning away as you look, even in the earliest art here. The Kitchen Sink school in postwar British painting gets a welcome airing. It was nicknamed by the art critic David Sylvester but his term ”kitchen sink” got taken up by theatre reviewers and is nowadays mostly associated with the realist drama of John Osborne. Is realism the same as working-class ? Jack Smith’s 1954 painting Interior with Child depicts a spacious room with a well-laid table and flower arrangement, and a little girl playing with a dog: it could as easily be a middle-class home in austerity Britain as a working-class one.
The catalogue says Smith’s “working-class upbringing in Sheffield” shaped his eye for “scenes of everyday life at home”. Yet having an artistic interest in domestic reality is a trait he shares with Bonnard, Matisse and other very bourgeois artists. Another painting shown here as a forgotten working-class masterpiece, Ceri Richards’ 1950 canvas Yellow Interior, is clearly a homage to Matisse with its room saturated in a single colour, where a long-legged faceless woman sits elegantly among the plants and flamboyant wallpaper. No one would look at this as a painting about class at all, unless told to.
It is much easier to see why Chris Killip is included. This remarkable photographer shot working-class life in the north-east of England at a time when vast economic changes were shutting shipyards and collieries. His project Seacoal is a mind-bending delve into extraordinary lives. In 1983 Killip moved into a caravan at Lynemouth, Northumberland to live with and portray people who were literally scraping a living by finding coal on the beach, straining it through wire nets as if it were gold dust. Killip described the coal-gathering scenes on the beach as “medieval”. How much can anyone have earned that way? Yet the Seacoal community seem in his pictures to survive with dignity. Kiss, New Year’s Day, Seacoal Camp, Lynemouth, Northumberland portrays a father and his daughter, happy in their little caravan. But is even this truly working-class?
When this photograph was taken in 1984 the industrial, capital-letter Working Class was fighting its last stand in the miners’ strike. Clearly the Seacoal folk didn’t belong to that organised class and the institutions it had created in the 19th and 20th centuries. Their way of making a living was both more ancient, and futuristic, looking forward to the fragmented nature of 21st-century society when McJobs, gigs and marginal existences make the idea of a single, organised working class naive.
Oh for another Killip to record and portray the ways people work and survive in Britain right now. Instead we get a lot of attitude. “Soften Up Hard Lad”, says an England flag by Corbin Shaw. Good advice. In Roman Manfredi’s photographs, lesbians man up in raw urban settings. We are told they are working-class but that seems a very essentialist way to describe personae that clearly embrace artifice and masquerade.
Yet when the exhibition drops its heavy load of idealism and actually allows in art that bravely depicts the reality of this unequal land, the show scores. George Shaw’s paintings and drawings of Tile Hill, the area on the outskirts of Coventry where he grew up, don’t claim class as an identity or celebrate it as a badge of honour. He just did grow up in this place, with its bleak yet sometimes beautiful mix of city and country, and it is in him. In his works here, the flat empty walls and silent unpopulated streets express his childhood environment’s ghostly power over him as an adult, as if he is still working out some unnameable trauma. Rain enters your soul just looking at Shaw’s honest, excellent paintings.
Here is modern Britain, working-class or not, as true as it comes.
Lives Less Ordinary: Working-Class Britain Re-Seen is at Two Temple Place, London, until 20 April
