In 1979 the artist Derrick Greaves, who has died aged 95, visited the Negev desert, in southern Israel, and observed the vivid paradox of the apparently cracked surface of the barren waste invaded by flowers springing up overnight. The resulting pared-down works that he produced for an exhibition in Britain and Tel Aviv built on a push towards abstraction that had started in the 1960s. Later, he borrowed motifs from the Ukiyo-e masters of woodblock printing Hokusai and Hiroshige, and finessed them for his own ends, attracted in part by the flatness that had haunted western artists since the late 19th century.
Later still he took inspiration from some of Georges Braque’s greatest canvases: large interiors of his studio, each overlaid with a bird in full flight, an image that Greaves refined further for his own purposes, as in Shangri-La (Two Exotic Birds) from 2002. Greaves’s line had always been strong and pure, and in his Shangri-La series, intended to provide an uplifting response to the horrors of the Iraq war, his art of line, silhouette and colour reached an exquisite peak.
However, initially he was viewed as being a member of what in Encounter magazine in December 1954 the critic David Sylvester called “the kitchen sink school”. This provided an inadvertent group name for four young British painters who had been taken up by the artist and gallery director Helen Lessore, with shows in her gallery, the Beaux Arts, in Mayfair. Greaves, John Bratby, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith were already out of sorts about John Berger having proclaimed them in 1952 as social realists. Now that they were grouped as the “kitchen sink” school, three of them were positively dismayed – the exception being Bratby, who enjoyed the popular fame it brought him.
The uneasy quartet seemed stuck with the label when the choice fell on them to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1956. And in 1957 Greaves and Bratby were among six young British painters in Moscow to open a show of their paintings hand-picked by Berger. But that year, the nation swallowed Harold Macmillan’s message that they’d never had it so good and began to reject social-realist austerity. Bratby, Greaves and Smith each won prizes at the 1959 John Moores Liverpool exhibition, but pop art was edging out realism as painting’s high-gloss response to bright new times.
Greaves’s first solo show at the Beaux Arts gallery in 1953 had been a huge critical and popular success, while he was still a student on a scholarship at the British School at Rome (1952-54). There, although he maintained the realism made in Sheffield, partly under the influence of the renowned Italian realist Renato Guttuso, it flowered and took on colour in the Italian sunshine. Stephen Bone, the Manchester Guardian critic, singled out Men and Dogs in a Landscape in the Beaux Arts show, notably for the blazing blue sky above an arid olive grove: “It is a pity this picture was not included in … [the exhibition] Figures in Their Settings, at present at the Tate Gallery, for Derrick Greaves, unlike most of the artists [at the Tate], has really been concerned to design human figures and their surroundings.”
Social realism, said Greaves, was aesthetic suicide, although his younger contemporary Patrick Procktor recalled Greaves once confessing to a gathering of contemporaries: “I was a teenage social realist.”
Yet he stayed in touch with his working-class roots and remained a socialist from his days selling the communist Daily Worker on a Sheffield street corner to late in life when, for instance, he smuggled the photographic silhouette of an Iraqi prisoner of war under torture in Abu Ghraib into what was at first sight a purely abstract image.
Born in Sheffield, Derrick was the son of Mabel (nee Swindells), a seamstress and costumier, and Harry Greaves, an accomplished cabinet maker but a remote parent, traumatised by his first world war experiences. Smith, a year younger, lived a few doors away in the same street. At the age of 14 Derrick left school and trained as a draughtsman in a foundry. A remarkably accomplished pen drawing of his mother’s kettle on a grate hung with drying towels survives from this time. In 1943 he took an apprenticeship in sign writing and did evening classes, and a drawing teacher encouraged him to try for the Royal College of Art in London. In 1948 he won a place and a scholarship worth £600, handsome at that time.
It was a massive stroke of good fortune for Greaves. Yet not only had he loved working as a signwriter, but in the end that trade, rather than the RCA or the Beaux Arts period, turned out to be the foundation of his mature painting. At the RCA he studied under Carel Weight, and his bleak Sheffield cityscapes of these years were a romantic as much as a realist reaction to industrial desolation not too far in spirit from Weight’s ghost-ridden renderings of shabby London streets and back gardens.
In 1982 Greaves moved to Norfolk, where he remained for the rest of his life. From 1983 to 1991 he was head of printmaking at Norwich School of Art. This was enriching for him and for his students, and when in 2004 he had an exhibition at Bury St Edmunds art gallery in the beautiful Market Cross built by Robert Adam, the visitors’ book was studded with huzzahs from former pupils gladdened by this viewing of his latest flowering. His exhibitions continued, principally with the James Hyman gallery in London. Irises in 2018 was followed by Blossom in 2020, and for his 95th birthday this year From Shangri-La to the Walled Garden, the new paintings recalling the rough stone walls that the artist encountered in the Derbyshire hills as a child. Hyman’s 2007 study of the artist was titled Derrick Greaves: From Kitchen Sink to Shangri-La.
In 1950 Greaves married Margaret Johnson, a nurse. They had two sons and a daughter; the younger son, Daniel, won an Oscar in 1991 as an animator. In 1990 they divorced, and four years later he married Sally Butler, formerly his model. She and his children survive him.
•Derrick Greaves, artist, born 5 June 1927; died 1 October 2022
