Peter Coker; painter in the Kitchen Sink School
Hyfler/Rosner
(Filed: 18/12/2004) Telegraph
Art:
http://www.sheffieldgalleries.org.uk/shared/display.asp?ID=369
http://www.jameshymanfineart.com/pages/archive/information/78.html
http://www.artnet.de/artwork/179955/_Peter_Coker_Alban_OETubby_Webb.html
http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/portrait.asp?linkID=mp05611&rNo=1&role=sit
Peter Coker, who has died aged 78, was one of the leading
realist painters of his generation and an important figure
in the post-war movement that the critics christened, not
altogether accurately, the Kitchen Sink School.
While John Bratby, Jack Smith and Ed Middleditch are among
the more familiar names of the movement, Coker's first
one-man show at Zwemmers in 1956 - featuring large,
obsessive and fiercely-painted scenes of animal carcasses in
a butcher's shop - created no less of a critical stir at the
time.
With work purchased from the show by the Tate Gallery and
the Contemporary Art Society, Coker seemed destined, like
them, to enjoy an extended period of recognition by the
Establishment. It was not to be.
That same year, Abstract Expressionism from America - in the
form of a major show at the Tate that included Jackson
Pollock, de Kooning and Kline - created a sensation, the
sheer scale and energy appearing to promise a more
optimistic and radical way forward for art.
If this was to prove an illusion, it dealt a deadly blow to
the Kitchen Sink School in particular, and to any developing
tradition of figurative painting in general.
Though Coker's reputation suffered like the others as a
consequence, he stuck to his guns, continuing to develop a
powerful and expressive style. At the same time, landscape
was to become his predominant subject matter for the rest of
his life.
Born in London on July 27 1926, Peter Godfrey Coker was the
son of a businessman. He was brought up at Leytonstone, and
acquired a love of music from his mother; as a child the
stencil-cutting and engraving works of his maternal
grandfather, who lived nearby, also made a great impression.
The impetus to become an artist came from his school in
rural Essex, where the family moved when Peter was 11; it
was there that he learned to love landscape.
Art was not, however, the career which his father had
envisaged for a businessman's son, and his teacher's
suggestion that he should apply for an art school
scholarship was rejected in favour of an apprenticeship in a
confectionery warehouse of which his father was manager.
After what he later regarded as the worst year of his life,
Coker found a way out in the form of one of the warehouse's
regular customers, who found the young man a job as a studio
boy at Odhams Press.
There he fetched work from Feliks Topolski and did lettering
and book jackets; meanwhile, in the evenings and at weekends
he studied at St Martin's School of Art and the Central, and
by the age of 17 he was ready to go to art school full time.
Instead, however, he volunteered for the Fleet Air Arm and
did not finally find his way to art school until his demob
in 1946, when he signed up as a full-time student on a war
service grant at St Martin's.
In 1949 and 1950 Coker travelled in Italy and France, and
absorbed the work of the great 19th-century Realist Gustave
Courbet, whose influence both in subject matter and
technique can be seen in much of Coker's work.
In 1950 Coker went on to do post-graduate studies at the
Royal College of Art, winning a scholarship in his first
year. Though he was a favoured student, commissioned to
paint a portrait of a past principal of the college, JH
Jowett, he was only one of a talented generation that
included Jack Smith, Derrick Greaves, John Bratby and Ed
Middleditch.
While still a student at the college Peter married Vera
Crook, a scientist by training, and they went to live in his
father's old house at Leytonstone, where their only son,
Nicholas, was born. It was a close and happy marriage,
despite the appalling pressures put on it in later life by
Nicholas's early death in 1985. Coker had been devoted to
him, and the tragedy was severely to undermine his health,
physically and mentally, in later years.
Short and slight of build, Coker's physique seemed at odds
with the intense material presence and scale of his
paintings; the large, powerful gestures of the palette knife
which moulded the thick paint seemed to echo the very
substance as well as the appearance of the objects Coker
depicted. In conversation, however, one was in no doubt as
to the seriousness and intensity of his feelings about his
art.
Deeply affected as he had been in 1949 by his first sight of
Courbet's great masterpiece of everyday life, The Funeral at
Ornans, Coker had also been very impressed by the work of
the contemporary French artist Nicolas de Staël. Using
tactile slabs of thick paint, de Staël had evolved a style
which, though essentially abstract in character, was still
very suggestive of specific places and materials.
Coker's achievement in the early 1950s was to weld together
these two influences. His paintings of butchers' shops (all
based on one close to home in Leytonstone), flayed hares,
chicken carcasses and sheeps' heads describe both physical
situations of an elemental kind and the psychic distress of
that period.
The Zwemmer show in 1956, at which these works were first
exhibited, attracted the attention of influential critics
such as John Berger. Coker had, however, already begun to
turn to landscape. Working on the Normandy and Brittany
coasts and in the Barbizon (all places where Courbet had
painted), as well as in Cornwall and Devon, his paint now
became even thicker - sometimes pieces of canvas had to be
inserted between the layers of paint to hold them together
as they dried.
He was choosing scenes that reveal powerful natural forces -
pounding seas, tangled forests, massive rock formations,
plunging waterfalls; subjects that allowed him to find
equivalents in paint that were almost physical.
Coker and Vera moved to Mistley, near Manningtree in the
Essex countryside, and from the early 1960s he painted as
many English landscapes as he did French. He became close to
the much older landscape painter John Nash, who lived
nearby, and developed a new admiration for John Constable.
Meanwhile Coker was teaching at St Martin's and at the Royal
Academy Schools (he was made an ARA in 1965). He continued
to visit France, but also travelled in the north of England,
whose landscapes added a new breadth to his work; often he
would use thinner paint, even watercolour, to capture the
very different atmospheric effects.
After Zwemmers closed in 1967, the Royal Academy summer
exhibition continued to provide a regular outlet for his
work. Two retrospective shows, one at the Minories at
Colchester in 1972, and another devoted to his Butcher's
Shop paintings in 1979, also helped to consolidate his
reputation, even if the artistic mood of the times was still
rather against his kind of work.
Then, in 1985, came the tragedy of his son's death. Coker no
longer felt like travelling to France, but found in the
dramatic, flickering light of north-west Scotland a
landscape much closer to his real feelings.
The event gradually took its terrible toll. Nursed by Vera,
and visited by his many close friends, for a time Coker
worked less and less. Over the last decade, however, he
returned to his painting with something of his former
relish. A book about his work, by David Wootton and John
Russell Taylor, was published in 2002.
Peter Coker died on Thursday. His wife survives him.
Hyfler/Rosner
20 December 2004
Peter Godfrey Coker, painter: born London 27 July 1926; ARCA
1953; ARA 1965, RA 1972; married 1951 Vera Crook (one son
deceased); died Colchester, Essex 16 December 2004.
Peter Coker was one of the foremost realist painters in
England.
He first came to attention in the 1950s with tough, workaday
still lifes and interiors. In these he achieved a material
solidity equivalent to the harsh reality of the bare kitchen
tables and animal carcasses which he painted. Their crusty
surfaces were created by lining the board on which he worked
with white lead and oil, a mixture used by plumbers to
secure pipe joints. Powerfully designed, their sinewy
architecture owed much to a subtle interplay of verticals
and horizontals. These paintings immediately associated him
with the Kitchen Sink artists - John Bratby, Derrick
Greaves, Edward Middleditch and Jack Smith.
Although the critic John Berger read into these and other
Fifties realist paintings political intent, Coker always
denied that he had any such aim. Nevertheless, his paintings
betray a strain and melancholy that can be related to the
tensions and unrest of the period; and the affront caused by
his work and that of other Kitchen Sink artists found its
counterpart in the plays and novels of the "Angry Young
Men".
Prominent among his early output were the series of works
based on his local butcher's shop. These "meatscapes", as
the critics dubbed them, were freshly acknowledged in 1979
when a touring retrospective of Coker's butcher's shops
paintings and drawings was shown at the Royal Academy. But,
in the late Fifties, the reputation Coker had so rapidly
achieved was equally suddenly undercut by the arrival in
England of American Abstract Expressionism. For the next two
decades, while American art and theory dominated the
contemporary art scene, Coker's affiliation to the great
tradition of European realism limited the recognition he
received.
He continued undaunted, painting with great tenacity and
stubborn ambition. The consistency of his preoccupations,
the mobility of his imagination, his avoidance of an
artistic rut, his fierce passion and artistic integrity
forged an outstanding career. It is beautifully encapsulated
in the monograph Peter Coker RA, published in 2002, with
texts by David Wootton, John Russell Taylor and Richard
Humphries.
Peter Godfrey Coker was born in 1926 at the Royal Free
Hospital in Gray's Inn Road, London. Both his parents came
from the East End, but his father, having gone into trade
and become manager of a wholesale confectionary company,
moved his family out to Leytonstone, Essex, soon after Peter
was born. Among his childhood memories was the experience of
his maternal grandfather's engraving workshop, where the
array of tools and materials and the purposeful atmosphere
awoke him to the dignity and pleasure of craftsmanship.
On leaving school, he initially worked under his father as
an assistant at Kerland and Haskin, the confectioners. He
hated it and soon moved on, becoming a studio assistant at
Odhams Press in Long Acre where he was encouraged to attend
St Martin's School of Art, first in the evenings and at
weekends and then on a day- release scheme. Then, in 1943,
aged 17, he decided to enlist, finding eventual placement in
the Fleet Air Arm. He returned to St Martin's in 1947, now
able to sign up as a full-time student on a war service
grant. During the next three years, he learnt much from
Vivian Pitchforth and James Stroudley. Many years later he
wrote obituaries of both men for The Times.
Before entering the Royal College of Art as a post-graduate
student in 1950, he discovered Courbet. He never forgot the
excitement of finding one of Courbet's Etretat paintings
filling the central fold in an article in the Saturday
Evening Post. In the summer of 1949, after a visit to Italy
on his first trip abroad, he stopped in Paris and
experienced Courbet at first hand, being particularly
impressed by his Funeral at Ornans, by its audacity, breadth
and scale. He was joined in Paris by Vera Crook, whom he had
met two years earlier and married in 1951. Their son
Nicholas was born in 1952.
While at the Royal College of Art, where he remained until
1954, Coker won two scholarships and acted for a while as a
studio assistant to Rodrigo Moynihan, then Head of the
Painting School. Though he coincided with Bratby, Greaves,
Middleditch and Smith, and shared their interest in realism,
he remained a solitary figure and did not exhibit with them
at the Beaux Arts Gallery. Instead he waited until he felt
ready to mount a solo exhibition and then found a venue of
his own choice, the Zwemmer Gallery, in Litchfield Street,
round the corner from the famous bookshop in the Charing
Cross Road. The success of his first one-man show in 1956
was followed by three further shows at Zwemmer's, in 1957,
1959 and 1964.
Living at Leytonstone, in a house which belonged to his
father and had at one time been the family home, Coker made
a series of paintings based on Epping Forest. Landscape now
became his prime subject, and the pattern of his life for
the next 18 years settled around his part-time teaching at
St Martin's School of Art and regular visits to France. He
first visited Etretat in 1955. Other places of especial
importance to him were Aldeburgh, Antibes, Audierne,
Bargemon and the garden at the Clos du Peyronnet at
Menton-Garavan, to name just a few.
After the closure of the Zwemmer Gallery in 1967, the
Thackeray Gallery became Coker's main outlet, followed by
Gallery 10, both in London, but he also exhibited every year
in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibitions, becoming an ARA in
1965 and a full Academician in 1972. He remained always a
loyal member of this institution, even when outspokenly
hostile to some of its practices.
One of his colleagues at the Academy, Frederick Gore, was
the first to discern a shift of focus in Peter Coker's art
in 1968, after a summer spent in the north of England:
At first he had used particular motifs or landscape details
. . . in much the same way as he had originally treated the
ingredients of still life. His observant sympathy had
therefore gone to the turbulent thicket of the forest, the
rough cliff face, the cavern, the beach with the wave,
things which the mind could isolate and grasp in their
entirety, intrepret in paint and reorganise.
Now he saw as paintable something different; landscapes
which surrounded him and which were in perpetual movement,
landscapes structured not only by geological strata but also
by light . . . The life of the landscape had become at least
as important as the ritual of painting. Thus the very
breadth of Yorkshire's high countryside and its atmospheric
changes led him to altogether thinner paint.
Another alteration, in 1962, had been the move to Mistley,
on the edge of Manningtree, in north Essex, which from then
on remained his base. Having initially worked for the
Scient-ific Civil Service, a job she resigned in 1957 in
order to care for her mother who was dying of cancer, Vera
had become Peter's bedrock, not least because her cooking
matched his gourmet standards.
This close and happy marriage was hard hit in 1985 by the
untimely death of their son. That summer they made the first
of many visits to Badenscallie, in Ross-shire, where Peter
Coker painted a series of obscurely moving works based on
fishing nets, strung out on poles for mending. Then, five
years later, in 1990, he suffered two serious heart attacks
and a debilitating stroke. Earlier, in 1959, he had been
diagnosed with Cushing's Disease. Now, once again, he was
beset with a series of medical problems.
Although he continued for a while to work with Vera's help,
he gave up in 1992 after a visit to Menton. His artistic
sensibility, however, remained active and was fed by his
voracious interest in exhibitions, catalogues and books.
Then, after a gap of 10 years, the frustration attendant
upon pent-up creativity proved too great and he began
painting again, though now confined to a wheelchair. Taking
as his starting point a set of drawings he had made in Paris
in the 1970s, he produced an astonishing body of work which
formed a travelling exhibition and is currently on show in
the Graves Art Gallery in Sheffield.
Coker will be remembered for the refreshing nature of his
astringent vision, for his consummate mastery as a
draughtsman, painter and etcher, and as a proud and vigorous
inheritor of a great artistic tradition.
Frances Spalding