Bretby, John Randall

Bretby creates as if he had only one day left. He paints a packet of cornflakes on a littered kitchen table, as if it were part of the Last Supper .

- John Burger ^[1]

John Randall Bretby was born in 1928 in Wimbledon , a suburb of London. After receiving secondary education from 1951 to 1954 he studied at the Royal College of Art . The next three years he worked as a tutor at this educational institution. Already during this period he became famous for his interpretations of the works of Walter Sickert of the period of the creative association of Camden Town . In his own paintings, which are quite typical of expressionism , Bretby often turned both to painting portraits of his relatives and to creating images of the simplest everyday objects of kitchens, bathrooms and toilets. Soon after the publication in 1954 of a review article on his work with the title "Kitchen sink realism " ( English kitchen sink realism ), he unwittingly gave the name to a whole artistic direction, not only in the visual arts, but also in drama, theater, and cinema. In 1958, his works were used as a collection of the fictional artist Jimson from the movie “ With the Mouth of an Artist ”.

With the increase in popularity of pop art, the demand for John Bretby’s work decreased significantly, but some fans, including, for example, Paul McCartney ^[2] , continued to collect his paintings. In 1971, John Bretby was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts . In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked a lot on portraits of celebrities; later, a series of these works was called the Hall of Fame . In the 1980s, he became interested in urban landscapes.

He died in 1992.

A fragment of John Bretby’s painting was used in the 2007 design of Mark Knopfler ’s Kill to Get Crimson .

• John Randall Bretby at artnet.com
• John Randall Bretby at the TATE Gallery website
• John Randall Bretby at pinterest.com