John Salt

John Salt (2 August 1937 – 13 December 2021) was an English artist, whose greatly detailed paintings from the late 1960s onwards made him one of the pioneers of the photorealist school.

[3] As a young boy Salt was encouraged to draw and paint, and at the age of fifteen he gained admittance to the Birmingham School of Art, where he studied from 1952 to 1958.

[3] Salt returned to the Midlands to teach at Stourbridge College of Art and in 1964 was the first artist to exhibit at Birmingham's newly opened Ikon Gallery, where he had his first one-man show in 1965.

Impressed at how the photographers' documentary style relieved them of the self-conscious need to adopt an artistic technique, Salt photocopied the book with an eye to painting some of its images.

"[3] Salt had originally planned to return to England at the end of his Baltimore course in 1969, but when two of his Buick works were bought by an influential New York City art dealer he took Hartigan's advice and moved there instead.

Salt's work in New York moved away from the earlier smooth consumerist portrayals of car interiors as he started to base his paintings on his own photographs.

[1] The result is that Salt's pictures have an extreme level of detail and precision that lends them a heightened sense of reality and eliminates as far as possible the self-expression of the artist.

[8] Salt's work has been accused of voyeurism in its impersonal and unforgivingly objective portrayals of impoverished lifestyles,[13] something he has gone some way to acknowledge: I don't like taking photographs because it puts you in situations where it can be confrontational or it can be awkward.