Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain: Reconstructing Home 9781350052727

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 8
Figures......Page 9
Acknowledgements......Page 13
Series Preface......Page 15
Introduction: ‘Shaken by the Spirit of Reconstruction’......Page 16
1 John Bratby: Masculinity and Violence in the Post-War Home......Page 40
2 Francis Bacon: Queer Intimacy and Queer Spaces of Home......Page 68
3 Keith Vaughan: Bodies and Memories of Home......Page 94
4 Francis Newton Souza: Masculinity, Migration and Home......Page 124
5 Victor Pasmore: Abstraction and the Post-War Landscape of Home......Page 152
Conclusion: Gilbert & George and the Persistence of Reconstruction......Page 178
Notes......Page 187
Bibliography......Page 206
Index......Page 219

Citation preview

Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain

HOME SERIES EDITORS: VICTOR BUCHLI AND ROSIE COX ISSN: 2398–3191 This exciting new series responds to the growing interest in the home as an area of research and teaching. Highly interdisciplinary, titles feature contributions from across the social sciences, including anthropology, material culture studies, architecture and design, sociology, gender studies, migration studies, and environmental studies.Relevant to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers, the series will consolidate the home as a field of study. A Cultural History of Twin Beds, by Hilary Hinds Food, Masculinities, and Home: Interdisciplinary Perspectives edited by Michelle Szabo and Shelley Koch Living with Strangers: Bedsits and Boarding Houses in Modern English Life, Literature and Film, edited by Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei Making Homes by Sarah Pink, Kerstin Leder Mackley, Roxana Morosanu, Val Mitchell and Tracy Bhamra Sexuality and Gender at Home: Experience, Politics, Transgression edited by Brent Pilkey, Rachael M. Scicluna, Ben Campkin and Barbara Penner Thinking Home edited by Sanja Bahun and Bojana Petric Queering the Interior edited by Andrew Gorman-Murray and Matt Cook

Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain Reconstructing Home

GREGORY SALTER

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Gregory Salter, 2020 Gregory Salter has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Francis Newton Souza by Ida Kar (© National Portrait Gallery, London) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5272-7 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5273-4 eBook: 978-1-3500-5274-1 Series: Home Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

for my Mum and Dad

vi

Contents Figures  viii Acknowledgements  xii Series Preface  xiv

Introduction: ‘Shaken by the Spirit of Reconstruction’  1 1 John Bratby: Masculinity and Violence in the Post-War Home  25 2 Francis Bacon: Queer Intimacy and Queer Spaces of Home  53 3 Keith Vaughan: Bodies and Memories of Home  79 4 Francis Newton Souza: Masculinity, Migration and Home  109 5 Victor Pasmore: Abstraction and the Post-War Landscape of

Home  137 Conclusion: Gilbert & George and the Persistence of Reconstruction  163 Notes  172 Bibliography  191 Index 204

Figures 1 Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 116.5cm, private collection © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2018. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd  9 2 John Bratby, Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall, 1957,

oil on board, 241.9 × 196.9cm, Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images © The Estate of John Bratby  14 3 Ida Kar, John Randall Bratby; David Bratby; Jean Esme

Oregon Cooke, 1959, vintage bromide print, 20.2 × 23.4cm, National Portrait Gallery, London © National Portrait Gallery  26 4 Jean Cooke, Self Portrait, 1958, oil on canvas, 1149 × 838mm,

Tate, London © Tate, London, 2017  34 5 John Bratby, Jean at the Basin, 1955, oil on board, 121.9 × 78.1cm,

private collection, London © The Estate of John Bratby Photo: National Portrait Gallery  37 6 John Bratby, Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window,

1954, oil on board, 122 × 108cm, Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire/Bridgeman Images © The Estate of John Bratby  42 7 Jean Cooke, John Bratby, 1954, oil on canvas, 122 × 91.4cm,

Royal Academy of Arts, London © The Estate of Jean Cooke  50

FIGURES

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8 Jean Cooke, John Bratby, 1962, oil on canvas, 130.8 × 61cm,

Royal College of Art, London, UK/Bridgeman Images © The Estate of Jean Cooke  51 9 Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon, bromide print, January 1960,

7 3/8 × 7 1/2in., accepted in lieu of tax by H.M. Government and allocated to the Gallery, 1991, National Portrait Gallery, London © Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Sotheby’s London  57 10 Francis Bacon, Man in Blue IV, 1954, oil on canvas, 198 × 137cm,

Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2018. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd  61 11 Francis Bacon, Figure in a Landscape, 1945, oil on canvas,

1448 × 1283mm, Tate, London © Tate, London, 2017  71 12 Keith Vaughan, Assembly of Figures I, 1952, oil on board,

142 × 116.8cm, Sainsbury Centre For Visual Art, University of East Anglia, Norwich © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018  82 13 Photograph of Dick Vaughan, from Dick’s Book of Photos,

c. 1938, Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018  85 14 Photograph of male figure lying on the shingle at Pagham,

from Dick’s Book of Photos, c. 1941, Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018  87

x

FIGURES

15 Photograph of two men at Highgate Ponds, c. 1933, from Dick’s

Book of Photos, c. 1941, Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018  88 16 Keith Vaughan, Camp Construction, 1941, pen and ink and

wash on paper, 21.5 × 27cm, private collection © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: Osborne Samuel  90 17 Keith Vaughan, Theseus and the Minotaure (Interior at

Minos), 1950, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 203cm, private collection © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018  99 18 Keith Vaughan, Lazarus, 1956, oil on board, 110.5 × 81.2cm,

private collection © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: © 1997 Christie’s Images Limited  104 19 Francis Newton Souza, Self-Portrait, 1957, pen and ink © Estate

of F N Souza. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: Grosvenor Gallery, London  112 20 Francis Newton Souza, Man and Woman Laughing, 1957, oil

on board, 152.4 × 121.9 cm, private collection © Estate of F N Souza. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: Saffronart  114 21 Francis Newton Souza, Crucifixion, 1959, oil on board,

1831 × 1220mm, Tate, London © Tate, London, 2017  119 22 Front cover of F.N. Souza, exhibition catalogue, Gallery One,

London, 1962. Original photograph by Oswald Jones. © Estate

FIGURES

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of F N Souza. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: Grosvenor Gallery, London  128 23 Ida Kar, Liselotte Souza (née de Kristian); Karen Souza;

Francis Newton Souza, 1957, 2 ¼in. square film negative, National Portrait Gallery, London © National Portrait Gallery  129 24 Ida Kar, Francis Newton Souza, 1961, 2 ¼in. square film

negative, National Portrait Gallery, London © National Portrait Gallery  130 25 Francis Newton Souza, ‘My Friend and I’, 1959, pen and ink

© Estate of F N Souza. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: Grosvenor Gallery, London  133 26 Victor Pasmore, Apollo Pavilion, 1970s, photograph © Estate

of Victor Pasmore. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2018. Photo: John Pasmore  138 27 Victor Pasmore, Lamplight, 1941, oil on canvas, 635 × 762mm,

Tate, London © Tate, London, 2017  143 28 Victor Pasmore, The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith,

No. 1, 1944–7, oil on canvas, 791 × 1097 × 25mm, Tate, London © Tate, London, 2017  145 29 Victor Pasmore, The Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and

White, 1950–1, oil on canvas, 119.4 × 152.4cm, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © Estate of Victor Pasmore. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2018  149

Acknowledgements I

have received a great deal of support and encouragement from so many people while researching and writing this book, and I am delighted to be able to thank them here. The early stages of this research were guided by David Peters Corbett, and shaped by the comments of Petra Rau and Jo Applin – I am indebted to their advice and guidance, and I am extremely thankful for all of their support. The research for this book was also fundamentally changed and challenged by my time working with the Documenting Homes archive at the Geffrye Museum of the Home in East London between 2013 and 2015, and the research environment of the Centre for Studies of Home at the Geffrye and Queen Mary, University of London. I would like to thank all the staff in the curatorial office at the Geffrye, particularly Eleanor John, and Alison Blunt at Queen Mary. Their research and work helped me think carefully about the question of home in this project. I am indebted to the comments, criticism and support of a wide range of colleagues and researchers over the last few years, including Kate Aspinall, Katie Faulkner, James Finch, Victoria Flood, Martin Hammer, Matt Houlbrook, Hana Leaper, Lynda Nead, Laurel Peterson, Sarah Monks, Catherine Spencer, Andrew Stephenson and Robert Sutton. Particular thanks are due to Lisa Tickner, who supported me during my MA at the Courtauld in 2008–9 and has continued to provide advice and help since then. Since September 2016, I have been lucky to work in the Department of Art History, Curating, and Visual Studies at the University of Birmingham, and I would like to thank Francesca Berry, Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Michael Clegg, Jamie Edwards, Hannah Halliwell, Sophie Hatchwell, David Hemsoll, Claire Jones, Elizabeth L’Estrange, Cosmin Minea, Kate Nichols, Markian Prokopovych, Matthew Rampley, Samuel Shaw, Camilla Smith, Sara Tarter and Nóra Veszprémi for their comments on my work and support, which has helped greatly in the final stages of completing this book. The students I have taught over the time I have been at Birmingham have responded to the ideas I put forward in this book with criticism and enthusiasm – I owe them all a great deal. My research has been enabled by the help and advice of staff in a range of museums, galleries, libraries and archives. My thanks are due to staff at the British Library, Tate Archive, the Courtauld Library, Aberystwyth University

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

xiii

School of Art Museum and Galleries (particularly Neil Holland), Julian Hartnoll Gallery, Grosvenor Gallery (particularly Conor Macklin), Piano Nobile (particularly Julia Fischel), Osborne Samuel (particularly Brian Porter) and the Imperial War Museum. I am extremely grateful to everyone who assisted me with copyright and image enquiries in the latter stages of this book. Gerard Hastings shared comments and contacts for my Keith Vaughan research, and the Vaughan chapter here is vastly improved as a result. Some material in Chapter 2 appeared in Visual Culture in Britain 18, no. 1 (2017), and some material in Chapter 3 appeared in Art History 38, no. 3 (2015) – I thank the journals for permission to reproduce that material here. This book has been supported by a Publications Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. I wish also to express my thanks to the staff at the Paul Mellon Centre for their support over the years. I would like to thank the Home series editors Victor Buchli and Rosie Cox for supporting my book proposal, and Miriam Cantwell and Lucy Carroll at Bloomsbury for all their help and patience in guiding this book through the review process. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their generous comments during this process. Finally, I need to thank friends who have encouraged me along the way: thank you to Holly Arrowsmith, Daniel Clancy, Louise Coles, Andrew Farndale, Rosie Hare, Simon Holt, Laura Martin, Anna Rapp, James Salter, Natalie Shaw, Holly Smith and Catherine Wilson. I would like to thank Charlie Waters for all his love, humour and encouragement, and, for all their patience and support, Benedict, Victoria, Andrew, the dogs, and my Mum and Dad.

Series Preface Series Preface: Why Home? Rosie Cox and Victor Buchli

T

he home is where people are made and undone. As life is increasingly seen as precarious, fluid, mobile and globalized, there is a growing interest in the home: what it is, what it means to various groups of people, how it constitutes them and how it relates to other spheres of life both in the present and in the past. Home is both physical and metaphorical, local and national, a place of belonging and exclusion. It is at the heart of the most seemingly mundane spaces and experiences – the site of quotidian activities such as eating, washing, raising children and loving. Yet it is precisely the purportedly banal nature of the home that masks its deep importance for the underlying assumptions that structure social and political life. Home reveals the importance of routine activities, such as consumption, to highly significant and urgent wide-ranging issues and processes such as the maintenance of and challenges to global capitalism and our relationship to the natural environment. Among academic writers home is increasingly problematized, interrogated and reconsidered. Long understood as an axis of gender inequality, home is also seen as a site; a space of negotiation and resistance as well as oppression and a place where such relationships are undone as well as made. As a topic of study, it is the natural analytical unit for a number of disciplines, with relevance to a wide range of cultural and historical settings. The home is probably one of the few truly universal categories upon which an interdisciplinary programme of research can be conducted and which over recent years has resulted in a distinctive analytical category across disciplines, times and cultures. This book series offers a space to foster these debates and to move forward our thinking about the home. The books range across the social and historical sciences, drawing out the cross-cutting themes and interrelationships within writings on home and providing us with new perspectives on this intimate space. While our understanding of ‘home’ is expansive, and open to interrogation, it is not unbounded. In honing our understandings of what ‘home’ is, this series aims to disturb and it goes beyond the domestic including sites and states of dispossession and homelessness and experiences of the ‘unhomely’.

Introduction ‘Shaken by the Spirit of Reconstruction’

I

n a journal entry on 15 March 1946, the artist Keith Vaughan (1912–77) faced the end of his time as a conscientious objector in the Non-Combatant Corps during the Second World War and prepared for a return to civilian life: The day before demobilisation: Rapid disintegration of personality. Integrity melting like ice in the sun. All poise, stature crumbling away … Furious grappling to retrieve the fragments of lost personality. Despair as the roots are slowly drawn after five years in the warm earth … Final dissolution in panic and self-pity. Womb-defence mechanism. Head under bed clothes. Childish oblivion. Have lost the scales of balancing gains with losses.1 The war had been relatively kind to Vaughan after a traumatic start. He made the torturous decision to register as a conscientious objector in the aftermath of his brother Dick’s death, who was killed in action with the RAF in May 1940. He was called up not long after on 2 January 1941. He found, however, that the all-male camps in which he was stationed – working on the land from 1941 at Codford in Wiltshire, before moving to Eden Camp, a prisoner of war camp near Malton in Yorkshire – allowed a sense of companionship that he had struggled to find as a homosexual in London in the 1930s. Though the work could be dull and friendships disrupted when companies were routinely broken up, the war gave Vaughan a sense of security and even community; in an entry from Codford in July 1942, he simply states, ‘I have returned home, not left home’.2

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ART AND MASCULINITY IN POST-WAR BRITAIN

Though Vaughan’s words reflect a wartime experience that was relatively atypical, they are striking for the way in which they convey a more general sense of the disorientating transition from war to peacetime. They express, in part, the shift in behaviour and routine that this necessitates, the uprooting of an established way of living, and its psychological effects. This new post-war moment is one of uncertainty and discomfort. It brings an end to the home and community that he had found and requires, as a result, a renegotiation of selfhood. Vaughan also finds himself struggling with the question of time. In one sense, this is a moment of return – his ‘grappling to retrieve the fragments of lost personality’, shattered and discarded somewhere before war began – but it is also likened to a retreat into immaturity (to the womb or a head under bedclothes in ‘childish oblivion’). In a journal entry on the previous day, Vaughan had referred to this moment as ‘the angst-producing twilight time between actuality and memory, the present and the past’.3 This is a moment of transition that poses a series of questions that Vaughan, as well as others emerging from the war, would have to face: about re-establishing home after six years of destruction and disruption and about negotiating a sense of selfhood after the upheaval of war, within a reconstructive moment of both trauma and optimism, memory and hope. Vaughan’s diary entries attest to some of the ways in which war and its aftermath shaped and unsettled definitions of home and masculinity in post-war Britain. In the ensuing years, these categories – personal, emotive and highly uncertain – became central to his art. This book examines the work of six post-war British artists, including Vaughan, whose works were informed by the recurring memories of war and the disorientating task of reconstruction. It traces how all of these artists alight on, and intertwine, the themes of home and masculinity in their artworks, revealing, in the process, insights into the subjective experiences of these themes in the post-war period. The artists are chosen and organized here in a way that their works present instances of the negotiation of home and masculinity from the small scale of the domestic interior to increasingly larger scales of public spaces, communities, migration and the nation. This is intended to develop an increasingly broad, complex picture of how these categories were encountered, lived and contested at this time. It is not, as a result, a full picture of post-war British art or a comprehensive social history of post-war home and masculinity. Instead, it responds to the specific representations of home and masculinity to highlight the varied, subjective experience of these categories in this unstable post-war moment. The artists in this book are not usually discussed in relation to one another in literature on British art. Five of the six artists here could all be described as figurative (in that their work represents the human body and its spaces), though all are more readily associated with very different groups or

INTRODUCTION

3

movements: John Bratby (1928–92) with the Kitchen Sink Painters, Francis Bacon (1909–92) with the School of London, Vaughan with Neo-Romanticism, Francis Newton Souza (1924–2002) marked by his race and birthplace in Goa as a postcolonial artist, and Gilbert & George (1943– and 1942–) with the turn to conceptualism and performance. Victor Pasmore (1908–98), meanwhile, embraces non-representational art, relief construction and town planning. Uncovering thematic connections between these artists can deepen an understanding of post-war British art. Home remains a notoriously difficult thing to study, for both historians and academics addressing contemporary homes, as it is a private space, with its routines difficult to capture and its emotions and resonances difficult to express. This book argues that artworks provide one way of understanding the experience of home. In one sense, artworks might provide moments where supposedly dominant or given ideas are undermined or re-imagined. This is something like Raymond Williams’s suggestion that art might allow the representation of previously excluded or ignored experiences or, perhaps, ‘the articulation and formulation of latent, momentary, and newly possible consciousness’.4 Similarly, Kobena Mercer has framed art as a ‘countercut that punctures openings’ in social ideas and forms that appear fixed and, in doing so, calls our relationship to those supposedly fixed ideas into question.5 In another sense, art’s complex relationship to history – how we might recover art’s history or what role art might play in the writing of history – is potentially productive. In her work on British modernism, Lisa Tickner considered art as a ‘critical condensation of modern experience’ though, inevitably, an imperfect one.6 Stuart Hall, too, reflected on the difficulty of ‘thinking about the relationship between the work and the world’.7 Both Tickner and Hall underlined the losses, the incompleteness, the lapses that happen in the movement from experience to representation and then interpretation.8 We are left to work with the ‘elasticity’ of history, as Tickner puts it, between the moment of a work’s inception and the ‘continuity of interests … whereby the work reaches into the present and comes alive for us through our own investments in the past’.9 To argue that artworks might offer a means of understanding home and masculinity in post-war Britain, then, is to argue for an understanding that is always going to be incomplete. What art and artists might offer, however, may be moments of illumination, reflection, negotiation, even contradiction, on the historical categories of home and masculinity, made visible to us and illuminated by our own concerns and questions, looking back from their futures. Works of art – though they come to us as finished objects or completed performances – are formative, made in process, the products of their presents. They might, as a result, hold or set down, just for one moment, the instability of home, identity and the sense of living in the time of reconstruction. They might even, as José Esteban Muñoz has suggested,

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ART AND MASCULINITY IN POST-WAR BRITAIN

offer moments of ‘anticipatory illumination’, building on the present and what has been lost of the past in order to imagine, perhaps, a world – a home – to come.10 This topic offers a different approach to the study of British art after 1945. This is an area that has been formed by studies that focus on individual artists or movements, and this book is intended, in part, to move beyond a tendency towards movement-focused studies.11 There are notable exceptions that take on the period in thematic terms, focusing on areas like the politics of realism, the nuclear threat, landscape and national identity, and migration.12 A focus on the intersections between reconstruction, home and gender is a new thematic approach here. At the same time, this book is intended to work across disciplines, and is heavily indebted to work in history, literature and social and cultural geography. My intention is to speak to those disciplines too, underlining the importance of art as a rich visual methodology for thinking about the historical, gendered experience of home and its reconstruction, and for thinking about the relationship between history, culture and subjectivity more widely. This is not to instrumentalize art, but is an attempt to speak of its resonances, contradictions and possibilities – to think about art objects, but also about their histories, written and emerging, and their complex positions within these histories. Throughout, artists are brought into dialogue with contemporary literary figures, some active in Britain, others elsewhere, and this is intended to reflect the ways in which these artists worked. Some produced their own writing that actively engages with ideas in their artworks (Bratby in his novels, Souza in his essays and Vaughan in his journals, which he styled after those of André Gide), others make explicit reference to literary sources in their interviews and artworks (Bacon, famously, made reference to a number of literary influences, and I explore Proust in relation to his work here, while Vaughan also turned to Gide), and others used words and literary forms alongside their artworks (understanding Gilbert and George’s Underneath the Arches, for instance, relies heavily on the invitations and statements they made alongside it). This book is both an attempt to reflect the porous boundaries of creative work in this period, as well as encourage a dialogue between academics and researchers working in these areas currently. The remainder of this introduction first seeks to outline and define the two key categories of this book: home and masculinity. It then outlines the methodology that will be used for exploring these categories in the works of the six artists in this study by demonstrating how British post-war reconstruction was a moment of particular temporal instability. Finally, it gives an outline of the chapters of the book.

INTRODUCTION

5

Home In post-war Britain, home was resonant with the anxieties of war and central to hopes of reconstruction; it was the concept that would, according to Lynda Nead, ‘repair the damage of war’.13 During the war, home had been the locus of disruption and destruction: families and households had been broken up as many men left for military service, women entered the workplace and children were evacuated from major cities, while over two million homes were destroyed by bombing and many others damaged. The reconstruction of home was, in one sense, a huge public, nationwide undertaking, formulated in universal, rather strict terms through social policy and government legislation (often developed under wartime conditions in the early 1940s).14 The British government faced, most pressingly, the task of replacing the homes that had been destroyed or damaged since 1940 (Labour’s Ernest Bevin famously promised ‘five million homes in quick time’ during the 1945 election). Town planners and property developers sought to rebuild war-scarred or overcrowded towns and cities, while working within the limits of austerity and the preferences of a public who, by and large, favoured traditional housing over modernist design; progress was slow, particularly in the years of austerity immediately following the war.15 Home was also part of the more general rhetoric of reconstruction in postwar Britain in more symbolic terms. This was encapsulated by the Festival of Britain, a nationwide event intended to reflect on national achievements and identity after the war and boost recovery and morale after a period of austerity. It was shaped by optimistic expressions of unity and group identity, including appeals to home, on individual, community, and nationwide scales that were echoed in the displays of the Festival’s centrepiece at the South Bank Exhibition.16 In Family Portrait, a film produced for the Festival by director Humphrey Jennings, the narrator Michael Goodliffe framed the nation in familial terms over footage of photographs in a family album: Perhaps because we in Britain live on a group of small islands, we like to think of ourselves as a family, and of course with the unspoken affection and outspoken words that all families have. And so the Festival of Britain is a kind of family reunion, to take a look at ourselves – to let the young and the old, the past and the future, meet and discuss17 Post-war home, then, was the focus of the physical and symbolic construction of the nation. Despite its disruption and destruction during wartime, it was being imagined as something that could offer continuity and stability in a moment of uncertainty. The reconstruction of home, however, was also a

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ART AND MASCULINITY IN POST-WAR BRITAIN

personal task, negotiated by individuals on much smaller scales – Vaughan’s journal entries that opened this chapter attest to fears and possibilities of this moment of change. If we can define post-war home, it is most productive to work between these two spheres of reconstruction – the personal and the public. This echoes recent scholarship on home that frames it as both public and private, an open, unstable, and fluid space, where social forces and social relations intersect and are negotiated.18 But more specifically than that, post-war home is an ever-shifting entanglement between public and private, made particularly fraught by home’s centrality to war and reconstruction. The parameters of home shift across this book – from the domestic sphere, to the body, the street, the group, the community, even the nation – but this, as the artworks attest, is the nature of home under reconstruction in Britain: the subjective search for belonging within the shifting limits of post-war society, a range of attempts to locate home between the dominant public ideals and personal experience. It is in these home spaces that emerging questions of identity and subjectivity begin to pull at the certainties of public reconstruction. The home’s central position in post-war reconstruction meant that what were perceived as older ideas of home acquired particular significance and resonance. The home of post-war reconstruction was conceived in highly gendered terms, based around small families and long-lasting marriages. This can be attributed to a desire to both re-form the family after its wartime disruption and look to the reconstructive future.19 In general, a reversal did occur as those men who were able returned to work and women stepped back into the home, though this was far from a clear-cut return to pre-war values of the nuclear family. Many women continued to work, for example.20 However, the policies and structures of the welfare state conceived of the family as split in gendered terms: it assumed that men would take on the role of breadwinners and women would take on the role of housewives and mothers, paying social security and benefits along these lines and privileging these respective roles, particularly with respect to women.21 The ideal of the companionate family, based on a harmonious partnership between husband and wife, emerged, and was propagated by contemporary sociological studies like Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s reassuring 1957 portrait of workingclass communities in Family and Kinship in East London.22 In practice, these ideals appear to have had some kind of impact on the way individuals lived and conceived of their homes, though they remained ideals: a significant degree of negotiation in relation to these emerging norms was desirable and necessary for many people. Chapters 1 and 5, on John Bratby and Victor Pasmore respectively, focus on how artists responded to these particularly influential ideas of home for both families and communities. Built into these gendered assumptions or ideals about home are, inevitably, assumptions and ideals about sexuality. The home imagined in

INTRODUCTION

7

reconstruction Britain was a heterosexual home, built around the nuclear family. This formulation was, in part, informed by the increasing influence of psychoanalysis in Britain, which placed the home and family relationships at the centre of the development of adult sexuality and personhood.23 These formulations did not consider the possibility of a queer home – a home that may not conform to the relationships and spaces of the heterosexual family. In the immediate post-war years, queer men, in particular, were considered corrupting and disruptive figures who operated in the unruly public spaces of the city. Gradually, a form of ‘respectable’ homosexuality emerged in the lead up to and in the wake of the Wolfenden Report, which was the product of a committee on homosexual offences and prostitution that first met in 1954. It eventually led to the passing of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967, which legalized homosexual acts in England and Wales between two men over the age of twenty-one in private. The home, then, became the default space for queer acts and lifestyles; queer respectability came with the mimicry of heterosexual domestic life.24 However, for many queer people, a private domestic space of their own was unattainable, and remained open to intrusion and observation. The home has, historically and still today, been an ambivalent space for queer people: a site of selfhood and relationships, but also mired in expectations of ‘normality’ and subject, potentially, to the public gaze.25 In response, queer homes have been conceived in ways that expand normative definitions of home – into spaces outside of the domestic interior (Matt Cook tells us that for poorer queer men in 1950s London, ‘“being at home” did not necessarily mean where these men slept’) or through relationships that reach beyond the nuclear family.26 Such set-ups and experiences are the subjects of Chapters 2 and 3, and the conclusion, which focus on Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan and Gilbert & George, respectively; they explore these artists’ highly individual representations of queer homes, shaped by enduring memories of war and negotiated from within the strict parameters of post-war reconstruction. The certainties of the public reconstruction of home were also simultaneously shaped and contested by post-war migration. Migration fundamentally undermines a sense of home as one secure, stable location in that it requires individuals to negotiate the identities, spaces, relationships, objects and memories of home across locations. Home is movement here – it is ‘lived in motions’ as Anne-Marie Fortier has put it, between locations, and between present and past, in a way that might further upset notions of the stability of the time and space of home.27 Migrants had a presence in Britain for hundreds of years prior to the post-war period, but their visibility and number grew in the years following the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948 when people from the former colonies were encouraged to make the journey to Britain to take up jobs required for post-war reconstruction. Like those who sought to make queer homes in this period, migrants, both from

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ART AND MASCULINITY IN POST-WAR BRITAIN

the Commonwealth and elsewhere, faced a great deal of marginalization, discrimination and even violence in their negotiation of their new home. They arrived as British subjects – the British Nationality Act of 1948 created the status of ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’ – though the enactment of increasingly restrictive legislation on immigration from the early 1960s onward began to formally create exclusions around a citizenship that had been unofficially eroded since they arrived.28 Migration also had an impact on British conceptions of home. As migration increased, ‘the colonial frontier came “home”’, in Bill Schwarz’s terms, placing the empire at the heart, uncomfortably and quietly, of the metropole and seemingly spreading disorder within what was imagined to be a previously ordered national home.29 The negotiation of the migrant home within the anxieties of the national home is the subject of Chapter 4, on Francis Newton Souza. Post-war home was a space of imagined stability, continuity and social limits; it was also a space where these ideas might, necessarily, be negotiated, contested and remade. I have suggested that we might frame this complexity by working with a sense of post-war home as forming in the space between public reconstruction and personal reconstruction. Within this framework, the artists in this book represent home in terms of the body, the household, the group, the city and the nation, often operating across more than one scale at once. This disparity attests to necessary variety of negotiating the reconstruction of home in post-war Britain, an experience that might be contradictory, unstable and imbued with both elements of constraint and possibility. For instance, in Francis Bacon’s Two Figures, 1953 (Figure 1 – I discuss this work at length in Chapter 2), queer intimacy is made viscerally public in a work that seems to both inscribe and flaunt the limits of home. In this minimal, boxy, seemingly windowless interior, one man straddles the other, their bodies in movement as the bedsheets fall to the floor beneath them. The painting, in its depiction of two men having sex on a bed in an interior, represents a moment of disintegrating boundaries – between two bodies, merging in intimacy and in motion, between the public gaze and a home’s private space, as well as, at a moment when homosexuality was illegal, between an audience of witnesses and a criminal act. Bacon’s thin streaks of paint fall across the image like a translucent curtain as if to underline this. As my chapter on Bacon will explore, his paintings do not necessarily seek to define a stable sense of queer home prior to the partial decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967; instead, they present home as drifting across anonymous, distinctly unhomely domestic interiors and hotel bars, marked by fleeting moments of intimacy and, potentially, violence. What Bacon’s painting makes visible are the workings of the construction of home, for queer men at this moment but also more widely. It conveys, instinctually, this space of home as both private and public (rather than as somewhere completely detached

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FIGURE 1  Francis Bacon, Two Figures, 1953, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 116.5cm, private collection © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/ Artimage 2018. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd from the public sphere); we see and feel how it is formed, delineated and negotiated in relation to wider, often repressive social forces as we watch these two men have sex. It contains, too, the sense of how home might be found at the intersection between physical locations (not necessarily the house) and a set of emotions and practices.30 It also speaks of how home

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might be encapsulated in a moment of intimacy, how our body and other bodies and their closeness might constitute it or, perhaps, threaten or disrupt it; how home might take in the interior, or the more anonymous spaces of the city, or beyond. Two Figures is instructive here as it encapsulates how we can conceive of home in post-war Britain as it is encountered and set down by the artists in this book: as constituted between public and private experience, defined in relation to subjective experience, and constituted in and through spaces that might gesture to the domestic while also occupying, appropriating or being shaped by public space. The boundary that Two Figures straddles, this book argues, illuminates the shifting limits and possibilities of home in post-war Britain. If this section has outlined a distinctly complex picture of post-war home – as imbued with a spirit of timelessness, hope and rebuilding, tightly limited in terms of gender, sexuality and race in societal imagination, but open to making and negotiation by individuals within these limits – then Bacon’s art, and the art of the other artists in this book, speak of how we might understand home within this context. These artists share an awareness of the unsteady constitution of home in post-war Britain. They are also all united by their awareness of how the lingering memories of war and temporal instability of reconstruction shape homes in this period, as I will argue later in this introduction. In this context, art becomes not a document of homes from this particular historical moment, but a means of encapsulating, working or negotiating its fluidity, the complexity of home’s limits and potential under reconstruction all at once.

Masculinities This book also explores the negotiation of masculinity from within and in relation to post-war home in Britain. Post-war Britain sees the emergence and solidification of a number of categories of masculinity that developed as part of the aims, legislation and anxieties of the reconstructive project. The strictly gendered ideals of the post-war welfare state that had sought to shape imaginings of home also called into being and solidified a normative category of heterosexual masculinity.31 This was a masculinity that was rooted, in part, in the home, as husband, father and breadwinner; Lynne Segal has noted an emerging post-war idea that men were supposed to be part of the home but that their role within it, in all likelihood, would not involve ‘women’s work’ of housework and childcare.32 This was not a complete break with some conceptions of pre-war masculinity – Alison Light has argued that the interwar years saw a move away from heroic, masculine public rhetoric towards

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a conception of Englishness (and gender) that was more inward-looking, domestic and private – but these attitudes appear to have been refocused around a type of familial masculinity after 1945, constructed through the welfare state and government legislation.33 At the same time, this developing connection of masculinity to the home was seen as conformist and met with resistance from some men, just as, outside of the family, the rise of mass culture, consumerism and an increasing ‘Americanization’ of British culture were interpreted as threats to male individuality as well as contributing to a perceived feminization of society in general. Concurrently, a sense of traditional masculinity – rugged, individualist, heroic – retained influence, largely due to the enduring cultural memory of the male combatants in the Second World War and continuing national service, which reinforced certain ideas about what masculinity should entail. Sonya O. Rose has demonstrated that the ideal wartime masculinity in Britain was one of the soldier-hero, which could assimilate certain anti-hero characteristics (kindliness, good humour) as a means of distinguishing itself from the hypermasculine German other without sliding into effeminacy.34 There were, inevitably, wartime masculinities that deviated from or intermingled with this temperate masculinity: increasing instances of wartime homosociality, both on the frontline and at home, which could reproduce dominant masculine ideals while also, as figures like Vaughan knew, offering moments of potential and failure, as well as the public prominence of female masculinity, as women took on work in factories, on the land and in non-combatant roles in the military, which both extended and troubled traditional gender divisions.35 This intermingling of masculine ideals and instability would resonate in the years after the war, as demobbed men returned, with relatively little fanfare, to civilian lives.36 In the years that followed, the shadow of the atomic bomb appeared to have eradicated the need for individual male heroism once and for all, just as Britain’s status on the world stage was beginning to decline.37 Wartime masculinity was the shadow and the prelude to the newly forming category of heterosexual, familial masculinity. Heterosexual masculinity emerged alongside (and was frequently defined in opposition to) other emerging categories of masculinity, particularly queer masculinity. Homosexuality was developed and defined as a social category in the campaigns for legal reform (such as in the 1957 Wolfenden Report) and in the human sciences’ focus on it as a ‘social problem’ to be studied and solved, and had become the focus of national scandal and police arrests in the post-war years (where queerness was framed as at worst, a sign of national weakness and decay, and, at best, an affliction).38 At the same time, migrant masculinities were perceived to have a growing presence in British society. Their otherness was perceived as a threat – resulting in outbreaks of violence from the 1950s onward and increasingly strict immigration legislation after an initial period

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of openness – and they were expected to engage in the thankless task of assimilation.39 The presence of black migrants in Britain – framed as ‘strangers’ by contemporary race relations scholars – was used as a means of securing the imagined community of the nation, while also giving rise to a ‘recharged’ definition of whiteness, with white masculinity becoming activity, control and refusal in the face of black presence (and white women as victims and prey to black men).40 Both migrant and queer masculinities were means of defining what white heterosexual masculinity was not. What is crucial here is that, in the flux of the post-war period and the drive for reconstruction, these categories of masculinity were emerging, being articulated, but also subject to contestation and negotiation by individuals.41 The art in this book’s case studies engages with this ever-shifting and fraught network of emerging post-war masculinities and finds artists grappling with these developing categories of gender. The relationship between emerging categories of masculinity and home was a concern in British culture. For example, the broadcaster and author Kenneth Allsop identified the figure of the male dissentient writer in his survey of the new literature and culture in 1950s Britain. He compared the dissentient writer with the ideal male citizen of the post-war welfare state and framed both in relation to the home. The ideal male citizen was a: £16-a-week steady, pipe-smoking artisan with a safe job in the local works, a New Town house with a primrose front door, an attractive wife and two ‘kiddies’, and a life well balanced between the TV set and the neatly-tended garden. This is a life of predictability and conformity, taking in many of the trappings and archetypes of post-war reconstruction. This way of life was also largely that of many of the dissentient writers that were the subject of Allsop’s study. However, he emphasized that they had the ability or the potential to deviate from it. In doing so, they stepped off ‘a warm, well lit stage, where the convection fire burns brightly and the “contemporary” armchairs form a tight, safe circle, into the outer darkness’; at this point, he becomes ‘one of those lost souls in search of his cards of identity’.42 There is a complex and sometimes contradictory interplay of ideas about masculinity and home here. There is, at first, the idea of the private sphere of the home as encouraging conformity and safety, with familiar implications that it is a feminizing space. However, there is a lack of the supposedly masculine public sphere that would provide an alternative – the dissenting writer steps out of the home into ‘darkness’ and finds himself ‘in search of his cards of identity’. Allsop implies that the home is the crucial space for masculinity in post-war Britain. But the uncertainty here is striking: there is a nod to the safety and conformity of the idea of familial masculinity but it is presented

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as a stage on which to act, a fiction, and there is a gesture to the idea of public, individual, non-familial masculinity, but this has no substance and is represented by only darkness. Here, the gendered spaces around which home may more traditionally have been constituted are presented as porous and inherently unstable. Additionally, it is the creative individual and creativity itself that offers if not a complete escape from this – that darkness, as I have suggested, seems to offer little in terms of an alternative – then at least a recognition of its limits, a pushing of its boundaries or spaces, and a possibility of deviation and difference. This is to push slightly further than Allsop may have intended, but it highlights an apparent self-consciousness about the inherent instability of masculinity in relation to home at this historical moment in Britain and posits culture – more specifically, art, for our purposes – as crucial to thinking and understanding, if not solving, the dilemma of post-war masculinity. Masculinity’s unsteadiness and art’s ability to address this unsteadiness – to make it visible rather than fix or document it – are the focus of this book. The artists here follow, in their own ways, Allsop’s very vivid sense of the relationship between masculinity and home as a space of masculinity’s negotiation. For example, John Bratby’s Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall, 1957 (Figure 2 – I discuss this work in detail in Chapter 1) finds the artist in the kind of domestic space described by Allsop. Bratby’s home is visible in the reflections of the mirror (moved across the wall three times to create the three self-portraits), where you can see furniture, a large bay window and a single lightbulb hanging above the artist’s head. In the left mirrored image – secured carefully in his son David’s cot – Bratby presents himself comfortably as the artist and family man, looking relatively cosy in a jumper, smoking a pipe and in the act of painting. This is countered by the more unruly images in the centre and on the right, where he presents himself as red faced, smoking furiously, and tucking and untucking his shirt in what feels like a very self-conscious reflection on self-fashioning. Furthermore, in the image on the right, he bends his leg which, along with his right arm, appears to almost break out of the mirror’s frame. This feels like a visual echo of Allsop’s description of the dissentient writer stepping off the ‘well lit stage’ of the home. Bratby’s painting, however, is more than a convenient illustration of Allsop’s concerns. It is a work that actively reflects on the performance of masculinity within the post-war home, in Bratby’s shifting, anxious, unsteady self-representations that underline its dependence on spaces, objects, clothing and their signifiers. It appears to embody, at once, masculinity’s limits or ideals, as well as a very conscious sense of the anxieties that this position might create. As my chapter on Bratby will explore in more detail, his art concerns itself with his self-image, the relationship between male subjectivity and the home, and the figure of his wife, artist Jean Cooke,

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FIGURE 2  John Bratby, Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall, 1957, oil on board, 241.9 × 196.9cm, Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool/Bridgeman Images © The Estate of John Bratby. who bears the brunt of Bratby’s self-fashioning and violence. Through works like Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall, we might witness masculinity’s fragility at this post-war moment, its constant construction under its own gaze that also seems to tear it apart, and its uncomfortable relationship to its own emerging ideals. Bratby’s painting, as well as Allsop’s text and the other representations in this book, betrays a sense of the historically shifting and inherently unstable

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categories of gender and sexuality. This conceptualization of gender and sexuality – that gender, and masculinity specifically here, is best understood through performativity and its inherently unstable nature – has been most influentially formulated by Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.43 This book takes up masculinity in these terms and examines its representation in post-war British art. The analysis is attentive to both moments when these representations may ‘congeal’ (to use a term from Butler) into the appearance of naturalness or normativity and moments of slippage, failure, anxiety, overlap and disruption.44 It takes as its focus both masculinities that appear to adhere to an emerging kind of heterosexual norm in the post-war period (Bratby and Pasmore) and masculinities that were pushed to the margins (in queerness for Bacon, Vaughan and Gilbert & George, and migration for Souza). In doing so, it explores how these masculinities relate to each other, operating in a messy, overlapping coexistence rather than a stable binary. Masculinities, in the post-war period, respond to competing ideals, but they fail, they deviate, they turn to violence, they imagine, tentatively, other ways of being. This is not, of course, unique to the post-war period in Britain, but I have sought to be attentive to how masculinity’s fraught instability might be heightened in the period after war. In this way, I respond to some of the ideas of Kaja Silverman, who examined marginal masculinities in the post-war period in America that deviate from what she terms ‘the dominant fiction’ and that represent a ‘collective loss of belief’ in its terms in the aftermath of conflict.45 While this book does not build on her psychoanalytic work specifically, it does seek to highlight moments where artworks speak of masculinity’s fragility and potential in a post-war moment. In the case studies of individual artists that follow, I explore art as a sphere for the negotiation and representation of emerging, varied categories of masculinity and their contradictions in post-war Britain. My focus on the relationship between art and masculinities is one of surprisingly few studies in this area and it remains a fruitful and necessary area for art historians to address.46 Art history continues to deal extensively with male artists, largely due to the structures and exclusions of the canon, and there is a need to interrogate and understand the constructions of masculinities by artists as a way of reflecting on how this might shape artistic production and our understanding of it. More broadly, the study of the relationship between art and masculinity can underline the power of representations in the construction of masculinity, as well as its reformulation and contestation, for scholars and audiences beyond art history. As a result, I conceive of artists as bound up in social and cultural history, rather than as exempt or extraordinary. At the same time, it is worth underlining the complexity and nuance with which we need to treat artworks in order to reach this understanding and the benefits for historical and theoretical thinking to which this can lead. Artworks are unstable spheres where we might

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read the inscription and negotiation of gender, its ideals and limits, their failures and possibilities. Bratby’s unsteady self-representation and his tentative, anxious bending and shifting of both his selfhood and his self-imposed frames underline how we might think art in relation to masculinity in relation to home – as a sphere of its stability and flux, its possibility and impossibility.

The time of reconstruction My definitions of home and masculinity have emphasized their particularly shifting, unstable nature at this post-war moment. In this section, I seek to account for this instability by expanding on the unsteady, nonlinear time of reconstruction in post-war Britain. This has already fed into my definitions – home as containing echoes of war as it reforms, masculinity defined as much by imaginings or visions of its past as the new categories of masculinity that emerged post-war – though this section will underline how post-war home and masculinity were fundamentally shaped by the time of reconstruction. In the process, it also outlines methodologies for approaching the unsteady time of reconstruction and its effects on home and masculinity through art. The post-war period has been consistently figured as temporally unstable or nonlinear, where the boundaries between war and its aftermath might be experienced as blurred or even as collapsing entirely. Frank Mort, for instance, finds a ‘dynamic push and pull of the past and the future’ in his study of post-war  Britain.47 Lynda Nead has focused on the temporal instability of the post-war  period too, exploring the haunting, disruptive conflation of past, present and future in bombsites, and tracing how the Great Fog of December 1952 was linked in the British cultural imaginary to Victorian fogs and plunged post-war society into ‘a world of uncanny time and space’.48 More generally, the unstable temporality of war and its aftermath have been the focus of trauma theory. Cathy Caruth has, influentially, conceptualized trauma as inherently belated, forgotten or ignored at the time but experienced again and again afterwards.49 Trauma, in the way it is manifested through memory, dislocation and turbulence, disrupts our sense of linear time (acting like a spectre, a haunting) and even our conception of history.50 The post-war period was one that was framed by the British government as a return – to norms of gender and of home, and the roles that they demand of individuals – or a new beginning; in reality, however, the events of the war – whether experienced directly in service, on the home front, or at a distance – had lasting material and psychological effects. Few artists in this book experienced the war directly (Bacon served as an air raid warden in London, Vaughan served in the Non-Combatant Corps as a conscientious objector, and Pasmore was conscripted briefly,

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before also claiming CO status) and there are few direct responses to the trauma of the Second World War to discuss here. Instead, it is the rippling, unsteady time of wartime trauma that is my concern, in a way that echoes Petra Rau’s suggestion that the return ‘home’ can be an extension of the conflict that has supposedly ended.51 The memories of the relationships, separations, violence and upheaval of war lingered and recurred in the decades after its end.52 The works of the artists in this book speak of the lingering power of war. The violence of war recurs, in various forms, in the work of Bratby, Bacon and Pasmore. The threat of wartime displacement and homelessness continues to trouble and drive Vaughan, Pasmore and even Gilbert & George (born 1943 and 1942, respectively). The end of empire and the emergence of mass migration – a less immediate impact of war and its aftermath, but no less seismic – are negotiated by Souza; here, other, related traumas and violences recur and return home to Britain, while the everyday traumas of racism make their mark on individuals.53 War’s memories, however, intermingled with futurity – hopes, possibilities and new or re-beginnings. Caruth conceives of trauma as future oriented too, framing it, appropriately for a study of home, as a ‘departure’.54 If the trauma of the destruction or disruption of home brings a return of the past, it also necessitates movement – be it physical or psychological – and an awakening that looks forward. This was a response that drove the artists in this book, such as Victor Pasmore: Today the whole world is shaken by the spirit of reconstruction … In painting and sculpture, as also in architecture, an entirely new language has been formed bearing no resemblance at all to traditional forms.55 For Pasmore, the trauma of war necessitated a futurity that became central to his turn to an abstract art that would explicitly address reconstruction. His words give this introduction its title, reflecting the way in which, for all the artists here and across the population more generally, the reconstructive moment seemed to require some kind of response. This book argues that home was the space where the time of reconstruction – an unstable intermingling of past and future – was encountered and negotiated. Home had been the space of the initial ruptures of war. For the sociologist Richard Titmuss, home’s wartime disruption threatened the stability of family life and the development of children; he also imagined it as the space of wartime ‘strain’, where ‘many private terrors must have been stifled in the darkness’. He noted that, by November 1940, six out of ten Londoners avoided public shelters and chose to sleep in their own homes during air raids. This could partly have been a result of government reluctance to encourage the use of public shelters on a wide scale, for fear of encouraging a shelter

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mentality, but Titmuss also implies that the home was something of an anchor for coping during wartime.56 In one sense, it allowed a certain independence and consistency: the threat of bombing could be built into the daily routine with the knowledge that the ‘safety valves’ of evacuation, public shelters and trekking to the countryside in the evenings were there if necessary. In another sense, it allowed people to retain the very support structures that the government and others feared disintegrating. As Titmuss put it: A threat to society implies a threat to the family, and when the physical hazards of air attack were present, families naturally tended to close their ranks. Staying at home, keeping the family together, and pursuing many of the ordinary activities of life made adjustment easier. Men and women clung to these things, for they symbolised normal life, and helped them to minimise the abnormal situation. Just as the home had shown its fragility in wartime, it was also perceived to have demonstrated its resilience and social usefulness in the face of strain. The home is the space where the ruptures of war are negotiated long after war’s end in psychoanalysis, which became influential in post-war Britain and can assist in understanding the relationship between post-war home and the time of reconstruction. The theories of Melanie Klein – broadly, that the human psyche achieves an integrated, relational ego through a fraught relationship with the mother’s body in infancy and that this can set children up to form relationships with other members of their family, friends, partners and communities as they move through life – were particularly important. As historian Eli Zaretsky has demonstrated, Klein’s ideas on the relational ego, focused around maintaining interpersonal relations and, by extension, wider interconnected communities, found resonance in a British society that was already concerned with questions of rupture and connection, as a result of the suffering and trauma of war, and the efforts by citizens to ‘pull together’ in the face of attack. Additionally, her focus on the mother clearly echoes the focus of the policies of the welfare state in the war’s aftermath. Klein’s ideas were taken up by British psychoanalysts like John Bowlby and D.W. Winnicott in the reconstruction period; her cultural influence, it is worth noting, was achieved by the mediation of her ideas through two prominent, mainstream post-war male figures. They adapted her thought, shifting her emphasis from the development of an independent psyche and personal life to focusing instead on how analysis and the role of the mother could bring about social integration.57 In Bowlby’s work, good mental health was the result of ‘a warm, intimate and continuous relationship’ between mother and child; he warned that deprivation could lead to delinquency and have other repercussions for mental health.58 Winnicott, meanwhile, echoed Bowlby’s emphasis on the

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importance of familial relationships for satisfactory selfhood and wider social belonging, emphasizing the importance of the role of the ‘good-enough’ mother and arguing more generally that ‘the essential of a democracy really does lie with the ordinary man and woman, and the ordinary, common-place home’.59 These ideas gained a significant amount of currency and popular appeal – both men were regularly involved in broadcasts on the BBC, for instance. They also demonstrate the extent to which the fears and trauma of wartime – of family breakdown, destruction of homes, and their psychological and social effects – fed into conceptions of home and selfhood in the reconstructive period.60 For this reason, this book adapts psychoanalysis as a framework for examining the art of Bratby and Pasmore in Chapters 1 and 5. Both artists engage with and interrogate the ideals of home and identity in the post-war period, as well as their lingering anxieties. British psychoanalysis  – a discipline that dwells on the perpetual present of past experience – offers a historically appropriate means of tracing the time of reconstruction in the home in their work. If psychoanalysis is one method of conceiving of the time of reconstruction and its relationship to post-war home, then queer theory also offers other possibilities of understanding here. For some queer theorists, thinking about queer time has been a way of conceiving of queer experiences, while also thinking about the rich potential of temporal disruptions. Elizabeth Freeman, for instance, has argued for a conception of queer time that works differently to the normativity of state-sanctioned time, made up of rhythms or timings reinforced by capitalism and social institutions that shape bodies and experiences. She views queer time, instead, as allowing ‘a different articulation between past and present, body and collectivity’ that might open up new possibilities and ways of being.61 It is possible to conceive of the time of reconstruction in Britain after the Second World War as a queer moment – as operating in a temporality that can be considered queer (where the rhythms of state-sanctioned time are interrupted and disturbed, by war and by individuals), as rich with the potential for new conceptions of home and masculinity, but also, almost inevitably, open to failure. Caution is required here in order to avoid imposing contemporary conceptions of identity and queer experience more generally onto the past. Laura Doan has warned that queer histories can become (perhaps unintentionally) embroiled in a kind of queer genealogy, where the roots of present identities are found in the past in an attempt at summoning a sense of queer belonging across time.62 With this in mind, framing the time of reconstruction in broadly queer terms need not be an anachronistic projection of contemporary theory into the past. But I want to hold onto this sense that the period of post-war reconstruction in Britain offered tentative queer potential, which was perhaps unsayable, ungraspable, maybe not even entirely knowable. It is a way of speaking of the openness of the reconstructive period within the very limits of its heteronormative, patriarchal and temporally linear

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structures, of the different rhythms, interruptions and possibilities that might be enabled or imagined from within them. This is not to set up an opposition between ideals or norms of home and masculinity and queer conceptions of home and masculinity – instead, it is to account for the messy, fluctuating nature of post-war reconstruction, the solidifying and shifting categories of home and masculinity in this context, and the disruptive potential contained, expressed or negotiated in the artworks produced in this extended moment.63 The queer time of reconstruction is most explicitly addressed in this book in the chapters on Bacon, Vaughan and Gilbert & George (Chapters 2 and 3, and the conclusion, respectively), where representations of emerging queer approaches to home operate within the temporal complexity of the post-war period. But, more broadly, queer theory’s concern with instability is instructive as a means of being attentive to the negotiation of home between public ideals and private experience for all of the artists in this study. It offers not necessarily a strict theoretical structure, but it can inform a way of thinking about the relationship between home, the time of reconstruction and artworks. It allows us to be open to the frequent instances of slippage in the representations in this book, where they make visible moments of potential, deviation, tension or failure in their engagement with home and masculinity. It is a means of underlining how particular ideals and categories of home and masculinity were called into being in the post-war period by the state, and remaining attentive to their power but also the ways in which they were shifted, negotiated and lived. And it is a way, too, of conceiving of and thinking through post-war reconstruction more generally: as something that was framed in linear terms in government policy – as war, then recovery, and which built state-sanctioned time into its structures – but which was, in reality, a complex, continually unfurling and faltering process that contained the lingering effects of war or even its return as well as the desire for a future. In suggesting that queer theory might inform a conceptualization of the time of reconstruction, I am not suggesting imposing queer readings on all of the artists across this book. Instead, I am suggesting that an attention to irregularities, interruptions, deviations and failures can be a helpful way of reading these artworks, with an awareness of the productive tensions that might be glimpsed, tentatively, incompletely, in the art of this period. To work with the unsteady time of reconstruction and its effects, then, is to look with an awareness of art’s fluid and often contradictory relationship to the negotiation of the unstable, emerging categories of home and masculinity in post-war Britain. In the chapters that follow, I analyse the artworks with a focus on how they engage with and are shaped by the time of reconstruction, drawing on psychoanalysis and queer theory where methodologically appropriate, but also remaining attentive to how they represent the temporal instability between war and its aftermath that these methodologies have enabled me to define here.

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Overview This book’s broad timeframe – stretching from the war and its aftermath in the 1940s to the early 1970s – is intended to reflect the enduring, changing nature of reconstruction and the legacy of the Second World War. It also pushes against a general tendency, frequently contested by historians, to think about the post-war years as distinct decades, with the 1950s as ‘austere’ and the 1960s as ‘swinging’, and so on.64 It also joins more recent studies in literary studies and history that have undermined the sense that cultural production in this period was rooted in apathy, insularity and consensus.65 In this sense, this book contributes to an ongoing reassessment of culture in Britain after the Second World War, through its specific focus on art, home, masculinity and reconstruction. Within this broad timescale, the artists have been chosen not because they might form a comprehensive picture of attitudes to home and masculinity in the post-war period (it is not possible to create such a picture). Instead, their work provides a series of subjective reflections on the negotiation between public and private possibilities of post-war home and masculinity in Britain that move from the small scale of the interior outwards. Together, they suggest that post-war home was defined not through the ideal stability of the household, but the very permeability of its boundaries, spatial, temporal or both, and the possibilities and difficulties of that state. This book begins with the domesticity-focused representations of Bratby, which engage most explicitly with the post-war ideals of home and masculinity while revealing their fraught, anxious foundations. It then moves through a series of chapters – focusing on Bacon, Vaughan and Souza – that address representations that make visible the processes, possibilities and difficulties of making home in terms of marginal categories of masculinity. These artists embrace non-domestic spaces and, increasingly, the male body as a means of defining and negotiating homes that come up against the limits of public reconstruction (and, inevitably, breach those limits). This book then turns to Pasmore, whose work seeks to construct home on the broadest scale yet – the community and, more generally, the nation – and illuminates how questions of home drove reconstruction in these large-scale terms. It then concludes with Gilbert & George, whose work attests to the enduring influence of war and reconstruction on categories of home and masculinity, while bringing us to a moment – twenty-five years after the war’s end – where we can reflect on what art can tell us about the negotiation of these categories across this period. As they illuminate home’s widening spheres in post-war Britain, these chapters are all linked by an attention to the unstable time of reconstruction, as I have framed it, and the enduring ways in which war shaped home and masculinity long after its end.

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Chapter 1 begins in the home of the nuclear family and the domestic sphere with John Bratby, and explores how his art engages with the emerging post-war ideal of home in Britain at this moment. Bratby is our starting point as his paintings focus overwhelmingly on the domestic interior and explore the construction of post-war home from within these traditional parameters. His paintings become spheres where emerging definitions of masculinity  – from the companionate masculinity of the nuclear family, to anxieties about conformity, and individualistic artistic masculinity – were negotiated. His representations of his wife Jean Cooke are addressed as a way of understanding how he defines masculinity through an unsteady and potentially violent relationship to femininity. Kleinian psychoanalysis is used here as a means of understanding Bratby’s representations in terms of contemporary discourses around the family and gender in Britain. This chapter also reflects on the challenge of engaging with artworks that refer to domestic violence perpetrated by the artist himself. Psychoanalysis is used here to read Bratby’s paintings as making visible the enduring presence of war in post-war home and masculinity, and as highlighting the temporal instability of reconstruction that, in Bratby’s work, threatens to engulf these post-war ideals. While Bratby’s representations of home found public ideals coming apart in the private domestic space, Chapter 2 explores how Francis Bacon’s representations traverse these boundaries freely. As homosexual subjectivity was emerging in post-war Britain just prior to partial decriminalization (in which homosexual relations were legalized but only for couples over the age of twenty-one in England and Wales), Bacon’s art suggests that queer home might be found in unhomely or public spaces (rather than a single, private interior) and in transient moments of intimacy and contact. In this chapter, then, Bacon’s art posits post-war queer home between the domestic and spaces of queer intimacy, and this definition of home is one forged in terms of emerging homosexual subjectivity. I begin by placing Bacon’s reflections on home in the context of queer historical scholarship, arguing that his unhomely vision of home can be considered as a response to post-war queer experience, before exploring Bacon’s Man in Blue series as representations of queer public intimacy and its processes in this context. I argue that this public intimacy is crucial to understanding Bacon’s representations of queer home, built around his personal conception of ‘drift’ that might speak productively of the negotiation of queer home more widely in the post-war period. Finally, I take up the intermingling of violence and intimacy in Bacon’s Figure in a Landscape, 1945, and find, in ways that echo Bratby, the violence and spectres of war returning in and helping to form a representation of queer home in Bacon’s terms. Here, the legacies of war and the time of reconstruction shape Bacon’s representations of queer home, and Bacon’s representations point to the queer potential of the time of reconstruction.

INTRODUCTION

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Chapter 3 focuses on Keith Vaughan who, like Bacon, makes visible how queer home had to be negotiated across and between public structures and private experience in the post-war period. Vaughan’s focus, however, is on the male body – on the memories of relationships and bonds that it holds and on the communities of home which form around it. If post-war queer home, as Bacon attested, is necessarily permeable, transient and drifting, then Vaughan’s response is to find the stability of home – and, inevitably, its transience – in the male body. The bulk of this chapter focuses on Vaughan’s painting Assembly of Figures I, 1952, which brings together four individual male figures into a disjointed, strange group in an outdoor, indeterminate space. The painting is read as an instance where the memories of transient and now lost homes formed in pre-war and wartime circumstances are restated on canvas and made visible again, and it attests to how the experiences of war fundamentally shaped Vaughan’s negotiation of post-war home through the male body. The chapter goes on to explore how Vaughan adopted the mythological figure of Theseus (via André Gide’s 1946 novel Thésée) as a figure of queer potential. His painted ruminations on this theme are considered as works where Vaughan imagined that the joys, struggles, limits and deviations of post-war queer home could speak – falteringly and quietly – to the possibilities and aims of reconstruction in Britain more widely. Finally, I consider how Vaughan’s Lazarus, 1956, might speak of the difficulties and possibilities of post-war queer home that is built on memories, of war and lost relationships. Chapter 4 turns to the work of Francis Newton Souza and argues that, like Vaughan, he locates the question of home in the male body. While Vaughan utilizes the male body to reflect on home’s stability and loss, Souza allows the male body to register the multiple spaces, experiences and anxieties of home that are the result of migration into a British society that was still recovering from war. Souza’s art, in a break with the other artists in this book so far, does not register the legacies of war and its shaping of home explicitly. Instead, his images of male bodies undermine the certainty of reconstructing home, exploiting the temporal instability of this moment and allowing it to be troubled by legacies of empire and increasing racial tension. The chapter begins by addressing Souza’s self-portraits. These works depict the artist as tense, mute and afflicted by arrows, and are read as works that deal with questions of assimilation and translation that had to be negotiated by migrants seeking to make a home in Britain at this moment. It then turns to Souza’s Crucifixion, 1959, placing it in the context of contemporary racial tensions as well as the enduring violence of colonialism and its aftermath to consider how Souza allows the male body to embody the experience of violence and suffering of homes across time and space. Finally, it is argued that Souza’s art and writing exhibit an awareness of the inherent instability of masculinity in post-war Britain, and that this instability seeks to complicate and undermine

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the assumptions of public reconstruction. The migrant home in post-war Britain, in Souza’s art, finds some kind of definition in the male body, which bears its histories and negotiations. If Souza’s negotiation of home through the male body serves to trouble the assumptions of public reconstruction, then the work of Victor Pasmore – the subject of Chapter 5 – finds this public reconstruction faltering. This chapter begins with Pasmore’s controversial Apollo Pavilion, constructed in 1969, and argues that the Pavilion is a monument to the anxieties about the destruction of home in wartime Britain, built nearly twenty-five years after the war’s end. The chapter begins by tracing how Pasmore’s paintings of the 1940s and 1950s responded to home under threat. In Pasmore’s art, that home stretches from the domestic sphere to visions of the national landscape. The chapter then explores Pasmore’s work at Peterlee that led to the construction of the Pavilion, tracing how this retained the methods and concerns of his works that responded to war. I return to British psychoanalysis to understand how the wartime experience of home under threat influenced the construction of the environment at Peterlee. At the centre of this is the Pavilion, which stands, at the end of this chapter, as a flawed vision of a form of public reconstruction that sought to make home on a community scale while grappling with the unsteady time of reconstruction. The conclusion turns to Gilbert & George’s performance Underneath the Arches in a railway arch near Limehouse in East London in 1969 as a way of reflecting on the continued centrality of memories of war and reconstruction for the categories of home and masculinity in Britain, nearly twenty-five years after the war’s end. It unpicks how their performance enacted a temporal complication that brought memories of wartime – particularly of destruction of home, homelessness, crime and homosexuality – back to a space of reconstruction. It outlines how the artists’ strange vision of home in this work – as homosocial, stripped of the material culture of home, and formed, simultaneously, by loss and hope – is both a deeply personal response by the artists and a way of conceiving of the negotiation, challenges and possibilities of post-war home in this book as a whole. Overall, this book argues that the works of these artists – Bratby, Bacon, Vaughan, Souza, Pasmore and Gilbert & George – were informed by recurring memories of war and the disorientating task of reconstruction, and that they can enable an understanding of how war and its aftermath shaped the negotiation of home and masculinity in post-war Britain.

1 John Bratby Masculinity and Violence in the Post-War Home

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n 1959, the artist John Bratby was photographed on the decking in his garden outside his home in Blackheath in South London with his family at this side (Figure 3). The photographer was Ida Kar, and she depicts him as an artist firmly embedded in companionate family life, framed and supported by the structure of the home around him. On his knee is his oldest son David, wrapped up against the cold, and Bratby gestures as if he is telling him a story or maybe gently telling him off. Opposite, Jean Cooke – also an artist, and Bratby’s wife – looks on lovingly, with a relaxed smile on her face. Bratby’s position as father and husband is highlighted, but his role as artist is also prominently stated through the presence of one of his paintings, propped against the window in the background. Through this arrangement, the image reproduces many of the assumptions about gender and the home in postwar Britain – Bratby the father but also breadwinner, and Cooke looking on, with no hint at her professional artistic identity, ready to take over with David if required. This seems, at least on the surface, to be a happy and relaxed representation of a nuclear family. The photograph does place a particular tension at its heart, however. The canvas, propped up behind the family, posits this set-up as something slightly different. Art is present in the home here, as a reminder of Bratby’s profession and of the sphere and outlet that sets him apart, to an extent, from the companionate normality of post-war family life. This coming together of art and the home was something that had dominated the critical discussion of Bratby’s art since he rose to public prominence in 1954 with his first solo

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FIGURE 3  Ida Kar, John Randall Bratby; David Bratby; Jean Esme Oregon Cooke, 1959, vintage bromide print, 20.2 × 23.4cm, National Portrait Gallery, London © National Portrait Gallery. show at Helen Lessore’s Beaux Arts Gallery in London, just after leaving the Royal College of Art. Critic John Berger declared that ‘to enter the Beaux Arts Gallery is to enter Bratby’s home’, in part because his subjects were ‘his wife, his sister-in-law, his kitchen table, his dogs, his groceries’, but also because ‘you are compelled to share his most intense and personal emotions’.1 For him, Bratby’s art makes a subject of not only the home and its objects, but also his own psychological interior. In many ways, Bratby’s turn to the home and domesticity as a subject was nothing new. David Sylvester, another critic, recognized this in his own early response to Bratby’s group show with Jack Smith, Derrick Greaves and Edward Middleditch; his review’s title ‘The Kitchen Sink’ gave the four artists a short-lived group identity as ‘the Kitchen Sink Painters’. Sylvester placed their work in a lineage of modern artists who took domesticity as their subject, from Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, through Henri Matisse, Cubism, Surrealism and, more recently, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Gruber. For him, Bratby and his fellow artists returned art to the kitchen: ‘a very ordinary kitchen, lived in by

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a very ordinary family. There is nothing to hint that the man about the house is an artist or anything other than a very ordinary bloke’.2 To Sylvester, the Kitchen Sink Painters were notable for their ordinariness – you would not find Picasso or Giacometti representing the everyday detritus of domestic life, as Bratby did. This chapter takes up the representations of home, family life and gender in Bratby’s art, noted in contemporary criticism of his work and echoed in Kar’s photograph. It explores how Bratby’s art engages with the post-war ideal of home that was emerging in Britain at this moment, and which I outlined in the introduction. Bratby is our starting point as his paintings focus overwhelmingly on the domestic interior and explore the construction of post-war home from within these traditional parameters. His paintings become spheres where emerging definitions of masculinity – from the companionate masculinity of the nuclear family, to anxieties about conformity and individualistic artistic masculinity – were negotiated. This is addressed in the first section, which considers Bratby’s Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall (1957) in this light and alongside the work of Cooke in order to highlight how the gendered definition of home in the nuclear family becomes, for Bratby, an unsteady negotiation of public ideals and private emotions. The second section then looks specifically at Bratby’s representations of Cooke, exploring how he defines masculinity through an unsteady and potentially violent relationship to femininity. Kleinian psychoanalysis is used here as a means of understanding Bratby’s representations in terms of contemporary discourses around the family and gender. In the final section, I conclude by reflecting on the challenge of engaging with artworks that refer to domestic violence perpetrated by the artist himself. I turn, again, to psychoanalysis to read Bratby’s paintings as making visible the enduring presence of war in post-war home and masculinity, and as highlighting the temporal instability of reconstruction that, in Bratby’s work, threatens to engulf these post-war ideals.

Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall and postwar masculinity In 1957, Bratby pulled a mirrored door off Cooke’s old wardrobe, propped it up against a wall, and began to paint what would become Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall (Figure 2). The reflections in the repeated mirror reflect aspects of the space of what would have been a familiar room to regular Bratby viewers, with a bay window in the background and a light bulb hanging unshaded from the ceiling. The painting appears to speak of the process of its making, with the mirrored door placed in one position for the first portrait,

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and then moved accordingly, to fill the rest of the space on the canvas. On the right and in the centre, the mirror stands freely against the wall; on the left, it is propped up and secured inside David’s cot. Each portrait is different. On the right, Bratby wears green trousers, held up with a thick brown belt, and a white shirt; he carefully records the way it gathers and folds at his forearms and waist. He holds a cigarette in his lips and he paints in its smoke, drifting across his face and above his head. Both arms are by his side and he looks at his own reflection with intensity, underlined by the manner in which he has picked out blotches or red marks on his face. This intensity is not matched by stillness, however; one leg is raised with the effect that it appears as if he is about to step out of the frame in which he depicts himself. In the centre, he continues to smoke and paints in another thick haze around his head. He wears the same clothes, but here his shirt is untucked and almost completely unbuttoned, and he raises one hand as if to keep its two sides together. There is less movement here, and his other arm is cut off by the edge of the frame. On the left, where the mirror sits in the cot, Bratby’s appearance and setting changes entirely. Rather than appearing as if he is about to move out of the frame or cut off abruptly by it, he stands a little more comfortably within the domestic space around him. The mirror is positioned here so that the space of the home unfurls most logically behind him, and you can make out pieces of furniture and the bay window in the background. He wears a brown jumper that appears to have neatly covered his shirt, and smokes a pipe rather than a cigarette. His face – no longer obscured by unruly cigarette smoke – looks lighter and more relaxed. Above the mirrors, he has picked out the textures and patterns of the white wallpaper. Bratby describes the process of painting a work very similar to Three SelfPortraits with a White Wall in his first novel, Breakdown, written in 1958 and 1959 and published in 1960.3 Part One of Breakdown is accompanied by a self-portrait by Bratby that is literally broken into pieces, giving a succinct, effective and self-aware gesture to the book’s preoccupations. The novel is concerned with the breakdown of an artist, taking in the disintegration of his marriage, family life and career. The artist appears to be a thinly veiled portrait of Bratby: he gives him the name James Brady and it begins with a physical description that sounds fairly familiar. Brady is ‘uncouth, fat, bespectacled, and balding’ with a ‘frowning, glowering, egotistical appearance’, a ‘receding forehead curving back nakedly over the top of his head’ and a ‘constant cigarette inserted in his lips amid the ugliness of his piggish face’.4 He is selfconscious, sometimes intelligent, but often ruled by his emotions. We find Brady in the process of painting, ‘a big bulging figure in the midst of the agonies and emotions of creation’, with dark, full, ‘feverish’ eyes, ‘corrugated’ worry lines and aching ulcers.5 Suddenly, he catches sight of a large wooden sideboard with three mirrors on it:

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He walked round this vast piece of furniture in his studio, and looked guardedly at himself in one of the mirrors. What he saw did not alter his mood, and his soul felt imprisoned, longing to be free, emotionally free and emotionally active. He wished he wasn’t so fat. He wished he was this, he wished he was that. But he was satisfied with himself at the same time: was he not a successful painter?6 Here, Bratby registers a similar intensity of looking to Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall, and conveys the artistic process as one of strain, agony and worry while giving voice to anxieties about his appearance and success that preoccupy him. That question – hanging at the end of the paragraph with a mixture of self-reassurance and self-doubt – is revealing about the nature of this conflicted process. Bratby’s text demonstrates an awareness of anxieties about masculinity that related both to the home and to his professional status as an artist. He appears to have posited art as a sphere where these anxieties could be confronted. In an interview with the artist, Lawrence Thompson stated that Bratby asserted that ‘all art is neurosis, the working out in paint or words of a personal conflict’. In the same interview, Bratby stressed the importance of self-portraits in this process: I paint my face a lot, worrying about my problems. It shows in my face, and I’m interested in how everything shows, how changing thoughts show. Living in this house is very reassuring to a person like me. I can lean on it. I work very well in this house.7 In this statement, he links the exploration of anxiety to his self-portraits, and underlines the importance of the home as the space in which this process can happen. But while home can be a site for the exploration of selfhood, he seems to reflect on its constraints elsewhere. He puts these conflicted feelings into the character of Brady in Breakdown. Frustrated at his anxieties and lack of progress in painting, Brady begins smashing up birdcages with an axe in his back garden, and reflects on his home: He was imprisoned in the prison of his successful ordered existence. His marriage was happy, his child of three a delight. Part of Brady, a big part, loved the prison he was in, a self-made prison of his love for his wife, his child, his art, his sound economy. Brady didn’t want to bust any of that prison up, but part of Brady longed to break loose for a spell.8 A few pages later, Bratby tells us that Brady ‘loved a well-ordered life, a life in control’ but had to cage ‘the animal within himself that longed to roam the dark

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jungles of emotional, lustful experience’ in order to maintain it.9 Breakdown is the story of that animal being uncaged. There is a tension in these reflections by Bratby, both in his own statements and in those he associates with James Brady in Breakdown, between the home as a productive space for masculine identity and home as a space of constraint. The latter becomes a familiar trope for Bratby – birdcages appear with some frequency in his paintings as does a gorilla, both symbols of this urge to break free – and it seems to have been a way for him to express how he struggled to negotiate masculinity at this point and, more problematically, a way to frame and explain the violence he inflicted on his family. This was a response that was exacerbated by new, emerging conceptions of the postwar familial home. The welfare state and wider social assumptions had put forward a sense of the nuclear family as a companionate ideal – where the mother and father shared the routines and tasks of the home, to some extent, calling men further and further into the family – while also retaining a strict sense of traditional gender roles, with the woman as mother and housewife, and man as breadwinner and father. There is a sense, in Bratby and in British culture more widely, that these expectations encouraged a certain amount of conformity at home, just as the emergence of mass culture was fuelling fears about more widespread cultural conformity.10 Post-war ideals of masculinity, in other words, were contested or undermined as they emerged; various male, public figures reflected on this process. Contemporary academic Richard Hoggart responded by idealizing the home – particularly the working-class home – while rejecting the idea that it might be an emasculating space. For him, domesticity was ‘a good and comely life … elaborate and disorderly and yet sober: it is not chintzy or kittenish or whimsical or “feminized”’. Within it, the key figures were the mother (‘the pivot of the home, as it is practically the whole of her world’) and the father (‘the “master in his own house”’).11 However, for Colin Wilson, who became a literary sensation in 1956 on the publication of his book The Outsider which explored the social outsider in literature and culture, the postwar settlement and home- and mass culture-focused life it offered was to be rejected. In his notebook, he recorded how he longed for a day when ‘my devouring need for seriousness will inspire thousands of others to spit on this new civilisation of football pools and public houses and demand a new way of life’.12 Wilson’s ‘Outsider’ was at odds with this conformity, hyper aware of the self-division necessary to operate in post-war society in a way that echoes Bratby’s Brady – a figure for whom ‘the ape and the man exist in one body’ and who is the only person ‘who knows he is sick in a civilisation that doesn’t know it is sick’.13 The writer and broadcaster Kenneth Allsop noted how these dissenting, anxious viewpoints were largely at odds with the wider public:

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I wonder if they would understand the baffled derision they would arouse in any well paid industrial worker today, with a New Town house full of comfortable over-stuffed furniture, a telly and several strong warmly-clothed children, if they told him his life had been ‘poisoned’ by humanism and that he had ‘lost his feeling of uniqueness’?14 These debates suggest the need for the culturally aware, contemporary man to find some sort of position between conformity and individualism, to negotiate the tricky tasks of home and masculinity. This apparent sense of masculinity under threat – from conformity and the family in particular – is present in Breakdown. The character of Bernard Bussey, a frame-maker to the artists that populate the novel, is introduced as a guest at an art party in Chelsea. Bussey is a reader of articles about characters such as ‘The Man Who Never Lived’, who is a ‘tiny cog in the vast machinery created by Real Men … spineless, gutless, non-individualistic’ in contrast to ‘The Man Who Is a Law’, a ‘leader of men, a creator, an individual, a force’. On his way home, he sits in a tube carriage in his bowler hat, reading another, similar article: Are you a servile disgrace to the name of man? What will your life have meant when you lie on your deathbed and you look back at its lack of achievements? Are you a Man or a Mouse? Have you wasted the gift of Life, or taken it and used it to some purpose? … How many times do they call you ‘Sir’? How many times do you call them ‘Sir’? Can you feel proud of what you have done with your life, or has your life been a waste? As Bussey steps off the train, a ticket inspector addresses him but does not call him ‘Sir’. As a result, he vows to become ‘an Individual’ like the art students he works for, deciding he needs to find ‘a way of life that was unique, antibourgeois, and individualistic’. He begins to play the trumpet in secret (‘very quietly’), to cultivate eccentricities, and eventually meets a painter called Martha who helps him buy new clothes and set up a business that brings him the individuality and personal life he craves.15 This section finds Bratby registering the contemporary debates around masculinity (which must have been common enough for Bussey’s article to be familiar to Bratby’s audience) and once again positing art as something removed from conformity, while also satirizing these anxieties. Additionally, the trope of the individualistic man playing the trumpet (probably inspired by an enthusiasm for jazz records and the freedom they represented) was familiar from John Osborne’s Look Back In Anger and even (as he would have been all too aware) his own paintings.16 This awareness of these debates – of the anxieties they could provoke but also of the stereotypes and assumptions around masculinity – is key for Bratby’s painting.

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Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall seems to grapple with the seemingly contradictory questions of home as a space of male selfhood and home as a space of containment and conformity. Where the mirror is leant, a little unsteadily, on the wall, he appears to play with containment and escape. In the centre, Bratby’s body is abruptly cut off on his left-hand side, emphasizing the restrictive capabilities of the frame. On the right, however, the wood of the frame seems warped, curving oddly towards the bottom of the canvas, as Bratby paints himself as if about to step out from it. His knee is bent and leg poised, while his arm touches the edge of the distorted wooden frame, gesturing faintly to the possibility of resisting the containment in which he paints himself. However, the tone here is more complex and more ambiguous than chafing at the confines of the home, I would suggest. On the left is that distinctly different self-portrait: Bratby in his sensible jumper, smoking a pipe, painting amid the objects of domesticity. He is framed – held in place – differently too. Here, the wood-framed mirror has been placed in David’s cot and tied into place securely. This image is literally rooted in an object that gestures to the companionate role that he must occupy in the family: the father. The railings of the cot are reflected back to Bratby in the mirror in a way that, once again, contains his painted image, the latest in a series of boundaries, frames and limits that Bratby inscribes on the canvas but only tentatively threatens to traverse. This is not to say, however, that this is a settled or entirely comfortable image of a man in his home – it is unstable while also gesturing to the momentary stability that a painted image may provide for the artist. The three self-portraits capture three different moments – of dress, of thought, of being – across the canvas, while the mirrors reflect the space of the home back to us in disjointed fragments, requiring us to piece together the room from a light bulb, a piece of wall, or a section of the window. The routines of the home are disrupted too: while Bratby roots his self-image in the cot, associating himself with an object of fatherhood and family life, he has simultaneously uprooted his son from that space. Presumably David had to sleep elsewhere while this painting was being completed. Here, the home and the masculine self are not unified entities, and Bratby gives us a sense of their shifting clarity instead. Bratby’s fragmented approach to the self-portrait is not surprising: I have highlighted how he registers the possibility of home as a sphere of stability and selfhood (where, for him in particular, the roles of father, breadwinner and artist can all potentially find expression at once) while also toying with a gendered sense that the home constrains. Both find expression here in a way that underlines the contradictory expectations of post-war masculinity. Wooden frames bend out of shape and Bratby threatens to step out of the home that defines him, just as he re-inscribes himself within it. In this respect, painting, for Bratby, is useful. In representing himself repeatedly from his reflection in the mirror, he can record a conflicted, changing sense of selfhood

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(and register the contradictions of masculinity of which he was clearly aware) while also disrupting the space around him. He can record a sense of the home and its objects containing his own image – and defining it, either on his terms or someone else’s – while hinting at the possibility of shedding one masculine self and inhabiting another. Home becomes neither a sphere of familial harmony nor a space of constraint, but an area of exploration, creativity and personal struggle – home comforts but also limits – with art allowing the conflicting nature of this experience to find expression, for now. Bratby was, as we know, not the only artist in this home, and Jean Cooke had a similar preoccupation with the self-portrait rooted in the domestic sphere. In a 1958 Self-Portrait (Figure 4), she also takes a mirror – oval this time – props it up and begins to paint her own reflection. This is not the frantic, unsteady, repetitive kind of self-representation that Bratby gives us; instead, the oval mirror has been carefully balanced against what looks like a wardrobe or a cupboard and Cooke paints just one image of herself. In the reflection, she is dressed in a white jumper and dark trousers. She captures herself in the process of forming the image, with one paintbrush in her left hand (raised in a way that it seems to touch the frame of the mirror), her other brushes clutched confidently in her right hand, and paints squeezed out and mixed on a board in front of her. In contrast to Bratby, the domestic space unfurls behind her without complication. The family is still in the upstairs of Jean’s father’s home at this point (they would shortly move to their own home in Blackheath) and this is clearly not a dedicated studio space. The carefully placed but still slightly precarious mirror attests to this, as does the presence of David’s cot in background. This has a similar importance as in Bratby’s self-portrait, though on very different terms. While Cooke does not root her self-image within the cot as Bratby does, she does make a clear association between these two elements. Her image is balanced, with her portrait on the left and the cot on the right, with the two linked visually by her raised arm. In this way, the composition suggests a negotiation of selfhood, as Cooke inscribes her own dual role – of artist and mother – into the portrait. The cot, however, is empty: David is seemingly elsewhere, perhaps with Bratby or her father or someone else, and in his absence Cooke paints an image that reflects on the balance that she must, necessarily, strike. Cooke wrote on her self-portraits: Sometimes I paint self-portraits to show off, sometimes to hide away in solitude, sometimes to say ‘Here I am’, sometimes to say ‘I want to be alone’. But always there is a searching for the unknown, the previously unperceived.17 In the case of Self-Portrait, Cooke has produced an assertive image of female selfhood in which her roles as artist and mother are stated with assuredness,

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FIGURE 4  Jean Cooke, Self Portrait, 1958, oil on canvas, 1149 × 838mm, Tate, London © Tate, London, 2017. but also a subtle nod to their complexity. In the background, a door is visible and hints at her return to the family or their return to her. Cooke’s work has been largely overlooked in recent years and there is evidence that, during her lifetime, Bratby imposed limits on her painting time and became jealous when her art began to receive acclaim in the 1960s and 1970s (as his star was on the wane). I have included her Self-Portrait here as a

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means of countering the tendency for Cooke to be obscured by her husband. Bringing her work into conversation with Bratby also allows us to read her art as concerned with the negotiation of gendered selfhood from within the nuclear family of post-war reconstruction. Cooke’s portrait recognizes that motherhood is her expected role, her social destiny in post-war Britain, and posits her identity as an artist alongside it, as its equal. For Bratby, it is almost the other way round: it is fatherhood and husbandhood that must be reconciled with the assumptions surrounding the expression of the identity of male artist. Both artists register the disruption of the space and time of the home in order to do this: art becomes a moment of pause and a moment of creativity, in the sense that the space of the home is reconfigured, briefly, on canvas, in a new way. In Cooke’s self-portrait, she registers the momentary absence of her son and foregrounds her work as an artist. Her painting records a brief lifting of the immediate tasks of motherhood while still acknowledging that that role, that part of her identity, never goes away (the cot remains in the background). Bratby’s image is admittedly more disorientating, in that multiple mirrors help to create multiple selves within a series of ruptured, fragmented spaces of the home. Ordinary domestic routines stop here too: David is displaced from his cot for an image of Bratby that roots him in a symbol of fatherhood while also putting him in the child’s place, gesturing to regression and infantalization in a way that further unsteadies his anxious, self-aware balancing act. If Cooke positions herself as an artist while gesturing back to her family and her position within it, Bratby tries to inhabit every role at once. The father, the artist, the conformist, the individual, even the child are all present on the surface of his canvas in fixed uncertainty. These portraits reflect on the negotiation of gender within the nuclear family. Cooke paints an assertive, complex image of female identity at this moment, recognizing the social ideal of motherhood while wrestling space for her artistic role to take centre stage. Bratby, in comparison, struggles to locate a similar stability, rooting post-war masculinity in the home in uncertainty and anxiety. Both artists attest to the unsteady path between social ideals and personal expression in the home of post-war reconstruction. In Bratby’s images of Cooke, as the next section will show, these ideals are increasingly allowed to falter and are linked to the destructive potential of violence.

Bratby’s paintings of Jean Cooke In the catalogue to his 1991 National Portrait Gallery show, John Bratby Portraits, Bratby reflected on his paintings of Cooke without sentimentality: ‘I sometimes painted my wife Jean Cooke as a particular person, not with

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affection. She was someone to paint. There, available, and did not cost modelling fees’.18 His words imply ambivalence to Cooke as a subject that is certainly present in his images of her, but they also suggest detachment that is belied by the emotional tenor of his paintings. There are undoubtedly occasional moments of intimacy and love in the way Bratby depicts Cooke, but they are also images that speak of mistrust, anger and fear. Bratby was notoriously selfish, forcing Cooke to fetch and carry materials for him, making her sit as his model for long periods of time in difficult conditions, and painting over her canvases when he had used up all of his own. We also know that violence had been an aspect of their relationship since they met as art students in 1953 and married quickly (with Bratby asserting, threateningly, that ‘you belong to me’).19 Bratby’s biographer Maurice Yacowar makes reference to the ‘marital strain’ that was a fixture of their life together, while Cooke’s obituaries and later interviews make clear references to violence between the couple.20 Yacowar also highlights how this violence becomes a presence in Bratby’s novels, showing how their thinly veiled autobiography trivializes his own marital violence and uses it to comedic effect.21 This violence is also present in his paintings. This section argues that Bratby’s paintings of Cooke are representations of the violence that emerges out of the gendered assumptions and limits of the post-war family home. His paintings distort and transform Cooke in terms of violence, anxiety and fear. Cooke, for her part, used art as a means of regaining elements of the selfhood that Bratby’s paintings and behaviour took away: ‘I didn’t like the way he painted me. That’s why I did all those self-portraits, to paint me as I thought I looked.’22 However, in Bratby’s paintings of Cooke the uncertainty about masculinity and the ruptures that Bratby inscribed into the home in Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall take a far more unsettling form. Jean at the Basin (Figure 5), from 1955, finds Cooke in the cramped space of her and Bratby’s bathroom. She stands in the centre of the work, with her hands on the sink and her head slightly lowered so that her gaze is fixed on the floor. Cooke was pregnant with the Bratbys’ first child, David, in 1955 and it is probable that her rounded belly subtly alludes to this. Around her, Bratby takes delight in picking out the rundown details of the bathroom, from the wallpaper peeling away above her head at the top of the wall and along the ceiling, to the cracks in the white, sloping wall to her left. In contrast, the floor seems to have been painted in with quick, long marks of paint that sweep, dramatically and diagonally, towards the front of the work. Cooke is positioned between the toilet – a favourite subject of Bratby’s at this time – and the sink, forming a visual link to an observation by contemporary critic David Piper, published in 1957: I observe he is excited by only two kinds of objects: himself and expended objects. Himself is by no means expended, but he always seems to take it

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FIGURE 5  John Bratby, Jean at the Basin, 1955, oil on board, 121.9 × 78.1cm, private collection, London © The Estate of John Bratby Photo: National Portrait Gallery.

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out of everything else. Those women are all expended, and what’s left is all debris, and the apparatus for disposing of debris, sinks, lavatories.23 Cooke’s lowered head and her inactive position alongside the toilet roll on top of the cistern and the Vim powder and mug that rest on the sink certainly provide echoes of Piper’s observation of Bratby’s women as ‘expended’. Her position in the bathroom does not make complete sense, and it has the air of an arranged and oddly formal scene, with Cooke aligned explicitly with the objects of the bathroom in a pose dictated by the artist. Despite Cooke’s prominent position at the centre of this work, the viewpoint of the painting follows Bratby’s gaze, across the room, over the toilet and the sink, over Jean’s bowed head to the mirror above her, where he paints his own reflection. This places Bratby in the doorway: you can begin to imagine him placing his easel and canvas there, and the bottom of the doorway is visible, tilting in to the lower left-hand corner of the image. In fact, the space and arrangement of the painting are distorted in general to reflect Bratby’s position. The mirror and upper part of the wall are seen from straight on, right in Bratby’s eye line, and he paints in his own portrait in the reflection with his paintbrush in his hand just touching the frame, like Jean’s in her self-portrait. The rest of the space tilts towards where he stands and looks: you can peer into the leaning basins of the toilet and the sink, Cooke’s torso seems compressed to fit her under the mirror and Bratby’s gaze while her foot points to where he stands, and even the furious streaks of red and brown paint for the floor seem to begin to fall towards him. Bratby becomes here, in effect, both subject and artist, looking at his own reflection while orienting the composition to his assumed position. You get the sense that, were he to drop his guard or step out of the gaze of the mirror and himself, the whole scene might fall apart. Jean at the Basin is then, inevitably and unsurprisingly, about Bratby. If the insertion of his self-portrait in the reflection and the distortion of the space and objects suggest Bratby’s need to root selfhood in a space that both contains and orientates itself to that selfhood, the question of Cooke’s presence remains. In one sense, we could read this image as simply one of containment: Cooke as wife and mother made to occupy the space of the home that was, as we have seen, so important to him. This would echo Piper’s sense of Bratby’s ‘expended’ women, though the image is also more complicated than that. I do, however, wish to hold onto the unsettling connotations that this containment implies. Bratby stands in the doorway, seemingly blocking Cooke’s exit, and asks a presumably pregnant woman to pose in a standing position, leaning on the edge of the sink. He inflicts much more arduous modelling tasks on his wife, as we will see, but this cannot have been comfortable. The position of Bratby’s self-portrait – directly above her lowered head – underlines the quiet, troubling mastery that is present in the image’s composition. There is

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also the possibility that Cooke serves a symbolic purpose here that reinforces particular contemporary ideas about gender. Bratby stands, commanding the space, his attention directed to himself and his work, and Cooke situated below him, head lowered, and contained in her thoughts and her position between the toilet and sink. She also serves to confirm the ‘heterosexuality or “masculinity”’ of her partner.24 There is an extent, then, to which Cooke is here to speak for Bratby – for his gender, his sexuality and his work. However, Cooke’s role in Jean at the Basin is more than that of a public signifier of Bratby’s familial and artistic selfhood; she is also framed as a mother. In post-war Britain, the figure of the mother had taken on particularly powerful resonances, particularly within British psychoanalysis. In a 1957 essay, ‘The Mother’s Contribution to Society’, D.W. Winnicott framed the ‘long and exacting task’ of parenthood as providing ‘the only real basis for society, and the only factory for the democratic tendency in a country’s social system’.25 He places the mother at the centre of this task: Every man or woman who is sane, every man or woman who has the feeling of being a person in the world, and for whom the world means something, every happy person, is in infinite debt to a woman. At the time when as an infant (male or female) this person knew nothing about dependence, there was absolute dependence.26 Here, the mother is posited as central to the correct personal development of individuals in reconstruction Britain. These ideas emerged from Melanie Klein’s psychoanalytic theories of the family. Her work can help us place Bratby’s painting in the context of theories around the family and the development of selfhood that had exerted influence on contemporary attitudes to family life, while giving voice to the motivations and anxieties of selfhood that underpinned the concepts of home and masculinity at this time. Klein’s theories placed a great deal of significance on the figure of the mother and her role in the development of children. Her body is the fragmented point of focus for feelings of love and hate in the paranoid–schizoid position in the early months of the child’s life, and she becomes the perceived whole object after this in the depressive position, and the recipient of feelings of love and guilt to atone for destructive feelings of hate earlier. For Klein, this process assists in the development of the ego, with the early negotiation of the relationship between the mother and child laying the groundwork for how individuals relate to the wider world around them. A key element of this development is the process of symbol formation, which acts to assist with the movement between the paranoid–schizoid and the depressive positions. Symbol formation occurs in infants after a phase of anxiety brought on by sadistic tendencies towards the mother and father in the paranoid–schizoid

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position. It is, initially, the projection of the father and mother’s genitals and organs (the subjects of attack in the paranoid–schizoid position) onto other objects by the infant as a result of the dread and anxiety it feels. According to Klein, this process forms the basis for the child’s relationship to the outside world, within the family initially and then outside of it. In her work, she uses the example of her analysis of a four-year-old boy called Dick, who was brought to her because he had been slow to develop vocabulary and intellect, and displayed little anxiety or affection. She seeks to encourage the development of symbol formation in Dick by helping him locate equivalents for the mother’s body in the outside world. Klein’s analysis is difficult to read, partly because Dick’s condition is now recognizable as autism, and partly because Klein seeks to create moments of anxiety for him in order to encourage symbol formation. However, she posits cramped domestic spaces (the space between the outer and inner doors of the room) and particular domestic objects (a chest of drawers, a toy coal cart and a washbasin) as equivalents for Dick’s mother’s body.27 This illustrates, for her, the process of symbol formation in action. This conflation of the mother’s body with domestic objects arguably also occurs in Jean at the Basin. Cooke leans on the washbasin, an object that was reminiscent of the mother’s body for Klein: it can contain and hold, but it also eventually expels what it holds. The same could be said for the toilet, just behind her. Cooke’s probable pregnancy underlines the comparison between her as a mother and these domestic objects. The room itself could also be said to hold similar connotations. Just as Dick found an equivalent for his mother in the dark space between two doors, so here the bathroom could stand in for the mother’s body – a contained, private space that can hold a body at its most vulnerable. This painted act of finding equivalence – by linking a mother to the objects of wider reality – echoes the sense of selfhood Klein locates in symbol formation and restates it, making it ongoing. Bratby’s painting becomes not just an attempt to root the image and the domestic space around his selfhood, but also a means of representing a mother’s importance to that selfhood. Cooke’s significance in this respect is varied. In one sense, she is present as Bratby’s wife and expectant mother, and the objects and space around her gesture to the role she is performing. In another sense, this conflation of Cooke with domestic objects suggests she plays an ongoing role in the process of symbol formation that contributed to the development of Bratby’s ego and could stand in, symbolically, for his own mother. In the way the painting restates the ‘original’ mother here it speaks to that process while also perhaps gesturing to a return to the experiences of infancy and childhood that the imminent arrival of a first-born child can provoke. In Jean at the Basin, Cooke is made to take on the kinds of demands that were asked of mothers in the reconstructive context of post-war Britain. She becomes the pivotal figure in the psychological drama of the post-war self,

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just as Winnicott outlines so urgently and explicitly. Leaning on the washbasin, she becomes another vital fixture of the home and Bratby’s look across to his own reflection in the bathroom mirror is not just a recognition of the male self but also a recognition of everything that supports and activates that self: art (in his painting hand), the home (specifically, the bathroom) and Cooke (the wife, the expectant mother, and the reminder of an original mother and the ongoing power and significance of that relationship). In this way, Bratby’s painting speaks of the importance of the figure of the mother in post-war Britain while also painting in the difficulties and ruptures this creates. It appears to contain an awareness that the construction of home is always reconstruction, that the present and the future are always formed by and susceptible to the everpresent past. This intermingling of past, present and future affects and forms the self too: the painting registers the sense that selves are constructed across time, from relationships that are formed anew but also always in relation to other relationships. Bratby records how maternity echoes across a life, with different resonances at different times. And, more urgently perhaps, Jean at the Basin speaks of the politics of this: of building a life – and, more broadly, social ideals – around the figure of the mother. We see for ourselves how this can reduce and restrict selfhood across gender, with femininity coerced and anchored to serve the contradictions of masculinity. If Jean at the Basin posits Cooke as a maternal figure given the seemingly impossible task of assisting in the negotiation of contradictory male selfhood, then Bratby’s other images of her raise the stakes and push closer to some kind of violent breaking point. Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window (Figure 6), from 1954, finds Cooke alongside the domestic objects that were recurrent subjects for Bratby at this early point in his career. She is nude, seated on a chair at one end of the kitchen table. Unlike in Jean at the Basin, she faces forward here, making eye contact with Bratby and with us as viewers. The viewpoint again suggests Bratby’s position – she is seen from above and her eyes look up to where he presumably stands painting, at the other end of the table. Her body is half-obscured by the large wooden table, with only her shoulders and right arm, breast, and leg visible. He seems to paint Cooke, again, without sentimentality, picking out her body in tones of red, pink, white and yellow, and gives her a look of tired malevolence – all flushed cheeks and dead-eyed stare. In front of her, the table tilts a little unrealistically with Bratby’s viewpoint, and it is crammed with objects from around the home. It includes cereal boxes (one box of Shredded Wheat and three of Cornflakes), Tate and Lyle sugar, table salt, jam and mustard, as well as silverware, pint glasses, vases, bowls and a box of matches, all arranged on top of a chequered tablecloth. Two dishes with gleaming silver lids sit in the lower centre of the painting, on the left of the table: their reflections show us the presence of the artist once again, in a blue top and brown-orange trousers, distorted in their

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FIGURE 6  John Bratby, Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window, 1954, oil on board, 122 × 108cm, Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire/Bridgeman Images © The Estate of John Bratby. surfaces. Behind the table and the nude figure of Cooke, the blind is raised at the kitchen window, and we can see past her, through the tottering boxes and clustered jars, out onto the street outside. After Bratby represented Britain at the Venice Biennale alongside the other Kitchen Sink Painters in 1956, Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window received a Guggenheim Award. Later that year, he published an article in Art News and Review that purported to explain the drawn-out process behind the painting’s creation, and Cooke’s important, demanding role:

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Jean, my wife, was that morning at the Royal College of Art, so I waited until she got in. I fixed a huge fire, got in some beer which I couldn’t afford, to sustain her in her posing ordeal to come, and I resolved to take her to the pictures when she had finished posing … Jean came in, grimaced when I told her what she had to do, and prepared to pose … I had started that dinner time, both of us without any dinner, because my inspiration might go if I didn’t exploit it immediately. Afternoon went through and the evening passed as I worked and worked. We snatched a hasty meal and worked in the late evening until 12pm … A horrible ache in my stomach, and a dry, searing feeling in my stomach tormented me, as I worked in that still lighted room. Jean understood and suppressed her weariness for the sake of the work. We went for a quick walk at 2am, got back about an hour later and worked until 9 when the house was woken into life.28 This account frames the process of painting as not only once again taking over the space and the routines of the home – Cooke posing nude in the kitchen, meals and bedtime ignored – but also imposing a significant amount of strain on Cooke herself. She returns from a working day at the RCA and is immediately instructed to pose for Bratby, and is given minimal breaks until the following morning. By this point, if his account is to be believed, she would have been awake for over twenty-four hours. There is some recognition of the difficulty of this task for Cooke, and he even suggests that he attempts to add some elements of comfort for her, like a fire, beer and maybe even the cinema. Eclipsing Cooke’s trial, however, are Bratby’s own personal and artistic struggles. He begins painting immediately so as not to lose his inspiration, works solidly without food, and endures searing aches and pains in his stomach. Creativity is agony until morning breaks the next day. We never find out if Cooke got her trip to the pictures. In this account, Cooke’s personhood and well-being are laid to one side for the benefit of Bratby and his art. While he registers the impact of this process on himself, the demands he puts on his wife here are unsettling to read. But they come to us not as previously unspoken revelations about the procedure of sitting for the artist; they are outlined unashamedly and triumphantly as some of the contributing factors behind a prize-winning work of art. And while Bratby frames Cooke as suppressing weariness for the good of his inspiration, there is no real sense of the painting being achieved here through her personal sacrifice; it is his coercion, insistence and example that ensure her submission. What Bratby presents to us here is a relationship of control and subordination and he is able to present this to us – to make it public – in the name of art. There are echoes of this in the image itself: Cooke sits naked on the wooden kitchen chair, and the table seems to jut uncomfortably into her body and pin her in. Behind

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her, the blind is open and suggests the humiliating possibility that a passer-by could glance in and see her posing nude. It is no wonder, then, that Bratby paints Cooke with an expression of exhaustion and anger. She looks up to him, to us, with large, tired but unblinking eyes, her cheeks flushed red, and her lips pursed and tense. In this look, we are given a reason for Bratby’s coercion and control. If his written account emphasized a certain power of Cooke in the name of art, the painting seems to speak, uncomfortably, of a need to exert that power: she glowers and threatens, and seems poised to leap up from her position on the chair (were it not for that table, and Bratby’s implied mutual, equally intense gaze). There are also aspects of maternity that sit alongside this sense of threat and control. Cooke’s breast is depicted in line with the surface of the table, creating a visual link between the sustaining possibilities of the breast and the foodstuffs and domestic objects on the table. This strange duality – Cooke as a threat, as someone to be subdued and controlled, but also as the potential, sustaining figure of a mother – also occurs in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger. Osborne’s play still lives on in cultural memory as synonymous with the post-war period prior to the 1960s, and contemporary critics were quick to trace similarities between Bratby, Osborne and the so-called Angry Young Men.29 The play is built around the relationship between Jimmy and Alison, a married couple living together in their Midlands flat with their lodger, Cliff. Critics have often framed Jimmy and Alison’s relationship in terms of class difference, but gender difference is also a constant theme in the play, often expressed by Jimmy himself. His views on Alison, and women in general, veer from fear and scorn to complete dependency. Early on in the play, after Alison has likened him to a child, Jimmy embarks on a rant against women where he accuses them of being violent and destructive. To Jimmy, Alison jumps on the bed ‘as if she were stamping on someone’s face’ and draws the curtain in a ‘casually destructive way … like someone launching a battleship’. At their dressing table, meanwhile, women sit ‘dropping their weapons and banging down their bits of boxes and brushes and lipstick’ so that ‘when you see a woman in front of her bedroom mirror, you realise what a refined sort of a butcher she is’.30 Immediately after this rant, however, Jimmy starts playing and wrestling with Cliff, knocking Alison over and scolding her with her iron in the process. She sends Jimmy out like a child while Cliff tends to her.31 Following a brief sulk, Jimmy apologizes, and the two make up, retreating into a childish game of squirrel and bear (‘You’re very beautiful. A beautiful, grey-eyed squirrel’, ‘Well, you’re a jolly super bear, too’).32 There are moments when these elements of violence and childishness overlap in Jimmy and Alison’s relationship. At the end of act one, Jimmy (unaware that Alison is pregnant at this point) reacts to the news that her friend Helena is coming to stay with them with a particularly violent outburst.

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He wishes out loud for her to have a baby and for it to die, to ‘wake you out of your beauty sleep’, then likens himself to a baby in Alison’s womb, as a victim of her sexual passion: She has the passion of a python. She just devours me whole every time, as if I were some over-large rabbit. That’s me. That bulge around her navel – if you’re wondering what it is – it’s me. Me, buried alive down there, and going mad, smothered in that peaceful looking coil. Not a sound, not a flicker from her – she doesn’t even rumble a little … She’ll go on sleeping and devouring until there’s nothing left of me.33 Jimmy’s equation of himself with a child buried in Alison’s womb brings together the various aggressive and childish strands of their relationship in one disturbing image of the husband as ‘smothered’ infant in the mother’s womb. There are echoes of this in Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window. Here, Cooke becomes not only a subject to be controlled and subdued – pinned in by the table and watched from a threatening, standing viewpoint nearby – but also a figure to be feared. The possibilities of maternity and the nourishing contents of the kitchen seem to sit alongside a sense of danger. Just as Alison has the potential to consume a man for Jimmy, Cooke is given the same dangerous properties. It is not just the glimpses of her breast and rounded belly that hint at this – gesturing to a similar, smothered fate for Bratby as Jimmy – but also her position at the head of the table and her tired but menacing look. She looks capable of devouring everything in front of her, including Bratby himself. In this way, the painting begins to conflate familial roles along similar, though perhaps more disturbing lines to Jean at the Basin. Mother, wife and lover meet on the canvas here, as do, implicitly, father and son, with their underlying aggression, anxiety and disconnect written on the canvas’ surface. This conflicted concept of the mother – as vital and loving, but also someone to potentially fear – feeds into the work of D.W. Winnicott, which points to the wider social implications of these ideas in post-war Britain. In his view, knowledge that we were all once dependent on a mother can lead to ‘a vague fear of dependence’, sometimes taking the form of ‘a fear of WOMAN, or a fear of a woman’ driven by a fear of domination.34 Seeking out danger helps to combat this fear of dependence and reach maturity, and men’s engagement in risk-taking, specifically going to war, is one way of doing this. Women are also able to engage in risk-taking, as Winnicott equates men undertaking war with women undertaking pregnancy and childbirth. However, with the development of the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World

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War, the opportunity for men to fight in a war appeared to have disappeared, with individuals essentially powerless in the face of nuclear war as the threat of destruction hung over everyone equally: ‘With no more wars, men find themselves high and dry.’35 Winnicott’s picture of men as having their selfhood compromised by the atomic bomb finds a voice in one of Jimmy Porter’s most famous speeches in Look Back in Anger: There aren’t any good, brave causes left. If the big bang does come, and we all get killed off, it won’t be in aid of the old-fashioned grand design. It’ll just be for the Brave New-nothing-very-much-thank-you. About as pointless and inglorious as stepping in front of a bus. No, there’s nothing left for it, me boy, but to let yourself be butchered by the women.36 In Winnicott’s work, and seemingly more widely, there is the enduring sense that war and violence, these typically masculine pursuits, were key to overcoming dependence on women and achieving selfhood. After the end of the war and with the development of the bomb, men were left to find their battlegrounds in the home and it comes as no surprise, sadly, to register the glaring stand-off that Bratby paints between him and Cooke. He gestures to the possibility of attack from her while painting in a pre-emptive retaliation in the way he contains and subdues her on canvas (and inscribes similar connotations in his triumphant public statement on how he painted it). In broader terms, this makes visible the wider anxieties surrounding masculinity and the home from the first section of this chapter. Companionate masculinity, rooted in the family and the home, is the distinct opposite of the man at war fighting ‘good, brave causes’. The latter continued to influence the selfhood of post-war men, including Bratby: he served briefly in the army after the war as part of his national service, but he was quickly discharged on account of his poor eye sight, which may well have underlined a sense of being at a remove from this particular ideal. The notion that aggression and independence are key to a mature, masculine individual is written into psychoanalytic and social assumptions about the family and gender in reconstruction Britain, but they also run up against the realities and demands of their epoch. Bratby registers these contradictions in paint and points, increasingly, to their potentially violent ends in the space of the post-war home.

Reading Bratby’s violence Violence has been a constant aspect of my analysis of Bratby’s paintings of Cooke: it is written onto the surface of his canvases, it is made explicit in his

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own writing and accounts as well as those of Cooke, and it lies underneath contemporary assumptions about the family and gender. I want to close this chapter by reflecting more explicitly on this violence. First, I want to think closely about the difficulties of viewing artworks that relate to domestic violence that are produced by the perpetrator of that violence. Secondly, I wish to address what it means to find violence not only within images of the family home, but also at the heart of assumptions about gender and selfhood in reconstruction Britain. Bratby writes domestic violence and violence between men and women into his novels, just as he appears to inscribe this violence onto his canvases. In Breakdown, James Brady’s violence towards women is addressed in an episode in the novel featuring a young art teacher called Esmerelda. Brady meets Esmerelda when he visits her art school to give a review of her students’ work. She seduces him and they begin an affair on the understanding that she will not tell his wife as long as he continues to see her. Esmerelda is framed by Brady as sexually frustrated and predatory, preying on his low self-esteem and sexuality, and blackmailing him out of her own loneliness. Brady is violent towards her on several occasions. For example, after finding her diary filled with mentions of him, he approaches her and kisses her: As he held her, he thought of killing her then: he released her and swung a punch at her jaw. It missed the jaw and his fist sank into her neck, making her gasp for breath in agony. His second blow knocked her out, and he bent down to kill her. But he recoiled and ran away. Later he received a letter from her, forgiving him, and asking him to visit her again, adding a hint of threat.37 Even after a violent outburst that verges on attempted murder, we are left with Esmerelda’s ‘hint of threat’. These outbursts are framed as responses to the way ‘Brady’s self-respect had dwindled gradually’ over the course of the novel already, ranging from his doubt about his art to several emasculating incidents in public, making him ‘vulnerable when faced with a strain’.38 That strain, which pushes him into violence, is Esmerelda: ‘With a somewhat mad, or shall we say unbalanced, female threatening him, it is surely more likely that he would go on breaking up, going from degradation to depravity.’39 Brady’s violence is constantly explained and excused – it is summoned by entrapment, low selfesteem and the figure of a woman. This sense of simmering violence and the sense of a woman-as-trigger are present in Bratby’s images of Cooke. In the 1950s, however, there were no specific laws against domestic violence, and the police were reluctant to intervene in what were considered to be ‘domestic matters’. There is a

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possibility that for contemporary viewers, Bratby’s art offered a glimpse of something private that did not necessarily require comment. From a twentyfirst-century vantage point, we now have a very broad and more public definition of domestic violence and abuse, which can include any kind of violence (physical or sexual), as well as physical and emotional force, emotional abuse, the destruction of property, enforced isolation from friends and loved ones, threats, and control of a partner’s access to belongings, food or loved ones.40 Many of these elements occur in Bratby’s images of Cooke and in their relationship more broadly. We can approach the violence of Bratby’s art and writing and its calculated openness by thinking more broadly about the wider social structures surrounding men, women and the family in Britain at this time. Sociologist Mary Allen roots the causes of domestic violence in ingrained patriarchal structures and their effects on individuals’ conceptions of gender, which, for Allen, comes down to ‘the power differential between women and men, which is understood by the latter as proprietorship and control, and experienced by the former as submission’.41 These assumptions are present in legal, religious and cultural structures, including the family, and, as I have demonstrated, very similar assumptions permeated British society and the development of the welfare state after the Second World War. Additionally, sociologist Jeff Hearn, in a study that draws on interviews with men who have been violent towards women, has shown how men’s explanations for their violence are rooted in these patriarchal assumptions. He notes how accounts of violence are often complex, combining ‘denials, excuses or justifications’ that mingle with references to ‘inner violence, social ownership, confession’ and other elements. Further, they are narratives, forms of ‘social talk’ that take place within the context of men’s power and reproduce that power, revealing assumptions about how individuals feel they should perform their gender.42 Bratby’s representation of his own violence – in his writing and in his art, my primary concern here – can be considered in these terms: as narratives of domestic violence that reveal assumptions about gender and power that underlie that violence. Aspects of his fiction like Brady’s destructive relationship with Esmerelda, his public statements on his art that hint at the emotional and physical abuse of Cooke, and unsettling paintings like Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window can be read as instances where violence is narrated by a perpetrator as a form of confession, but also a means of justification for that violence and a reproduction of power that that violence represents. In each of Bratby’s examples, the trigger for violence is an outside source – either art itself, which puts physical and emotional strain on him, or a woman, who offers both sexual and maternal comfort while also threatening to smother, to attack, to consume. This entwining of violence and selfhood reflects and engages with the narratives around the family and individual development that find expression in British psychoanalysis and beyond at this time. However,

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just as Jean at the Basin appeared to gesture to the return of the processes and anxiety of infancy, Bratby’s representations of violence can also be linked to other past traumas: to find violence in the home in the post-war period is also to find the echoes and aftershocks of the Second World War. In 1940, D.W. Winnicott addressed the early days of the Second World War in his essay ‘Discussion of War Aims’. Here, Winnicott steers away from considering war as being a battle between ‘good’ (Britain) and ‘evil’ (the Nazis); instead, the conflict is between an emotionally mature nation and an emotionally immature nation. For Winnicott, democracy and freedom are hardwon, the results of emotional maturity and the ability to accept our own need to surrender freedom and to be controlled – to recognize the potential in all of us to submit to the horrific social systems that had developed in countries like Germany and Italy.43 His essay was written before the full horrors of the war unfolded – the destruction of homes of British families as well as the holocaust – but those events would only have strengthened his feelings on this subject. It is this context that I wish to bring to Bratby’s art, and paintings like Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window, as well as Jean at the Basin, and Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall. In doing so, the aim is to address the violence and control in these images and to speak of them, without merely accounting for or explaining them. I think this is Winnicott’s point, partly (though I struggle with his innate link between aggression and masculine maturity): that the violence in all of us is to be acknowledged and named, its power registered, so that it may be contained or avoided. Bratby’s images, as disturbing and difficult as they are, ask us to speak of violence, to recognize its presence at the heart of the post-war British home and family. In this way, Bratby’s paintings register the way in which war’s driving forces and emotions remain in the years after its end. They occupy the home, distorting its spaces and infiltrating the relationships of its inhabitants. Bratby’s paintings attest to the endurance or re-emergence of the violence that the post-war settlement sought to end. They speak of the ways in which newly emerging ideals of home and masculinity were haunted and shaped by the legacy of war, and the masculine ideals and, potentially, violent acts (Bratby’s agency cannot be denied here) that occupied those spaces. Bratby’s art makes visible the unsteady time of reconstruction, and the way it shaped home and masculinity. If Bratby’s artworks speak of a broader, pervasive violence in post-war British society, they also speak of the endurance of violence by one person – Jean Cooke. It is fitting that she should have the last word here. Just as Bratby repeatedly used his wife as a subject, Cooke also produced images of her husband. In an early portrait from 1954 (Figure 7), Bratby is seated alongside a tabletop, just as she was in Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window. Here, however, he is fully clothed and comfortable, his legs stretched out so that you can see his sandalled feet. A dog sleeps peacefully on the floor. On the

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table, there is not the furious collection of objects – just a couple of bowls and spoons, some fruit, a glass and a plant, as if the couple had just finished sharing breakfast before Cooke painted the work (in sharp contrast to Bratby and Cooke snatching ‘a hasty meal’ so that his inspiration did not desert him). In the background, a door opens to another room, allowing an element of light, space and breathing room that does not occur in Bratby’s paintings. The

FIGURE 7  Jean Cooke, John Bratby, 1954, oil on canvas, 122 × 91.4cm, Royal Academy of Arts, London © The Estate of Jean Cooke.

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FIGURE 8  Jean Cooke, John Bratby, 1962, oil on canvas, 130.8 × 61cm, Royal College of Art, London, UK/Bridgeman Images © The Estate of Jean Cooke.

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ease and calm of this image are striking, with Bratby looking relaxed within this scene of simple domestic companionship. In one sense, Cooke’s painting registers a moment removed from violence. Bratby is far from the bloated, anxious figure that he tended to depict in his self-portraits, while nothing of the composition here brims with the uneasy tension of his images of Cooke. You can imagine and understand Cooke’s desire to record or create a moment like this on canvas, to give a clearer sense of the companionate family that Bratby gestures to in his paintings but also struggles to embrace entirely, and to erase the violence that dogged their relationship and their home. In 1962, Cooke produced another portrait of Bratby (Figure 8). Here, he sits slouched in a comfy chair in a red dressing gown; his blue and white striped pyjama bottoms are visible and he is barefoot. He clasps his hands together and looks down with an expression that is half contemplation and half that of a sullen child. As a representation, it seems intimate and affectionate, but also faintly ludicrous: Bratby, one of the most successful British artists of the 1950s, who built his reputation on paintings that declare an unstable, difficult and potentially violent masculine persona, just out of bed, hardly looking like a threat at all. This chapter has argued that Bratby’s art makes visible how the home of the nuclear family in post-war Britain was shaped by competing, contemporary ideals and anxieties surrounding emerging categories of masculinity. Bratby’s art attests powerfully to their unsteadiness and volatility, as he moves from selfportraits to representations of his wife Jean Cooke. These works complicate narratives of post-war home and reconstruction by allowing violence – violence perpetrated by the artist and the enduring violence of war – into representations of home. In the process, the home of the domestic interior becomes a space of both male selfhood and male violence; the legacies of war, in the post-war settlement, are difficult to shake off and potentially, still, destructive. In Chapter 2, we remain, initially, in the domestic interior with the book’s first queer artist Francis Bacon. Gradually, we move into other, more public spaces, such as the hotel bar or the public park, to trace how Bacon’s representations might make visible the complex negotiation of queer homes across a wider range of spaces. Violence remains present in Bacon, and the next chapter explores how the legacies of war shaped post-war queer homes, and what representations of post-war queer homes tell us about the legacies of war.

2 Francis Bacon Queer Intimacy and Queer Spaces of Home

I

n Francis Bacon’s 1953 painting Two Figures (Figure 1), two men are having sex on a bed in a dark room. They lie on a bed that stretches horizontally across the canvas like a platform or a stage. There is a headboard on the left side of the bed with a mangled, misshapen pillow alongside it, as well as a mass of bedsheets, formed out of thick smears of white paint. Their bodies are broadly modelled in fluid strokes of white, pink, blue and lilac, though there are areas where the paint appears to have been rubbed away or dark paint rubbed on to create shadows or definition on their bodies, or where paint has been applied more carefully to begin to pick out their faces. One man straddles the other and wraps his arms around his partner, to embrace him, hold him or pin him down. His head meets the face of this other man, their cheeks touching and his subtle expression – lips seemingly pursed and eyes narrowed or closed – suggests determination, action or exertion. Underneath, the other man appears to be lying on his side, facing us. We see his face, with its shadowed eyes and mouth open: his teeth are visible, bared in a cry of ecstasy, or anguish, or pain or merely effort. These men are in motion in a moment of intimacy, their faces and bodies blurred by Bacon’s unresolved application of paint. This is heightened by the thin streaks of watery paint that descend from the top of the canvas, passing over the bodies of the two men, distorting and smearing them slightly, before curving gently at the base of the canvas, like a translucent curtain hitting the floor. This is a room, although it is a very basic one – windowless and featureless, apart from the bed at its centre. It is delineated with very thin lines of white paint,

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and we seem to stand just within it or on its threshold, intruding or about to intrude on this moment between the two men. The bodies of the two men occupy a threshold too: they are seen and exposed – a private moment made public – but they are caught up in this moment of sexual intimacy, seemingly unknowing or uncaring of the audience that watches. This sense of an invasion of privacy is all the more palpable with the knowledge that in 1953 the witnessing of a sexual act like this between two men could have resulted in them being arrested. Two Figures was first exhibited in a show of Bacon’s works at the Hanover Gallery in the early 1950s, where his dealer and gallery owner Erica Brausen hung the work in the upper part of the gallery, half hidden from visitors who would have had to actively seek out the work in order to see it.1 With homosexuality illegal – partial decriminalization for men aged over twenty-one did not occur in England and Wales until 1967 – Brausen was concerned that the graphic nature of Bacon’s painting would provoke a police raid. The transgression that Two Figures represented – the way it made an illicit, private act public – was risky and potentially controversial, and Brausen’s choice of hang restored a little of the boundaries that Bacon had wilfully ignored. Since this first exhibition, Two Figures has continued to live a semi-public, semi-private existence. It has been exhibited publicly on only a handful of occasions, though it remains widely reproduced in Bacon literature.2 Critics have also closely tied the painting to Eadweard Muybridge: the pose and positions of the two men in the painting clearly derive from his photographs of wrestlers taken in 1887. Bacon’s interest in Muybridge’s photography and his intensely personal use of these images as sources for his work has not gone without comment. Critic David Sylvester viewed Two Figures as ‘a conflation of autobiography and photography’ and saw Bacon and his then partner Peter Lacy’s features in the faces of the two men on the bed. Years after the work was produced, Bacon himself admitted, ‘I manipulate the Muybridge bodies into the forms of bodies I have known.’3 The constant reference to Bacon’s use of his sources when discussing works like this in effect gives it a more palatable public face, something Bacon and Sylvester may well have been inclined to do (understandably, given their age and the period in which Bacon was working). But continuing to invoke Muybridge in front of Two Figures is akin to Erica Brausen moving the painting half out of sight in 1953. It is this tension between public and private – the sense that there existed strict boundaries around what could and could not be expressed about queer sexuality in post-war Britain alongside the sense that queer experience meant that these boundaries were inevitably going to be transgressed – that is a key element of Francis Bacon’s art in the 1940s and 1950s. It is also a balancing act that Bacon himself performed: his interviews with Sylvester

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and other public statements on his art avoided explicit references to his sexuality outside of a few biographical details, though he never sought to hide or disguise his homosexuality from friends and sections of the art world. This reticence helped to shape the scholarship and discussion around his art and continues to hold some influence, even today.4 It is easy to understand Bacon’s position as the majority of his experiences occurred prior to partialdecriminalization (he would have been approaching sixty in 1967), and he produced Two Figures at a time when to be found to be homosexual, even to exhibit what were interpreted as signs of homosexuality (like wearing make-up, as Bacon did) was to risk arrest. Bacon’s forays into homosexual subject matter or references in the early part of his career toe this saying/ not-saying line. This chapter takes up the unsteady relationship between public and private in Two Figures and its reception as a means of reading Bacon’s paintings as representations of queer homes in post-war Britain. While Bratby’s representations of home found public ideals coming apart in the private domestic space, Bacon’s representations traverse these boundaries freely. Bacon’s art suggests that, as homosexual subjectivity was emerging in post-war Britain just prior to partial-decriminalization, queer home might be found in unhomely or public spaces (rather than a single, private interior) and in transient moments of intimacy and contact. In this chapter, then, Bacon’s art posits post-war queer home between the domestic and spaces of queer intimacy, and this definition of home is one forged in terms of emerging homosexual subjectivity. The first section of this chapter places Bacon’s reflections on home in the context of queer historical scholarship, arguing that his unhomely vision of home can be considered as a response to post-war queer experience. The second section explores Bacon’s Man in Blue series as representations of queer public intimacy and its processes, built on moments of recognition and contact. The third section argues that this public intimacy is crucial to understanding Bacon’s representations of queer home, built around his personal conception of ‘drift’ and its implications of homelessness. A reading of Bacon alongside James Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room (1956) solidifies this idea, and points to how Bacon’s representations might speak productively of the negotiation of queer home more widely in the post-war period. Finally, the fourth section takes up the intermingling of violence and intimacy in Bacon’s Figure in a Landscape, 1945, and finds, in ways that echo Bratby, the violence and spectres of war returning in and helping to form a representation of queer home in Bacon’s terms. With reference to Jean Genet’s novel Funeral Rites (1948), this final section argues that the legacies of war and the time of reconstruction shape Bacon’s representations of queer home, and that Bacon’s representations point to the queer potential of the time of reconstruction.

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‘I hate a homely atmosphere’: Bacon and home In popular memory, Francis Bacon’s home is synonymous with his studio. The space that Bacon used for his home and his studio from 1961 until his death  – 7 Reece Mews in Kensington – has taken on mythic qualities in exhibitions and scholarship. This three-room flat was made up of a kitchenbathroom landing, a modest bedroom and a small but intense room for working in, filled with painting materials, books, magazines, newspapers, photographs and daubs of paint smeared on the walls. Bacon’s final partner John Edwards donated this studio and its contents to the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, and it was removed, piece by piece, and installed there on public view in 2001. It stands in the gallery as a monument to the myth of Bacon and the gestation of his paintings – scholars continue to sort through the potential sources it contains to piece together the processes behind his art. It is also a chaotic testament to the collision of a home and art. In the post-war period prior to 1961, however, home for Bacon seems to have formed, shifted and disintegrated at regular intervals. In late 1943, Bacon moved into a flat at 7 Cromwell Place in Kensington along with his childhood nanny Jessie Lightfoot, and was joined a few years later by his then lover Eric Hall. Bacon’s biographer Michael Peppiatt frames this arrangement as unusual, makeshift, bohemian, but distinctly happy and stable, with Lightfoot as a mother figure to the artist and Hall as lover but also replacement father. Furnished sparingly though not without extravagance (there were velvet sofas and two Waterford chandeliers), this home appears to have had an air of faded grandeur that may have recalled Bacon’s old family home in Ireland as well as the hotels and casinos of Monte Carlo that the artist liked to frequent. At night, Lightfoot slept on the kitchen table. Cromwell Place became a space for elaborate, lengthy parties focused around drinking, dancing and gambling, with lookouts dressed as house painters positioned outside to warn of any police raids, but it was also the space in which Bacon produced his first widely successful paintings.5 This idiosyncratic but seemingly happy arrangement came to an end by 1950, when Bacon’s relationship with Hall ended. A year later, Lightfoot died of heart failure. This appears to have crushed Bacon: he had known her since his birth, and she had lived with him, in one setting or another, for the previous twelve years. In the aftermath of her death, he quickly gave up his lease on his home. This begins a period that Peppiatt refers to as Bacon’s ‘wanderjahren’. He spent periods in South Africa, Tangier and Monte Carlo, rented temporary accommodation in London, spent time with his new lover Peter Lacy in Tangier and Henley-on-Thames, before sharing a flat in Battersea with two friends, Peter Pollock and Paul Danquah, where he spent six years living and working (Figure 9) before moving to his now-famous studio at 7 Reece Mews

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FIGURE 9  Cecil Beaton, Francis Bacon, bromide print, January 1960, 7 3/8 × 7 1/2in., accepted in lieu of tax by H.M. Government and allocated to the Gallery, 1991, National Portrait Gallery, London © Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, Sotheby’s London. in 1961.6 This is a period for Bacon, then, when home is in flux: at the centre of this upheaval at the end of 1954, Bacon wrote to his then dealer Erica Brausen from a hotel room in Rome that he was ‘going to try and find a place in London where I can really settle for a change and perhaps let when I go away. I am so sick of never having a permanent place’.7 Bacon’s experience of home in the 1940s and 1950s is in many ways not representative of the experience of home of other contemporary queer men – as an increasingly successful artist with connections he was able to travel frequently and find spaces in London as and when required. However, the broad sense of his embrace of a makeshift kind of domesticity at one moment while also finding intimacy elsewhere, in other spaces and along temporary timelines, speaks to queer experience in post-war Britain. This

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has been well documented, and was closely linked to the complex ways in which the emerging category of homosexuality was conceived by queer men themselves, as well as the popular press, the government and the public at large. Numerous historians have highlighted the intense unease surrounding homosexuality by the British establishment after the Second World War, with queer men becoming symbols of the decline of the British Empire, the feminizing effects of consumerism and the wartime breakdown of the family unit.8 Queer men were anathema to the home-centred fantasy of postwar reconstructive society in Britain, and police surveillance and arrests of queer men were common.9 As planners looked to rebuild and reorganize urban centres in the wake of war, queer men were also framed as antisocial, corrupting figures, occupying crowded urban spaces and engaging in transient encounters.10 Alongside this unease, however, a counter view emerged that drew on contemporary sexology to argue for homosexuality as an unfortunate medical condition.11 These ideas led to the formation of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution in 1954 and the publication of their findings in the Wolfenden Report in September 1957. The committee drew on testimonials from police officers, psychiatrists, religious leaders and discreet, respected gay men, including Peter Wildeblood, who had been arrested for homosexual offences in 1954, served time in prison, and written a book called Against the Law about his experiences. The report recommended that homosexual behaviour in private between consenting adults over twenty-one should no longer be considered a criminal offence.12 This was a crucial first step towards wider social acceptance of homosexuality, though it conceived of the acceptable homosexual in very limited terms: at home, away from public life and in pairs – in other words, middle-class homosexuality that mimicked middle-class, familial heterosexuality.13 This inevitably excluded a wide range of queer men who did not own a home with a stable partner, nor did it reflect what might constitute home for them. Matt Cook has shown how, for many, a comfortable sense of ‘being at home’ was not necessarily found in the interior, and was just as likely to be related to public spaces – bars, cinemas, hotels, the homes of others, even the street. Queer homes in this period could be marked by their fluidity: the mobile, functional, though often dangerous spaces of the urban bedsitter, or the symbolic power of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s ‘excessive and unbounded’ collage mural in their home in Islington.14 To begin to think about home in terms of homosexuality in the 1940s and 1950s, then, is to find a space where the overlapping of private and public is heightened, not only in the sense of queer men typically moving between these spheres in search of intimacy, but also in the sense of these very private experiences and conceptions coming under scrutiny and occupying

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a prominent position in public consciousness. You can find echoes of this experience in Bacon’s Two Figures. It wrenches this moment of male intimacy into public view while retaining the basic elements of a private space. It makes visible the very experience of being queer in post-war Britain, of seeking intimacy but also living with the gaze of reconstructive society, of finding a space outside of but also within the boundaries of home. Bacon appears to have registered the difficulties of home – in art and in life – in ways that speak to this kind of reading. In a 1974 interview with Sylvester, he discussed his transition from what he and Sylvester termed the malerisch paintings – painterly bodies and forms in dark settings, like Two Figures – to the use of similar forms against increasingly stark backgrounds, made up of pinks and oranges. For Bacon, this shift, which occurred initially in the late 1950s and then came to dominate his art from the 1960s, was connected to a desire to distance his art from the home: I hate a homely atmosphere, and I always feel that malerisch painting has too homely a background. I would like the intimacy of the image against a very stark background. I want to isolate the image and take it away from the interior and the home.15 This short statement is, as is usual for Bacon, seemingly riddled with contradictions: he dismisses a ‘homely atmosphere’ while wishing to retain a sense of intimacy in his art, and he claims he wishes to take his images away from the home and the domestic interior while continuing to include those elements – blinds, couches, doors, toilets and so on – in his more vivid canvases in the 1960s and beyond. The slippery relationship between Bacon’s words and his images here speak to the wider question of how home is addressed in his art. It is present but denied, a clear concern but also something to be subverted. Home appears to have occupied a similar position in Bacon’s everyday life. Peppiatt records how, in the 1950s, when Bacon ‘went “home” he was confronted by a comfortless mess in a temporary space’ where ‘he might cut himself off for days, seeing no one and leaving the telephone unanswered’ before reappearing as ‘the most gregarious man in London’ to find intimacy and sociality outside of the home.16 For Bacon, this lack of comfort – home’s ruptures, its scars – was not without significance. Speaking on his Reece Mews studio, he suggested its disrepair and unconventional appearance could be personally meaningful: The places I live in, or like living in, are like autobiography. I like the marks that have been made by myself, or other people, to be left. They’re like memory tracks for me. I could do them up each time and cover them up again. For

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instance, this door, somebody broke it in a rage over something; well, I’ve left it because I like it like that, also the broken mirror and papers on the floor.17 Here, the lack of a homely atmosphere does not necessarily equate to a lack of home: paint marks on a wall, broken fixtures and fittings, and scattered papers function like memories, records of love and cruelty, work and intimacy. These are aspects of home highlighted by Bacon in a self-consciously provocative way: they gesture to violence, arguments, disorder and other transgressions that an ideal post-war home should not contain, or, at least, attempt to hide. It is this idea of home – somewhere between intimacy and violence, construction and destruction – that ties Bacon to a heightened, developing sense of post-war queer experience and which can speak to his paintings of the 1940s and 1950s.

The Man in Blue series and queer intimacy in public The fluid spaces of queer intimacy are the subjects of Bacon’s paintings in the 1950s, which focus on seemingly anonymous interiors and indeterminate public spaces in which queer men might meet other men. These works, this section argues, picture a kind of intimacy sought between the limits of post-war reconstruction and the possibilities of queer experience that might form the basis for thinking about how Bacon conceives of home in his art. These paintings – of which Two Figures is a part – emerge in the wake of Bacon’s now-famous series of paintings based on the Velazquez portrait of Pope Innocent X produced around 1950–2 and include suited men in domestic spaces (such as Study for a Portrait (1953), Hamburger Kunsthalle). They share concerns with the disintegration of public and private boundaries, rooted in the isolated male figure. The focus of this section is a set of related works that explore these themes in detail: the Man in Blue series, made up of seven works produced in 1954. Bacon based the series on a man he met and picked up that year, at the Imperial Hotel at Henley-on-Thames. Each work focuses on a man in a suit, situated in a dark setting tinged with blue tones. Much about these works hints at anonymity: the generic title of the series and the numbered variations within it (I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII), the barely sketched out settings which suggest, minimally, the interior of a hotel bar, and the familiar appearance of the man in each painting, always in a dark suit, white shirt and dark tie. There is a sense of repetition here – that each man in blue could be the same man, painted in different positions or poses, but also that each man could be a different man, encountered in a similar setting and potentially

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FIGURE 10  Francis Bacon, Man in Blue IV, 1954, oil on canvas, 198 × 137cm, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2018. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. picked up perhaps with similar conversation or actions each time. This man is always positioned at the bar or in a booth: leaning in towards us, clenching his hands as if in conversation as in Man in Blue IV (Figure 10), folding his arms

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nonchalantly and leaning over a table or bar as in Man in Blue I, or occupying the space without gesture, isolated and still, as in Man in Blue III. There is a sense, then, that the Man in Blue series is concerned with the experience of cruising and the homosexual pick-up, in its anonymity, repetition and public intimacy. Its subject is not necessarily a visibly queer man: he adopts the suited uniform of a heterosexual man in a way that echoes the normative, limited nature of clothing for the majority of men outside of the counter-culture in the post-war period and casts some doubt on his status and availability.18 There is little to suggest the man’s deviation from these norms, at least in terms of his dress. There are other, less easily readable aspects of these paintings too, however. Their faces are blurred, pushed by Bacon’s familiar, soft handling of paint into uncertainty, a lack of recognition. They shift too, between carefully stylized distance, turned from us, arms folded (Man in Blue I) to adopting more direct eye contact and open body language (Man in Blue V). In Man in Blue IV, the figure shifts again, leaning in to us, caught up in conversation or appearing to be about to make a proposition. Our relationship to these figures is unstable, moving from distance to closeness and even the possibility of intimacy and back again, from image to image. The uniform of the suit, in this context, could be read as taking on the quality of a public mask or costume, something that was worn to conceal queerness (at least from those from which queerness needed to be concealed), a veneer of respectability that was distant from the make-up and drag of more effeminate queer men. It is known that these were often the type of men Bacon liked to pick up – seemingly heterosexual men who ‘could be seduced by money, or by the novelty, or by their own desire for defiance’.19 These are men who operate under the social gaze of a society that policed and prohibited homosexuality, while managing, momentarily, to escape that prohibition. These paintings are not just possible reflections on the public masks worn by queer men in the public in the post-war period, but they also speak to the direct experience of cruising and the pick-up, and their wider implications for the conception of queer intimacy and the spaces of home at this historical moment. In order to begin to unpack this, I want to address a particular literary example that it is known Bacon linked to his conception of his own sexuality. It is named in Grey Gowrie’s obituary for Bacon, published in The Guardian shortly after the artist’s death: He told me that he [Bacon] had come to the view that homosexuality was an affliction, that it had turned him, at one point in his life, into a crook. The crookishness, not the sex, was a source of shame and if he talked at all, it was his nature to tell everything. We both liked Proust and agreed that the beginning of Cities of The Plain said all that needed to be said about being homosexual.20

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Here, Gowrie records Bacon aligning his experience of homosexuality with ‘crookishness’ and coming up against the law (unsurprising, given the prelegalization context in which Bacon lived, but still poignant), as well as with Proust’s introductory section to the fourth volume of À la recherche du temps perdu (first published in English in 1927). Copies of Proust’s novel were found in Bacon’s Reece Mews studio after his death, and the short section that Gowrie cites is useful for placing the Man in Blue series within the context of Bacon’s apparent conception of queer experience.21 This section of À la recherche du temps perdu opens with the unnamed narrator of the novel observing the goings-on in the Guermantes’ courtyard and its surrounding buildings, where he happens to catch a chance meeting between the Baron de Charlus, one of the novel’s main characters, and a tailor, Jupien.22 The narrator notes the random nature of their meeting: Charlus does not normally call at this hour, so his arrival coincides, unexpectedly, with Jupien’s regular time for leaving his office. They meet in public, in the courtyard, with Jupien poised, significantly, on the doorstep – the threshold – of his shop. Communication between the two characters appears to begin wordlessly, with the narrator recording how they adopt harmonious poses and exchange mutual glances in a ‘dumb show which … seemed to have been long and carefully rehearsed’.23 As Jupien begins to walk out of the courtyard, Charlus follows him and eventually asks him for a light, despite not having any cigars with him. Jupien then invites him inside, and they disappear back into his shop. Throughout, the narrator adopts a position of initial ignorance about what is going on between the two men. He decides to continue watching them and, noticing that he can listen to what is going on in the shop through a thin partition next to it, he makes his way over to the other side of the courtyard. Like Charlus and Jupien, he is wary of attracting attention, and so decides against making his way through the rooms of the building and underneath the courtyard, and instead edges across the courtyard in the open, close to the walls. On reaching the other side, the nature of Charlus and Jupien’s meeting is revealed when he hears the two men having intercourse. He describes the noises he hears through the thin partition vividly and disconcertingly, suggesting that it sounded as if ‘one person was slitting another’s throat within a few feet of me, and that subsequently the murderer and his resuscitated victim were taking a bath to wash away the traces of the crime’.24 The two men eventually emerge, with Charlus thrusting money into Jupien’s hand and asking about other men nearby. The narrator reflects on this new knowledge he possesses, describing the overwhelming transformation in how he how perceives Charlus: ‘until then, because I had not understood, I had not seen’, he declares, and later, ‘everything that hitherto had seemed to my mind incoherent, became intelligible’.25 The chapter closes with the narrator reflecting on ‘inverts’. Here, queer men are characterized as an effeminate, afflicted race, forced to find

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comfort in fleeting sexual encounters with other ‘inverts’ because the ‘real men’ they truly need would not return their desires. They operate, in part, like a second society, recognizing each other, mixing across classes, and relying on chance meetings – like that the narrator had just witnessed – in order to form bonds. They are also, by necessity, part of normative society, but hidden and duplicitous within it, looking, as the narrator puts it, ‘no more like the common run of men than those apes with melancholy ringed eyes and prehensile feet who dress up in dinner jackets and black ties’.26 There is a significant amount of ideas here: on queer experience, on the nature of a public pick-up, and on conceptions of homosexuality that are rooted in values and assumptions that we might consider out-dated and stereotypical, but which were clearly key to the thinking of Bacon, and more than likely other queer men, on identity prior to partial-decriminalization. There is that sense, as in the Man in Blue series, of queer men attempting to adopt a costume in order to pass in everyday life, with Proust’s narrator comparing them to apes dressed unconvincingly in a uniform of respectability. Queer men are framed in a way that positions them as being outside of society while operating within it, largely hidden from view (unless you can see through their disguise) and finding intimacy almost randomly, when they meet another queer man. Their intimacy is framed in similarly covert and unsettling terms. Communication between Charlus and Jupien begins wordlessly, with gestures and poses imitated and echoed, before conversation continues with loaded questions (asking for a light) that ask one thing while meaning another. Once they disappear into Jupien’s shop, eluding the gaze but not the ear of the narrator, the sounds of their intercourse are likened to violence, one person slitting another’s throat. Images and atmospheres of crime, disguise, concealment and violence are not just associated with homosexuality, but presented as being bound up in its very nature. This is crucial for Bacon and his Man in Blue. The images in this series appear to be concerned with the encounter with a suited and potentially queer man in public. They register that experience but they also register the layers of concealment and revelation that were a fundamental aspect of homosexuality at this moment. That Bacon would think of his sexuality in these terms is perhaps alien to twentyfirst-century viewers of his works, but an acknowledgement of this does not necessarily turn these paintings into images of self-loathing. Instead, recognizing these elements in these paintings is an act of recognizing a more enduring element of queer experience: the sense of being aware of signs or gestures of queerness, and the moments at which these might be made visible or not. Reading the Man in Blue series through Proust’s text casts one kind of contextual light onto these otherwise (and necessarily) quiet, unassuming images of suited men at bars. Proust’s text – invoked by Bacon via Gowrie years later – speaks where the paintings do not.

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There is a sense, then, that the Man in Blue series is about intimacy and connection, but also looking – seeing and identifying others for this intimacy and connection, or at least others who share the same queer desires for them. Looking is also, of course, inherent to cruising – a moment of visual exchange and mutual recognition between anonymous individuals in the public spaces of the city. Cruising might originate in sustained mutual glances – in the street, in front of a shop window, at a urinal, at a bar – and could lead (though not always) to conversation and sex. It requires a certain amount of free time and freedom of movement too – to linger, to move, to look in public space.27 The shifting glances across the seven Man in Blue paintings certainly appear to echo the look of cruising. Bacon appears to have posited looking as being central to post-war queer experience more generally: Whenever I really want to know what someone looks like I always ask a queer – because homosexuals are always more ruthless and more precise about appearance. After all, they spend their whole lives watching themselves and others, then pulling the way they look to pieces.28 Looking, in Bacon’s quote here, is partly a symptom of being under surveillance, from other queer men and, I would suggest, wider society too, and partly a result of needing to turn that same gaze on others. That this is framed in terms of cruelty – the ruthlessness of the look, and the way it pulls others apart – is typical of Bacon but also indicative of a sense of being within and a part of these types of looks. Queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick found this sense of surveillance – through looks and the knowledge they produce – in Bacon’s chosen extract from Proust. In her terms, the description of the meeting between Charlus and Jupien and the revelation of their relationship reveal the narrator’s complicity in the queer world in which the two men operate. He is able to describe what she calls ‘the spectacle of the closet’ (the closet observed) from ‘the viewpoint of the closet’ (the closet inhabited), gaining, through the advantage of expertise on the subject of another’s sexuality, momentary insulation from the suspicions of others about his own sexuality.29 Bacon is aware, I think, of this possibility, but remains reticent. The Man in Blue – in his many, very similar guises – is painted into the appearances, the settings, the possibilities and the anxieties of the closet. He wears the costume of respectable masculinity, he sits alone in public at the hotel bar, available – maybe – for conversation, a drink, sex. But Bacon never makes the big reveal. There is an element of doubt or ambiguity about these men: there is nothing, beyond the knowledge that Bacon based this image on a man he picked up or the wider context of anxiety around the ‘respectable homosexual’ hidden amongst the masses, that hints explicitly at homosexuality.

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A reading of this nature relies on the viewpoint of the closet – a viewpoint Bacon would know well – or at least a knowledge of that viewpoint, most easily achieved by queer viewers, in the 1950s and beyond. In this way, the Man in Blue series is made up of paintings of men that can be looked at in a variety of ways. There is a sense in which he can be read as being subject to the queer look that Bacon knew well – the look that wonders what the suited costume hides, that pulls the figure to pieces. At the same time, he can be subject to the non-queer look – the look that reads these images as concerned with moments of intense isolation, perhaps rooted in post-war existentialism.30 A reading like this acknowledges the ways these images might perform for different audiences. More broadly, these paintings also echo the ways in which boundaries between the emerging categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality could blur, as Bacon also knew very well: the way homosexual contact or intimacy did not necessarily equate to homosexual subjectivity as we know it today, the way experiences of queer intimacy could rise suddenly out of the appearances and spaces of heterosexual life before seemingly disappearing again, out of view. The Man in Blue series does not merely document these contemporary experiences; instead, they very tentatively reflect on revelation and exposure, allowing their minimal compositions to bear the traces of the circumstances, anxieties and possibilities of finding queer intimacy in public in post-war Britain.

‘Drift and see’: Bacon, James Baldwin and home If the Man in Blue series can be rooted in queer public intimacy in post-war Britain – its surveillance and risks, but also its possibilities – via Proust, then it can also speak to the question of queer home. We have seen how Bacon underwent a period of instability with regard to his home in this period – Peppiatt refers to it as ‘a kind of self-imposed exile’ – though, in many ways, this state would have been relatively familiar to him, at least since leaving home. He recounted to several interviewers the story of his expulsion from his family home by his father at the age of sixteen, and he subsequently spent periods in interwar London, Berlin and Paris in the late 1920s, before settling back in London in the 1930s. Bacon characterized his ambition at this point as ‘simply to drift and follow my instinct – to drift and see’.31 This sense of drifting – not settling, moving around, meeting and embracing the people, events and opportunities that come your way – appears to have been how Bacon framed his whole experience of life. Peppiatt’s Bacon continually returns to this idea of drifting as a way of conceptualizing his experience:

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‘Life itself is nothing but a series of sensations. We just drift from moment to moment. My whole life has been like that, you know, drifting from bar to bar, person to person, instant to instant.’32 This concept, seemingly put forward consistently by Bacon throughout his life, can be useful for thinking about the experience of home for him. It can be attentive to his own reflections on home in this period – we have seen already how home, for Bacon, was inherently bound up in his persona and art while also consistently positioned as something to reject or make unhomely – while also remaining attentive to the nature of post-war queer experience. Crucially, it can also illuminate how paintings like the Man in Blue series and Two Figures might speak of queer home. Drifting, exile and the search for home within a lack of home are key themes in James Baldwin’s 1956 novel Giovanni’s Room. Bacon and Baldwin have seemingly little in common in many respects – Baldwin’s politics and blackness magnify Bacon’s lack of politics and whiteness in comparison – but I want to suggest that Baldwin’s novel (like the work of Proust) can give voice to some of the unspoken yet present queer themes in Bacon’s art, particularly surrounding the experience of home. As I will demonstrate, Giovanni’s Room – published in Britain shortly after Bacon completed the paintings in this chapter – illuminates the contemporary relationship between queerness, home and exile that, I argue, inform Bacon’s work. Giovanni’s Room focuses on a young American man called David in Paris and his reflections on his relationships with an Italian man called Giovanni and with his American girlfriend Hella. David is drifting in Paris: Hella has taken a trip to Spain to contemplate marrying him, and in the meantime he has fallen in with an older homosexual man called Jacques through whom he meets Giovanni. Before long, David falls in love and moves in to Giovanni’s small room. For David, life in Giovanni’s room ‘seemed to be occurring underwater’ at a remove from the outside world, not least because Giovanni has smeared white cleaning polish on the single window to insure privacy. The wallpaper is torn and dirty, though a scene of a man and woman walking together in a garden remains on one wall. Scattered around the room is the two men’s dirty laundry, Giovanni’s tools and paintbrushes, and other detritus, which Giovanni calls ‘the garbage of this city’ and which David sees as ‘Giovanni’s regurgitated life’. The debris of the room disturbs David: he struggles at first to find the key to the disorder but eventually realizes it lies in Giovanni’s feelings of ‘punishment and grief’ tied to his homosexuality. David comes to believe that he has been brought to this room to destroy it in order to make a better life for Giovanni, and ‘this life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni’s, must first become a part of Giovanni’s room’.33 Removed and dark, while also infiltrated by the dirt and detritus of the outside world, Giovanni’s room is an other space, marked with the experience of homosexuality.

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It is not much of a jump from the windowless, dirty space of Giovanni’s room to Bacon’s equally airless though less cluttered interior of Two Figures – the two spaces share a conflation of queer intimacy with a claustrophobic, separate space, removed from society at large. At the same time, these are spaces where boundaries have been breached. Two Figures focuses on a moment of passionate, frantic (even ambiguously violent) sex between two men, and positions the viewer on the threshold as both witness and intruder. In Giovanni’s room, the ‘garbage’ of the city has found its way into the space – boxes of cardboard and leather, empty bottles and spilled wine, old newspapers, a rotting potato – in a manner that explicitly disturbs our sense (and David’s) of what should constitute a domestic space: it is not clean, organized, delineated (it even recalls the chaos of Bacon’s own studio). The Man in Blue series demonstrates a similar disregard for boundaries, in its focus on images of men at bars or in booths who shift quietly between isolation, apparent indifference and eye contact in a way that gestures towards the processes of cruising. The boundaries that fall away in Giovanni’s room seem about to shift, tantalizingly, in these paintings too. As the novel continues, David finds himself struggling to extricate himself from Giovanni’s room, at least in emotional terms. He wanders the streets of Paris thinking about the French families in each house, whose ‘walls … held them in and protected them’ against the night and longs to find a home there too: ‘I wanted to be inside again, with the light and safety, with my manhood unquestioned, watching my woman put my children to bed.’34 Hella returns from Spain and David decides he must try to build a life with her and leave Giovanni. Together, they find another temporary home: a house in the south of France, where they attempt to live like an engaged couple, though David recounts the ‘nightmare’ of this house and their mutual uneasiness there. One evening, before Hella has discovered the truth of David’s homosexuality, they argue, with Hella begging him to provide her with the home she craves: Please. I want to go home. I want to get married. I want to start having kids. I want us to live someplace, I want you. Please David. What are we marking time over here for? … where are you? You’ve gone away somewhere and I can’t find you. If you’d only let me reach you – !35 Hella pinpoints David’s lack of place, the indeterminacy of his home, his drift. He is unmoored and in exile: alone in a foreign country, straying from heterosexuality and the certain and seemingly safe home this can provide. Earlier in the novel, he receives a letter from his father asking the same questions – ‘Aren’t you ever coming home?’. As he reads the letter, he watches a sailor walk across the boulevard, confident and carefree in his heterosexual masculinity, and this confidence, this ease, makes him think of home again

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and reflect: ‘Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.’ Home, here is final, determined and, once left, impossible to recover. The sailor, in David’s eyes, represents someone who has not strayed, who has clung to the expectations of life that make home possible; David left, he drifted and can see no way back. Crucially, it is in an imagined look that David finds confirmation of his lack of home. As the sailor approaches, the two men make eye contact and David receives a look ‘contemptuously lewd and knowing’ which he feels certain would, if voiced, be one of ‘look, baby. I know you’.36 David’s recognizable queerness cuts him adrift. If Baldwin’s descriptions of Giovanni’s room speak to Bacon’s own unstable, increasingly boundary-less representations of a kind of queer domestic world in Two Figures and the Man in Blue series, then his broader reflections on home for queer figures in the post-war period can speak to Bacon’s personally important sense of drift. In Baldwin, queer experience is explicitly linked to a sense of straying from the heterosexual family and its gender roles, which creates a seemingly irreversible state of exile or homelessness. His queer figures are marked by the spaces they occupy – the claustrophobic, dirty room, the street or the dingy queer bar – but also by the looks of others, which register the difference of queerness, a separateness and apparent lack of place. For Baldwin, these reflections on the difficulties of home are of course shaped by his own homosexuality, but also his position as a black American who left his birthplace of New York and made a home in France in an attempt to escape the oppressive racial prejudice of post-war America.37 Bacon was an exile of sorts too, though for different reasons as I have outlined: he was evicted from his family home in Ireland by his father and moved with a certain amount of social and sexual freedom around Europe initially, before settling in London but continuing to seek experience abroad. Both men would have known the uncertainty of home that Baldwin expresses through David, an uncertainty that seems to paint a melancholic and seemingly doomed sense of queer experience in the post-war urban metropolis. There are difficulties with making a direct comparison between Baldwin’s exile, predicated on racial lines as well as those of sexuality, and Bacon’s drift – Bacon, of course, did not face the same racial discrimination as Baldwin, and I am at pains not to conflate the two here. However, there is a clear sense of how Bacon’s works like Two Figures and the Man in Blue series can speak to these broader ideas of drift and homelessness in Baldwin. These paintings retain recognizable elements of home – the barely delineated interior, the bed, sensations of intimacy and connection – while also extending them into public space (implicitly in Two Figures, explicitly for the Man in Blue). At the same time, they incorporate elements of the unhomely – anxiety, tension, undertones of violence, anonymity and so on. In their emergence from the spaces, intimacies and relationships available to queer men at this moment

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in history, Bacon’s works can be considered expressions of being ‘not at home’ within an overwhelmingly heterosexual culture, while also seeking a sense of home, some kind of intimacy, that begins to emerge and does not necessarily cohere to expectations. To find home in paintings like these is not to tie Bacon to a concept of normative domesticity that he clearly had no interest in nor is it to frame them as expressions of the possibility of queer community: it is to allow his work to register the possibilities of queer intimacy that are not built around home in the conventional sense of the term, that bleed into the public sphere covertly or shockingly. This can consistently feel like an overwhelmingly dark portrait of post-war queer experience, though it is worth emphasizing, in tandem with this, the potential of being not at home, of allowing yourself to ‘drift and see’ as Bacon would have it. These works speak of connections – bonds, intimacies, even relationships – that are formed in the face of the restrictions and hindrances of criminality and marginalization. They are present as testaments to moments of queer intimacy while also speaking of the ambiguity and difficulty of defining and living a sense of queer home at this historical moment. Bacon’s response is to paint the expansive, seemingly boundary-less sense of queer experience – to represent the experience of drift, of apparent homelessness – while also registering the inherent and irreconcilable difficulties of knowing and establishing home within it.

Figure in a Landscape, queerness and reconstruction Two Figures and the Man in Blue series present a vision of home that is built around drift and intimacy across boundaries. There are also moments when Bacon allows these boundaries to shift and seemingly collapse completely, as in his 1945 work Figure in a Landscape (Figure 11), in a way that interrogates the relationship between queer experience, post-war masculinities and the reconstruction of home more generally. The painting is set outdoors: the figure of the title is placed in the centre of a scrubbed out, scorched setting in front of a flowerbed and tall hedge, with a wedge of pale sky visible above. Aside from the blue of the sky and unsettling touches of red in the flowers, the colour is reduced to shades of brown and black. The work is widely accepted to have been based on a photograph of one of Bacon’s lovers Eric Hall dozing on a bench in Hyde Park – in a sense, those brown and black tones take on the same qualities of a photograph.38 The painting’s photographic source is important here in two ways. First, it locates the painting in a specific public space – Hyde Park – used by thousands of Londoners every day and which served,

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FIGURE 11  Francis Bacon, Figure in a Landscape, 1945, oil on canvas, 1448 × 1283mm, Tate, London © Tate, London, 2017.

like Hampstead Heath, Piccadilly and Soho, as a space for queer connection. At this point, particularly when the blackout would turn public spaces into realms for covert cruising, Hyde Park was a space where queer figures might congregate, for sex or socializing – another example of the spaces of home and intimacy being stretched into the public sphere. Secondly, it links the painting, at least in part, to a particular figure: Eric Hall. Art historian Martin Hammer has pushed against a reading of this work that links it too explicitly to him, arguing that this is a ‘red herring … taken far too literally by numerous critics who have insisted upon reading the work as in some sense a portrait

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of Hall’.39 I am retaining the link to Hall here, however, in order to address the troubling combination of queer intimacy and violence in this work, rather than read this as a straightforward portrait. The figure of Hall is barely recognizable in the centre of Figure in a Landscape. While he may have been peacefully sleeping in the original photograph, here the few parts of his body that remain recognizable are slumped lifelessly and awkwardly over a park bench. You can make out one of his arms, protruding from the sleeve of his flannel suit, and the shape of one lapel (Bacon’s eye for the simple uniforms of masculine dress is present here, nearly ten years prior to his Man in Blue series). Meanwhile, Hall’s legs do not reach down from the bench to the floor but barely seem present at all: the trouser legs of his suit hang limply, as if the legs themselves have been cut off but the clothing left in place. The rest of him – his torso, his other arm and his head – has been engulfed by a great black space that curves to suggest that, if Hall’s body were visible in full, it would be slumping before us, to our right. On this right-hand side of the work, towards which Hall’s semi-visible body seems to fall, is another ambiguous set of forms. A curved railing, held up on legs, enters the canvas and merges with the form of the bench. Connected on top of this is what has been identified by some critics as a microphone and by others as a machine gun; in either case, behind this is a mouth with its lips parted and teeth clenched, caught either in the act of speaking or with an expression of determined effort. Both interpretations suggest photographs as sources: Bacon could be quoting a dictator in mid-speech behind a microphone here or the violent, menacing spectacle of a soldier behind a machine gun.40 These two elements come together uncomfortably on the canvas – you could imagine Hall’s head, were it visible, positioned where the disembodied mouth is, but this would require further deformation of his already mangled body. Beyond the physical awkwardness of the image, however, is the disturbing conflation of a photograph of Bacon’s partner in a peaceful setting with a horrific image of war – one that would have resonated with Nazism in 1945. Not only is Bacon merging the public and private here in terms of queer experience of urban space, but he is also bringing together his own private life with the public events that occur alongside it – intimacy meets violence here and, on a grander scale, love meets death. While it is unlikely that an image like Figure in a Landscape would have been consciously preconceived in the state we encounter it as viewers – Bacon consistently underlined how he utilized chance and improvisation in the composition of his works – the conflation of an image of a lover with an image of fascism and a war only just, at this moment, being won still bears some investigation. Bacon’s use of Nazi imagery has been linked to a concept that John Russell identified with his art in 1964: ‘The History of Europe in My Lifetime’. In a letter to Sonia Orwell in December 1954, Bacon expands on this idea:

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I think a sort of life story which sees underneath of the events of the last 40 years, so that you would not know whether it was imagination or fact, is what I could do, as the photographs themselves of events could be distorted into a personal private meaning.41 Bacon suggests his art could act as an ambiguous life story that reconfigures the events of the recent past into images that bear some kind of personal significance, to the extent that the two become intertwined and seemingly indistinguishable from each other. Nazism and Hall meet violently here on canvas in an early instance of Bacon’s notion of a painted life story. This is a distinctly queer idea, as a general concept and in this painting specifically. It disrupts all kinds of boundaries – of space and place (a relatively private memory of Hall in Hyde Park meeting the public threat of Nazi Germany), of morality (love and leisure meet evil and violence) and of time (two isolated, separate incidents come together at once). This conflation of personal experience with wider, public, horrific events is a tactic employed by other queer cultural figures that are contemporary with Bacon. Here, I want to draw on the work of the French writer Jean Genet, particularly his 1948 novel Funeral Rites, to draw out what may drive the queer conflation of private and public, and to think about what it can tell us about home and reconstruction at this historical moment.42 Funeral Rites is a novel of grief, written after the death of Genet’s lover, Jean Decarnin, who was killed by a collaborator in Paris in 1944. From the first pages, his grief for Jean mingles with imagery of Nazism and the Third Reich – those responsible for Genet’s grief and Jean’s death, and the grief and death of millions of others – and he allows the public, historical events of the end of the Second World War to intrude on the personal narrative and to coalesce into a fantasy that takes over the book. Gradually, and with increasing frequency, Genet adopts the personae of the other characters of the novel – Erik, a German soldier; Riton, a French collaborator; even Hitler himself – as a means of wrestling control over grief and death. The pivotal moment in these identifications comes early on, when Genet goes to watch a film in a cinema. He fixates on the figure of Riton, a French militiaman who has joined the side of the Germans in the fighting in Paris. He notes the audience’s revulsion at this figure (one woman foams at the mouth, bounces on her seat and yells at the screen) and expresses his own contradictory sense that ‘my hatred of the militiaman was so intense, so beautiful, that it was equivalent to the strongest love’. He identifies Riton as Jean’s killer and uses him as a way to wrestle control over his grief, reasoning that ‘the best trick I could play on that fierce gang known as destiny, which delegates a kid to do its work, and the best I could play on the kid, would be to invest him with the love I felt for his victim’. Genet offers Jean to Riton – he

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fantasizes about betraying him, about being the force behind his destruction at the hands of the Nazis – and writes of waves of love passing from him to the militiaman, which are equivalent to the love he feels for Jean. He has sexual fantasies about Riton and imagines marrying him, clothed for the ceremony in white decorated with ‘black crape cabbage rosettes’. When he imagines Riton informing him that he has killed Jean, Genet cannot bring himself to say, ‘you did the right thing’, but instead answers with ‘I gave him to you, Riton. Love him dearly’. He comes around from this fantasy knowing how the book will progress, stating that he is ‘trying to present these characters to you in such a way that you see them lit up by my love, not for their sake but for Jean’s, and particularly in such a way that they reflect that love’.43 This act of betrayal, the offering of Jean in grief to his imagined murderer, sets the tone for the ruminations on betrayal and evil that dominate the rest of the novel. There are some clear parallels between Genet’s novel and Bacon’s Figure in a Landscape, particularly in terms of betrayal, queer relationships and Nazism. In the painting, Bacon mutilates the body of his lover, melding him unflinchingly with recognizable elements of fascism – the capped soldier, the machine gun and the dictator’s microphone. However, where Genet brought queer sexuality together with Nazism as a means of grief, Bacon inflicts this act of betrayal on the image of a still-living partner. Their relationship had been unorthodox. Bacon and Hall had been involved since the late 1920s, with Hall supporting Bacon financially and acting as an intellectual influence as well as being Bacon’s lover, and they did little to hide their relationship from Hall’s wife and children. Hall’s marriage collapsed in the mid-1940s and he was living with Bacon by 1947, joining the artist and his childhood nanny Jessie Lightfoot at 7 Cromwell Place in a happy though eccentric domestic arrangement. This change in circumstances for Hall was, understandably, unpleasant, and there are reports that Hall’s wife sent Bacon threatening messages, Hall’s father turned up at Cromwell Place to remonstrate with the artist, and that Hall’s son Ivan was left deeply disturbed by these events. Bacon’s own, brief comments on the matter – ‘of course when you’re young, you think much more about your own enjoyment than the harm you may be doing’ – highlight his subsequent feelings of regret and remorse about the situation.44 Without wishing to read these circumstances onto the painting (which were unfolding as it was being produced), we can perhaps at least tentatively point to a sense that Bacon would have been aware that his relationship with Hall would likely implicate him in the breakdown of Hall’s family life and certainly operated outside of social and legal boundaries. Much has been made of betrayal in Funeral Rites, and the transgressive nature of Genet’s literature and persona more generally.45 However, while his identification with Riton is purposefully amoral and his betrayal of Jean teeters on the unforgiveable, these imagined gestures remain rooted in

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love and grief. It is this uncomfortable intermingling of love and destruction, intimacy and betrayal, that link Bacon and Genet’s representations. In Figure in a Landscape, Hall is mutilated, destroyed on canvas by his lover, and symbols of Nazism emerge from the void of his body. This intermingling of social elements (intimacy) with their antitheses (evil, violence) suggests a state of abjection. For the philosopher Julia Kristeva, abjection is a state of being cast off – the point at which the normative boundaries of the self and the social are called into question and disintegrate. To be abject is to exist in a space that is catastrophic, fluid and uncertain, fluctuating between the social and the asocial, the self and the other, the inside and outside, life and death, pleasure and pain, language and its lack.46 This is essentially the state that Bacon and Genet adopt explicitly in the fantasies of their art, where the boundaries of morality and love, as well as the boundaries of space and the body, collapse when Genet projects his grief up onto the militiaman on the cinema screen and Bacon tears open Hall’s body to insert, or reveal, the presence of Nazism. Here, and more implicitly in Bacon than Genet’s more overt text, this state of abjection is aligned with the state of being queer in the post-war period. As we have seen, Bacon is living and working at a time when to be queer is to be abject: excluded from mainstream notions of the family, the community, the city and the nation, operating within but on the fringes of reconstructive society (a position that Bacon, largely, appears to have embraced). We might read the conflation of Hall and Nazism in Figure in a Landscape, then, as an expression of queer abjection at this time. It also, crucially, allows this state of abjection to find expression within a space of queer intimacy and, in broader terms, queer home. In this work, the boundaries of home that queer experience already stretched to their extremes are pulled down entirely; the unhomely – the presence of an evil other – enters into the image. This painting becomes an image of home and queer intimacy as abject: as fluid, indefinable, without boundaries. While Two Figures and the Man in Blue series gestured to the queer negotiation of home and intimacy, Figure in a Landscape appears to embrace the abject as a means of representing something that perhaps seemed inexpressible: the sense of operating – making a home, making a life – in a society that had no place for you. If the limits and boundaries of home are destroyed in Figure in a Landscape, then masculinity is also subjected to a similar act of destruction. Here, the male body is mutilated, deformed: emerging from the dark void on the bench are elements of Hall – an arm, parts of his grey-brown suit, the remains of a leg – and the disembodied Nazi jaw, teeth bared. This is an incomplete, reorganized male body, made up of empty space, a fragment of a dictator or soldier, and the ordinary uniform of a British man. Historian Sonya O. Rose has outlined how a temperate masculinity emerged in Britain during the Second World

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War, in response to the violent, loud, destructive masculinity of the Nazis, all ‘gloom and threats … machines and robot stuff’, in J.B. Priestley’s words.47 Bacon conflates both kinds of masculinities in this image. Hall’s suit signals ordinariness and outward respectability, and his hand retains connotations of human contact and intimacy. In contrast, the dictator’s mouth would have echoes of the films and photography of Nazi rallies and speeches, the words, propaganda and ideologies that were expressed there, and the mass murder and war that had been their effects. These two masculinities sit uncomfortably together on canvas, refusing to cohere into one outright and easily defined male self: the ordinary respectable Briton or the evil, violent Nazi other. The effect would have been unsettling to contemporary viewers: a male body imbued with both symbols of ‘goodness’ and ‘evil’, seemingly mutilated and deformed with a still very present violence. Again, Bacon’s work ignores seemingly necessary social divisions. His image rejects the widespread conception of Nazi masculinity as other, as evil, as inhuman, as a contrast to the temperate heroes of the Allies and particularly Britain.48 Instead, the limits and divisions of masculinity collapse: the monstrous and violent meets the ordinary and intimate, ‘them’ meets ‘us’, and the Nazi dictator emerges from the body of Hall like a warning, a spectre of a war only just being won. Nazism is not a distant threat in another country here; instead, Bacon implicates himself, Hall, and the rest of us in the potential appeal and power of fascism. It speaks of guilt and complicity at a historical moment (in Britain at least) of victory and morality. The destructive representation at the heart of Figure in a Landscape also has implications for the wider experience of war and reconstruction at this historical moment in that it links this experience to the abject. In war and reconstruction, boundaries between the everyday and the violent, the ordinary and the evil begin to blur and can fall away. Bacon himself experienced this in London during the Blitz: he was declared unfit for military service and volunteered as an air raid warden, enforcing the blackout and helping to rescue victims of bombing.49 At the same time, the realities of war elsewhere were experienced vividly from a distance, through newspaper reports, images and propaganda films seen at the cinema. The violence and threat of war could be felt through these media and brought closer; the previously distant activities of war became fixtures of everyday life too. In response, reconstruction sought to put the abject, boundary-less state of war right, to rebuild and restructure, though, as I argued in the introduction, the time of reconstruction is inherently nonlinear, shaped by the physical and psychological echoes of war. Figure in a Landscape – in the way it is built around intimacy and its destruction, war and its recurring memory and trauma – makes visible the flux and instability of reconstruction and speaks of the ambiguities and realities of recovering from war. British masculinity

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is haunted by the Nazi other, domestic peace is shattered by violence. Reconstruction does not march optimistically forward here, but is mired, intertwined, in war’s destructive, resonant past. If Two Figures and the Man in Blue series pointed to a possible conception of queer home built on drift, homelessness and intimacy that transgresses boundaries, then Bacon’s Figure in a Landscape appears to destroy the boundaries of public intimacy entirely, opening a space that we might, still, tentatively link to queer home. But the spatial and temporal complication that Bacon paints in Figure in a Landscape works to entwine post-war queer intimacy with the legacy of war. Its abject gesture is not a destruction of home but a provocation to live with the uncertainty of the boundaries of home that war had threatened or even destroyed. It does not put anything back together because, from the perspective of a homosexual in Britain in the early postwar years, there might not be anything to put back together. The play with boundaries and transgressions in Bacon’s 1950s paintings from earlier in this chapter read, in the light of Figure in a Landscape, like images of intimacy – in the domestic or the public – shaped by the continued uncertainty of new postwar boundaries. In these works, queer post-war home is formed around a drift that is resonant with the memory of war. This chapter has argued that Bacon’s paintings make visible a sense of queer home that responds to emerging ideas about homosexual subjectivity by embracing the fluidity of public and private boundaries and, more broadly, a sense of drift that might speak to the nature of queer intimacy at this moment. Bacon’s works do not seek to define home with any real sense of stability – instead, I have argued that they seek to capture the permeable spaces of home and moments of bond or connection, and in doing so they offer reflections on the dilemmas but also possibilities of post-war queer home. I have also suggested that Bacon’s works, like Bratby’s, are shaped by the unsteady time of reconstruction. Here, queer intimacy and wartime betrayal intermingle as a statement of queer home’s inherent challenge to attempted linear narratives of public reconstruction. Queer home, in Bacon, is built on an instability that echoes that of war. In Chapter 3, Keith Vaughan’s paintings and journals exhibit a similar concern with transient moments of queer intimacy in spaces that extend beyond the domestic sphere, including the army barracks and the beach. For Vaughan, unlike Bacon, queer intimacy’s potential for community and, by extension, a more far-reaching sense of home becomes particularly important in the post-war period. Vaughan’s broader visions of queer home are intertwined with the unsteady time of reconstruction too, built on the memories of wartime bonds and their inevitable ends. If Bratby and Bacon have found post-war home to be resonant with, and potentially undermined by, memories of war, then Vaughan seeks to transform those memories, falteringly, into a vision of post-war home.

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3 Keith Vaughan Bodies and Memories of Home

I

n April 1943, in the middle of the Second World War, Keith Vaughan was serving as a conscientious objector in the Non-Combatant Corps in Wiltshire and out for a walk. He was with two fellow recruits, Bill Geest and Cosmo Rodewald, and, together, they stumbled across the home of the socialite and ‘Bright Young Thing’ Stephen Tennant at Wilsford Manor. Tennant had been a famous figure in 1920s British society, a fixture in gossip columns and on the party circuit, and, even then, unmistakably queer. By the 1940s, he was living an isolated and increasingly eccentric life in his family home. In his journal, Vaughan describes how he and his companions stumbled onto the grounds by accident, and spent a few moments watching Tennant in his garden, hidden like tourists on safari, as ‘he glides to and fro across the lawns. Touching a bush, a flower here and there, picking a blossom or a leaf and pressing it to his cheeks’. The men eventually pluck up the courage to speak to him, and he invites them into the garden and his home to be shown around. Vaughan quickly realizes that they are not the home’s only visitors. Like many large country houses at this time, it had become a nursing home for wounded soldiers and he sees ‘soldiers sprawling in their blues over the lawns and verandas’ who Tennant seems perfectly happy to have around: ‘He spoke nothing but well of the invaders of his sanctuary.’ They are led into the only room Tennant has been able to retain for himself – the servant’s quarters  – which Vaughan finds ‘impossible to take seriously as a room, there was no real function. Simply masses of silk and satins and cushions … I found the whole thing empty and rather depressing.’ Vaughan’s sudden, surreal glimpse into Tennant’s Wiltshire home produces an evocative meeting of war and queer identity. In Vaughan’s account, Wilsford

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Manor is at the centre of wartime flux, with soldiers scattered on its lawns and in its rooms, displacing Tennant from his usual spaces. Vaughan and his companions are displaced too: on duty with the NCC in the countryside, away from their homes and families and exploring the area around them in an off-duty moment. What they find is a strange amalgamation of the present and the past: the scattering of wartime soldiers alongside Tennant, who Vaughan describes like a spectre of a now-lost moment of decadence, glamour and even frivolousness. Hidden away in the countryside, the home itself appears distinctly out of time. Vaughan can’t help but be self-reflective in the wake of this vision of Tennant, displaced but undisturbed by the upheaval of war and the passing of time: I feel always feel slightly guilty in being shocked or amused by such people, suggesting that I am so very different myself, whereas in effect the difference lies largely in the fact that they are unashamedly, uncompromisingly themselves, whereas I have always posed as something else.1 Tennant and his home turn Vaughan’s attention back to his own queerness and his own life, and Vaughan finds himself not measuring up to the older man’s unashamed selfhood. This question of how to live as a queer man in the 1940s and beyond – how to locate and maintain home in the face of flux and uncertainty – is something that preoccupies Vaughan constantly, both in his journals and in his art. In many ways, Vaughan found himself in a very similar position to Tennant at this point in the middle of the Second World War. Vaughan’s pre-war home life, bonds and existence had been disrupted irrevocably by the war, and he found himself having to negotiate a position that found some kind of balance between his queer identity (and a desire for intimacy on those terms) and his new wartime role, serving with other conscientious objectors in the NCC. His journals are key for understanding this careful negotiation of and reflection on his experiences as a queer man, both during the war and in his subsequent decades, as well as his experiences as a conscientious objector during wartime and his experiences, work and reflections as an artist. Sixty-two volumes span from the first entry in August 1939, just as war was looming into view, up until his very last moments, where he calmly records that he has taken an overdose of capsules with whiskey and his words become illegible as he dies on 4 November 1977, nearly forty years later.2 Vaughan’s dedication to his journal, right up until the very end, belies its importance to him as a regular ritual of open reflection and self-examination. Vaughan’s honesty, in one of the few realms where he could risk it in the 1940s and 1950s in particular, helps to illuminate the aims, drives, frustrations and relationships that helped to form his art, and allows us to trace his engagement with home during the war and in the years of post-war reconstruction.

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This chapter argues that Vaughan’s art – consisting of photography, wartime sketches and post-war paintings – can be interpreted as engaging with the question of queer home during war and in its aftermath. Vaughan, like Bacon, makes visible how queer home had to be negotiated across and between public structures and private experience in the post-war period. Vaughan’s focus, however, is on the male body – on the memories of relationships and bonds that it holds and on the communities of home which form around it. If post-war queer home, as Bacon attested, is necessarily permeable, transient and drifting, then Vaughan’s response is to find the stability of home – and, inevitably, its transience – in the male body. The first three sections of this chapter focus on Vaughan’s painting, Assembly of Figures I (1952), which brings together four individual male figures into a disjointed, strange group in an outdoor, indeterminate space. It is related to Vaughan’s memories of communal experiences that constitute homes across space and time: with other queer men at Pagham on the south coast of England prior to the war, in queer spaces in London like Hampstead Heath, and while serving in the NCC during the war years. The painting is read as an instance where the memories of these transient and now-lost homes and bodies are restated on canvas and made visible again, and it attests to how the experiences of war fundamentally shaped Vaughan’s negotiation of post-war home. The next section explores how Vaughan adopted the mythological figure of Theseus (via André Gide’s 1946 novel Thésée) as a figure of queer potential. His painted ruminations on this theme – his claustrophobic but erotically charged Theseus and the Minotaure (1950), and his mural for the Festival of Britain’s Dome of Discovery – are considered as works where Vaughan imagined that the joys, struggles, limits and deviations of post-war queer home could speak – falteringly and quietly – to the possibilities and aims of reconstruction in Britain more widely. The last section considers how Vaughan’s Lazarus (1956) might speak of the difficulties and possibilities of post-war queer home that is built on memories, of war and lost relationships. Overall, Vaughan’s work makes visible one instance of the increasingly, necessarily sprawling nature of queer home within the unsteady time of reconstruction, but sets its parameters as the bonds and intimacies made possible and restated by the male body.

Pre-war memories of home in Assembly of Figures I The negotiation of queer home is central to Vaughan’s Assembly of Figures I, 1952 (Figure 12), which appears, initially, to be an idyllic, peaceful image of a group of figures gathered in a landscape. The four nude figures and the minimal

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FIGURE 12  Keith Vaughan, Assembly of Figures I, 1952, oil on board, 142 × 116.8cm, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art, University of East Anglia, Norwich © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. aspects of the landscape – a few rocks, some trees and a cloudless sky – share the same golden yellow and dark green shades. With nothing to disturb them, the four figures stand around empty-handed, seemingly without any particular aim other than to be together and to be seen to be together. In the foreground on the left, one figure stoops slightly and we catch the muscular definition of his arm, legs and buttocks. On the right, another figure is captured posing nonchalantly, with one leg perched on a rock and an arm raised and resting on the top of his head, rather like a model for a classical statue caught off guard.

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In the centre, another stands with his arms folded and one foot slightly in front of the other, as if he is idly chatting or waiting. Despite Vaughan’s decision to conceal the figures’ genitals behind shadows or pouches, as well as his technique of smoothing out their facial features with simplified forms and broad patches of colour until they border on androgyny, the group remains unmistakably male. Brought out into the open and carefully arranged, while retaining a distinctly casual atmosphere, the painting offers little by way of explanation – its subject seems, on first glance, purely to be the grouping of nude male figures. Their gathering is not entirely idyllic and straightforward, however. Assembly of Figures I became the first in a recurring series of assemblies, and he produced nine in total before his death. Vaughan would speak in retrospect in his journals about bringing figures together in assemblies, which he defined as ‘orderly rhythmic groups of individuals, which act and are acted upon by mutual consent’.3 Assemblies are about a specific kind of order, achieved between the person doing the assembling (Vaughan) and the people involved in it. They are intended as groups of individuals too, rather than collections of anonymous figures, and the four bodies in the first Assembly certainly feel as if they have been brought together from disparate origins. The modelling and shadow on their bodies back this up; the poses and varying positions of the shadows on the three completely visible figures would suggest they originate from separate sources. This sense of initial separateness is underlined by the position and pose of the figure on the right, off to one side, with his left leg resting on a prop that is not there. More generally, there is an awkwardness to some of the composition – the stooped figure, for example, who looks, in one sense, to be leaning in to embrace the figure behind him, though this is undermined by their difference in position and height. Vaughan’s assembly, then, reflects a coming together of individuals but also its awkwardness – a push and pull between individuality and communality on canvas. Alongside the figures, particular features of the landscape also prove troubling. There is the section of foliage to the right, which suggests that the figures may have emerged from cover, or are about to return to it. The broad sky emits a golden glow that merges with the green of the painted ground so that the landscape is rendered as a dirty-gold, indeterminate space where the bodies cast no shadows. There is also a similar area of dark green paint at the bottom of the canvas – a piece of dark undercoat left visible where Vaughan has not allowed the paint to cover the whole of the ground. The four figures gather round this strange rupture; it even seems that the stooping figure on the left leans in to peer over it. The space of the painting only does so much to accommodate the figures, creating questions and anomalies as much as a distinctive setting for them.

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Vaughan’s reflections on intimacy across time in his journals are crucial for an understanding of the disjointed nature of Assembly of Figures I. In a long journal entry on 6 February 1940, Vaughan gradually moves from pessimism about his chances of surviving the war to nostalgia, particularly for his trips to Pagham, between Selsey and Bognor Regis on the south coast of England, in 1937 and 1938.4 Harold Colebrook, one of his lovers who he had met at the ballet, had taken him there for the first time and they had stayed in a converted railway carriage owned by Colebrook’s aunt on a deserted part of the beach. Before long, both men were taking other people – such as mutual friends or working-class youths they had picked up in London – regularly.5 In Vaughan’s despairing journal entry, the memory of Pagham returns like a reassuring vision: I like to think now of the days last summer when I wandered naked with H over the hot shingle at Pagham. It came as a shock at first … the purely sexual excitement of hot sun. Later it became quite a ritual. We would walk out, lightly clad, till we had left people behind and the beach was deserted … There we took off our clothes and lay naked on the ground and offered up our bodies to the sky … They were pagan, sensual days.6 Vaughan took and kept a number of photographs of his trips to Pagham. Some of the photographs tend towards the erotic: a selection of these were reproduced in the edition of his journals and drawings published before his death and show groups of naked men in empty landscapes, much like his paintings. In some, the figures cover their faces and parts of their bodies with a thin, pale material, which has the effect of smoothing out and obscuring their features, as in the first Assembly. Vaughan is said to have recognized the enduring influence of the photographs on his art, reflecting in the 1970s that they were ‘lodged in his subconscious and “just emerged when called”’.7 However, the connection between the photographs at Pagham and Vaughan’s paintings – most of which were produced decades after the summer of 1938 – is more than that of a superficial visual source. In a retrospective note added by Vaughan in his 1966 Journal and Drawings, he describes the quiet, isolated nature of Pagham at that time: To the west of us was nothing but deserted banks of shingle which formed round the entrance to old Pagham harbour. Nobody ever came to that part of the beach except ourselves and so there was no need for us to observe what are considered the normal decencies of public bathing.8 This double re-contextualization of Pagham by Vaughan – first, in 1940, as a mourned, idyllic, pre-war state of being, and secondly, in 1966, as a homosocial space, a retreat, where normal rules did not apply – is crucial to a more complex

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understanding of the role it plays in his art. In fact, many of his paintings, particularly in the 1950s, can be considered attempts at re-contextualizing and re-experiencing the fleeting freedoms of Pagham, several years down the line. While some of Vaughan’s pre-war photographs focus on the nude male bodies of friends and lovers, it is not their only focus. For example, in amongst the pre-war photographs is a portrait of Vaughan’s brother Dick (Figure 13):

FIGURE 13  Photograph of Dick Vaughan, from Dick’s Book of Photos, c. 1938, Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018.

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his presence is a useful reminder of the breadth of subjects and spaces covered by Vaughan’s photography, making them representations of a wide range of intimacies.9 Dick is an important symbolic presence in and around the photographs. He was killed in action with the RAF in May 1940 and, in response, Vaughan combined his Pagham photographs with other photographs of trips to the coast (possibly Bognor Regis) as well as visits to Hampstead Ponds and the ballet in a ring binder titled Dick’s Book of Photos. Collected together and dedicated, in the title, to his deceased brother, the photographs appear to have been combined in part as a kind of memorial. Memory undoubtedly plays a significant role in the resonance of these images for Vaughan: he was drawn back to reminiscing about Pagham and pre-war life as the war broke out, and Dick’s death would have made real the impression that these images belonged to the past. Their compilation in the album also united a collection of figures, locations and memories over a number of years in one material object: Vaughan solidified relationships and events of the past at this time of uncertainty and loss. Brought together in Dick’s Book of Photos, these photographs of people and places of personal significance do not only act as memorials, but speak to a particular way of living. The presence of Dick in these photographs, alongside children, friends and almost certainly some lovers, suggests that they can be considered as representations of one multifaceted, fluid kind of home, a kind of ever-changing, flexible intimacy that Vaughan considered to be idyllic. Sexuality is a part of this: one photograph, taken at Pagham, is of a young man in a pair of trunks, sprawled out on the shingle in a manner that recalls Vaughan’s reflection on his time there as ‘pagan, sensual days’ (Figure 14). The focus is on his body, particularly his torso, and his hands cover his eyes with the effect of giving the figure some of the anonymity that Vaughan’s painted figures share. Suggestively, a pair of discarded shorts lay on the stones behind him. Elsewhere, however, the homoerotic and the everyday combine – another photograph depicts two men at Highgate Ponds, one muscled figure wears only a pouch over his genitals while the other has a towel wrapped around his waist (Figure 15). The two men are not posing for the camera, however – one drinks from a bottle of milk, the other casually holds a newspaper, talking to someone out of shot. Any sexual or homoerotic overtones are tempered by these everyday aspects, which lend the images less of a sense of voyeurism or eroticism (though these continue to be present) and more of the impression that this is merely a snapshot of something distinctly ordinary. In fact, throughout Dick’s Books of Photos, the range of figures photographed – a man with a child, a boy fishing, an older man sunbathing with a cup of tea, for example – suggest that we are witnessing occasions with a revolving cast, the coming together of people in a kind of makeshift family,

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FIGURE 14  Photograph of male figure lying on the shingle at Pagham, from Dick’s Book of Photos, c. 1941, Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018.

albeit in an album that juxtaposes these ordinary snaps with more sensual imagery. Dick’s Book of Photos was not the only album Vaughan put together: years earlier, in 1933, Vaughan compiled an album of photographs taken at Highgate Ponds, where images of men at the ponds are carefully layered alongside inscriptions (‘In the heat’) and an ever-increasing temperature as you flick through the images of nude or nearly nude bodies – 85°–87°, 89°– 90°, 92°. Created while he was still living at home with his mother, this album delights in the all-male setting at Hampstead and speaks of its importance for Vaughan as a space for socializing, photographing and looking, outside of his everyday home.10 In both these albums, there is a combination of affection and sensuality that Vaughan does not seem particularly interested in resolving – perhaps there is no tension here for him, and so the photographs give an impression of a ‘family life’ or more appropriately broad sense of social bonds and community that encompass a range of individuals and needs. It is this sense of intimacy and belonging – stretching beyond the domestic interior as home, incorporating a broader range of relationships and spaces, but still retaining the possibility of home – that is crucial for thinking about Assembly of Figures I. There is a sense that the temporary spaces of home at Pagham and Hampstead return to Vaughan and to us, productively, tantalizingly, through the painting.

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FIGURE 15  Photograph of two men at Highgate Ponds, c. 1933, from Dick’s Book of Photos, c. 1941, Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018.

Bonds of intimacy in the Non-Combatant Corps There are, however, other memories of home that find some kind of return in Assembly of Figures I, rooted in Vaughan’s experience during the Second World War. Vaughan’s war is well documented in his journals and this writing, as well as the artistic works that he produced alongside them during the war years, suggests that his conception of wartime life was, in many ways, very similar in tone and outlook to his pre-war photographs. As war approached, he had already come to the decision that he was against it and spent the first year of the conflict assisting with the St John’s Ambulance service. In May 1940, only a few days after Vaughan saw him off at Trafalgar Square tube station, Dick was killed in action with the RAF; shortly afterwards, he made the necessary arrangements to register as a conscientious objector – a decision he did not take lightly – and was eventually called up on 2 January 1941. After initially dreading the prospect of army life and finding the dayto-day labour gruelling, he quickly began to settle in and enjoy his existence in the exclusively male camps of the Non-Combatant Corps. A journal entry for 3 January 1941 already registers the benefits Vaughan found in army life:

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‘Perhaps the biggest surprise is the absence of the human problem. Everyone is accessible, no effort is demanded.’11 Coming from the relative isolation of his everyday pre-war life with his job at advertising agency Lintas and home life with his mother, he found the necessary, easy comradeship of the army a revelation. By March, Vaughan finds time to jot down that ‘I am not writing much now because I am too busy living to write. Living or almost living – the closest I have got to living for a long time’.12 Throughout the war, while forming a number of close intellectual and social bonds with his fellow recruits, he also grew to know the transience of army life, as he found his companies broken up, shifted about and moved on every few months. For example, he spent the summer of 1941 helping with harvesting and haymaking in Codford, while, by summer 1943 he had been moved north to Eden Camp at Malton. Even when Vaughan remained in one place, others were coming and going, and while he accepts this as a reality, he clearly found the constant flux difficult, commenting that ‘sudden changes of surroundings are whole uprootings. The loss of a companion an intimate and complete loss’.13 Vaughan was acutely aware of the multifaceted nature of wartime life, as he demonstrates in a journal entry on 24 September 1941 where he contrasts the daily life of the residents of Codford with that of the members of the NCC who are based there: We set up our own world of crude, grubby complexity; mass cooking, mass eating, mass sleeping. In the evening we infest the peaceful village like wolves, crying for food, comfort, diversions, affection. Each one of us has his home, his roots, his life somewhere, but not here.14 There is a clear awareness here of the contradictions of life in the NCC: supposedly permanent homes and ties have been left behind and interrupted for now, supplanted by a temporary kind of existence that replaces known experience with a more temporary community of home. In response to this, Vaughan drew and painted aspects of his wartime life as best he could, fixing the scenes of makeshift male domesticity around him in his own mind. So, only weeks after the entry in his journal on life in Codford, he produces a sketch like Camp Construction, dated October 1941 (Figure 16). Dominating the image is the curving shell of what will become the barracks. Vaughan’s words – ‘we set up our own world’ – are reflected by the male figures distributed across the image. In the foreground, one figure carries a piece of metal or wood across his shoulder, while another crouches behind him, presumably working on another piece of the barracks. In the background, one man helps another climb up the shell of the building, while others work around them on the ground. Crucially, however, no one figure is depicted in isolation – in every instance, the men work in groups of two or more, sharing the workload as

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FIGURE 16  Keith Vaughan, Camp Construction, 1941, pen and ink and wash on paper, 21.5 × 27cm, private collection © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: Osborne Samuel. they construct their own home. Vaughan’s fondness for assemblies of figures for the rest of his life could be said to originate in images like this – images inspired by wartime life. Group living was something that Vaughan continually reflected on in his journals. On 12 January 1942, he describes army life in the evenings, after the day’s work is completed, a time he particularly relished: Suddenly, from being separate individual units, writing, reading, working, each in his bed, we become inseparable, intermixed in a warm, argumentative, contented, cosy sermon, borrowing, lending, giving, taking of each other … I like this sort of living better than any other at such moments. I like its rich confused vitality.15 Vaughan found great comfort and inspiration in this sense of the NCC as a community of people who are able to act as individuals while also living harmoniously in a group setting. With the war machine rumbling

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on in continental Europe, his way of life must have seemed like an idyllic alternative. Other men who served in the NCC appear to have expressed equally positive, though slightly less idealized views of wartime life. Despite being on the receiving end of mistreatment from officers for disobeying orders, Arthur McMillan reflected on the ‘happy and contented’ atmosphere among the men in his company.16 Meanwhile, Ronald Pinford – a CO who had volunteered for the NCC – remembered the enforced, makeshift domesticity, amongst banter and arguments: ‘We slept on the floor on a palliasse stuffed with straw and had blankets and what have you, and we more or less made our life together’.17 Another recruit, Welshman Raymond Williams, dedicated his wartime diary in retrospect to the men he served with in the NCC – ‘the finest set of people I have met in my inhibited and lonely life’.18 Clearly the NCC created deep, lasting bonds between the men that made up the companies. It is clear that Vaughan took comfort in the daily tasks and rituals of the camps, while also finding immense joy in the relationships that were rooted in this makeshift home. He continually emphasizes the interaction between men in his images and accounts – interactions made possible by wartime comradeship, but ultimately signifying something more personal and potentially influential. The contradictions inherent in comradeship and male companionship have been explored extensively by a number of historians and literary scholars, who have charted the shifts in attitudes to this between the First and Second World War – from a glorification of male friendship in the former, to a more muted, anxious attitude in the latter.19 Vaughan would have experienced a perhaps less fraught sense of comradeship than those on the front line (though he was still visibly and spatially removed from civilian life), but would have known both its bonds and its failures. His comradeship appears to have been emotional and intellectual, and this seems to have been common amongst other COs. Ken Shaw, who served in the same unit as Vaughan, reflected that ‘we were all together in one group and we did reinforce each other although we all had widely differing views’.20 COs, particularly at the start of the war, were often employed in relatively dull manual labour, and Shaw’s picture of the men keeping each other going is certainly reflected in Vaughan’s journals, as we have seen. However, Vaughan has also demonstrated the fragility of the intimacy of comradeship as a CO, as men are moved on or transferred constantly. This does appear to have been a common fear – Raymond Williams, another CO in the NCC, constantly records the changes and moves in his diary: ‘I am afraid I get cat-like attachments to places. Don’t relish the “move” tomorrow’.21 In her study on male friendship in the First World War, Sarah Cole highlights one relatively simple strategy for combating this fragility – privileging ‘the transcendent moment of intimacy rather than long-lasting

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bonds and commitments’.22 In his entries in his journals, Vaughan arguably engages in this emphasis on transcendent, fleeting moments of heightened intimacy, while making clear links between them and a sense of home: I have returned home, not left home … Oh all the intolerable weight of misery lifts at once in here with Ken’s high-spirited quips and Stuart’s inscrutable calm smiling with his row of baby teeth. Freddy was sleeping. ‘Hallo my son’, I pressed my cheek against Harry’s cool washed face. What does it matter if I make a fool of myself.23 Moments of conversation or humour, the look over to a smiling or sleeping recruit, and brief, affectionate, bodily contact may be temporary here, but, for Vaughan, they are sufficient and meaningful enough to signify a return home. Perhaps not coincidentally, Cole’s framing of comradeship as transcendent moments of intimacy also echo the description of the circumstances of a homosexual pick-up: it is not difficult to imagine that Vaughan may well have been used to a particularly fleeting kind of intimacy with other men anyway, even if it did not make his partings any easier to negotiate. The realities of domestic and day-to-day life outside the army for someone like Vaughan – a homosexual in Britain, prior to legalization – appear to have proved no less unstable or problematic. He was clearly conscious of his position outside of a normative domestic set-up, both in and outside the army – he consistently stresses how unhappy he was living with his mother before the war in the journals.24 As the war progresses, his thoughts turn increasingly to a return to civilian life: Here in the army, navy, air force, here or elsewhere, men live conscious all the time of their hearts, their roots elsewhere, in some other life … In my case the situation is rather different. I have no intact existence to which I belong other than the circumstances in which I find myself … Leave is not a return to harbour, to the walled garden of security, but a continuation of the uncertain present in a different reality and a different setting.25 From what he expresses in his journals, it would seem that the camaraderie and makeshift life that Vaughan finds in the army – ultimately focused around relationships between men – is preferable and perhaps more structured to life elsewhere, even at its most fragile and fluctuating. Without the means to recreate or refer to a stable kind of existence, his focus for a sense of what might constitute home for him becomes the experience of relationships themselves. Vaughan frames his encounters with men on leave in similar terms to his army existence: if he takes comfort in the brief, daily intimacies of army life, he also learns to retain the same knowledge of the fleeting nature of intimacy

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in his relationships. His journals include an account of his time spent with a young man who he picks up in London’s darkened streets in September 1944.26 Here, Vaughan gives a rather honest account of the procedure involved in picking someone up – from standing around in the dark, to making idle, loaded conversation with someone (‘They don’t give us much light in spite of the new regulations, do they?’), taking them for coffee and, only then, in the lights of a café, being able to clearly see the person you had met. This entry also gives a picture of how queer men negotiated the city – the man has a family waiting for him at home so cannot go home with Vaughan or take Vaughan with him. Instead, they walk along the Strand and over the Embankment, where they hold hands and kiss in the dark (‘I felt a great satisfaction to be doing something which thousands of others were doing elsewhere … ’). They then walk past Charing Cross, up Northumberland Avenue and down The Mall before ducking into St James’ Park, where they head into a darkened spot and start kissing again. They are quickly disturbed, however: Some footsteps were approaching along the path and a torch flickered across so we broke off and got up to find somewhere more secluded, but it was difficult to distinguish the path and we came to some barbed wire and then a torch was shone full in our faces and a policeman asked us for identity cards which he scanned with suspicion and finally handed back rather reluctantly … I felt angry and humiliated by it all. They walk out of St James Park, up Piccadilly, through Berkley Square and back onto Piccadilly Circus, where they leave each other, planning to meet again the next day at Vaughan’s house. This is an account of intimacy on the move, interrupted by a policeman and delayed until they could meet again. The two men do end up spending a few hours together and having sex the following day, and Vaughan reflects on their time together: I realised this was not false, but simply a thing of the moment, without past in sequence – a way of affecting a relationship during an afternoon. Yet I could not avoid the faint stirring of an affection which looked to the future; and I knew he could not fit into my life, and he knew it too, but without regret. Vaughan’s account echoes the fleeting intimacy and comradeship of the army. The NCC was, of course, a more stable kind of intimacy where camps were built and routines maintained over a longer period of time, whereas picking up another man leads to momentary contact over an afternoon or two and the knowledge that ‘he could not fit’. Vaughan’s experiences inside and outside the army are important in their similarity then, but also in the knowledge they

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must have brought of the way in which intimacy can be encountered across varying timescales, from the very brief to something that may have felt, momentarily, a little more permanent.

Reconstructing home in Assembly of Figures I Clearly, Vaughan was aware of the shifting nature of his intimate life, incorporating, in part, fleeting encounters with men in London and the memories of communities and relationships in Pagham, Hampstead, and in the NCC. These memories are revised and negotiated in his art and reveal Vaughan’s conception of home at this post-war moment. To explore this, it is necessary to return to Assembly of Figures I, with its individuals brought together on canvas but never seemingly coalescing into a unified group, situated in a landscape to which they relate but do not fully inhabit. That this tentative, carefully composed group of figures should seem disjointed is now perhaps unsurprising, considering the breadth of memories – of individuals, of bodies, of communities – from which Vaughan appears to have drawn. Made visible in this painting, to us at least, are the outdoor nude and semi-nude figures of Pagham and elsewhere from Dick’s Book of Photos; the throwntogether recruits to the NCC in the Second World War; and the individual male figures Vaughan must have known well enough – from his own photographs or those found elsewhere – to recall for each figure that makes up the assembly. In this sense, it is no wonder that the first Assembly refuses to resolve into an idyllic unity: it draws upon a range of pasts for one image, pasts which can be glimpsed or guessed at but which never solidify into one overall vision of memory. But it stands as a painted summation of these memories, an attempt to imagine something else: an assembly, a coming-together, a sense of setting down something greater than fleeting moments of the present or bonds left behind in the past. And Vaughan seems to paint in that struggle: the bodies mingle awkwardly but still exchange glances, a section of foliage looms in the background like something to return to, and the dark form in the foreground is a strange presence, a shadow or a rupture that holds your attention. This sense of arranging and working out through art, and bearing the difficulties of that process out on the canvas, chimes with Vaughan’s own tentative statements on his work. In some notes reflecting on his 1964 Whitechapel retrospective, he commented: I remember only too well how each painting was another attempt over and over again to find an equivalent image for the perplexity of our identity and flux and contradiction of one’s relationship to an environment – to the life of one’s time – if it would only keep still long enough to be measured.27

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In the catalogue for the exhibition he echoes this, suggesting that one of the primary aims of art and life is ‘reconciliation’ or ‘equilibrium’, though he clarifies that, in seeking this, ‘the mistake is to imagine that this can be done by eliminating the hostile forces’.28 This search for equilibrium or a pause in the flux – making ‘some order out of my own personal muddle’ – is inherently tentative, makeshift, fused out of difficulty and loss as much as joy.29 These reflections point towards a way for thinking about home through Assembly of Figures I. If the representation of bodies in the first Assembly draws on a range of figures in Vaughan’s life – lovers, friends, comrades in the NCC, more anonymous bodies in social spaces like Hampstead – and sets them down with a sense of attempted harmony but also disjuncture, then the painting’s surface also bears the marks of this process. Specifically, I want to focus on the dark green form on the ground around which the figures are assembled. In a literal sense, this is not an addition to the canvas – something Vaughan has painted in – but an absence: this is undercoat that has not been covered, the dark green ground left exposed in a way that registers, on close inspection, as a rupture in the otherwise smooth surface of the landscape. This could also be read, more broadly, as a shadow: it falls across the foreground of the work to suggest the presence of another body, just outside of the picture plane. This is present in the gouache study for the finished painting, so was clearly an intended element of the composition rather than something improvised during the painting process.30 The dual nature of this form, both a physical absence of paint on the canvas and the indication of an extra presence just outside of it, has important implications for Assembly of Figures I, home and its formation. Several factors point to this form representing the presence of another figure. Later Assemblies, such as the Third and Sixth Assemblies (1956 and 1962), include single figures in the foreground turned inwards to face the main group of figures, which have been interpreted as self-portraits.31 However, Vaughan also suggested that this was done to facilitate the psychological engagement of the viewer – he recognized that the device of turning ‘the second figure back to the viewer, thus presenting the viewer in relation to the first figure’ could have an inclusive effect.32 The form in Assembly of Figures I does not necessarily look like a body, however, though it could be interpreted as a shadow. There are instances in Vaughan’s photography where his shadow falls into the picture plane, and this may be a replication of that phenomenon here.33 Equally, it is also possible that this shadow was intended to stand in for the viewer’s own shadow, incorporating them into the work as they stood in front of it. In both cases, the shadow acts to signal an individual’s presence near to the group but not, for the moment, entirely part of it. For Vaughan, as an artist and photographer, this would have been a familiar position to take – stepping back from the group to take a photograph at Pagham or Hampstead, or sitting to one side to record or recall the group work and activities of his

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NCC unit in his sketches, before re-joining the fray. In the painting, the shadow acts as an indication of presence – of Vaughan, perhaps, or the viewer, or both, implicating them in the arrangement of figures and extending a sense of sociality to the artist and to whoever stands in front of the work. However, the strangeness of this form bears repeating to avoid an entirely idealistic reading: it disrupts the otherwise smooth, golden expanse of landscape and it is formed from a literal absence of paint, where Vaughan has not covered the dark undercoat. This acts as a pertinent reminder of the duality of the shadow here, signalling both presence – the possibility of additional figures close at hand – and absence, in that it signifies the mark of someone not entirely present: the shadow of a memory perhaps, the silhouette of a lover or friend now gone. In this sense, the shadow in the first Assembly addresses the same difficulties – of coming together, of remembering, of solidifying the past – implied by its composition. This unspoken rumination on what has been and gone and what could be – evinced in the shadow, and implicit in the assembled nature of the painting – evokes the work of José Esteban Muñoz. Muñoz conceptualized queerness as ‘the not-yet-here’, a state of being that acts differently to ‘straight time’, which ‘tells us that there is no future but the here and now of our everyday life’. Queerness, in contrast, is in excess of the present, finding comfort and strength in no-longer-present moments from the past and hope in the potentiality of a ‘not-yet-here’ future.34 While Muñoz’s concept emerges out of contemporary debates in queer theory, there are echoes of his queer, flexible, hopeful temporality in Vaughan’s painting. His return to the bodies and experiences of the past and their assembly, in a group that recalls the very groups and communities that Vaughan found comfort in, restates that past as something more, something depicted rather than just imagined, something possible. And that form in the foreground – that shadow – speaks of the absence of the past, its continued presence in memory, and the possibility of another body, another presence once more. In Vaughan’s restatement and assembly of known and remembered bodies and their resonances, then, are quiet premonitions of Muñoz’s queer temporality built on moments of ecstasy and their potential ‘ability to rewrite a larger map of everyday life’.35 This potential, as Muñoz himself acknowledges repeatedly and Vaughan knew only too well, was not without its disappointment, and the difficulties of assembly and memory are written on to the canvas. This sense of Vaughan as being concerned with the intermingling of the past and the present in Assembly of Figures I, and its potential to point to new ways of being as well as its struggles and disappointments, returns us to his general reflections on painting as a search for equilibrium and reconciliation in the face of the flux of post-war experience and the wider question of home. The elements of possibility and struggle, joy and loss, harmony and disharmony

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that are present in the composition of the figures on canvas and in the process and material of its painting speak of the very real, contradictory experience of home: one of presence and absence, of the instability of home, its cerebral, non-physical presence in memory, oscillating and hovering between past and present. There is awareness here, then, of the time of home in very general terms, in the way the first Assembly speaks of the contradictions and instability of setting down its memories. We can also consider the painting in historical terms: here, Vaughan seeks to set down and process twenty years of the upheaval and rupture of home in the face of war – taking in the making and breaking of bonds and spaces, distance and displacement, even grief and death – while actively attempting some kind of reconstruction. This is not necessarily reconstruction in its most simple and quite possibly unachievable sense – the sense of ‘getting back to normal’ – but it is a kind of reconstruction that is attentive to the emotional and physical ruptures of experience, which acknowledges their continued resonance and difficulty while looking forward, tentatively, to future possibilities. There are also crucial ways that Vaughan’s painting speaks to his very specific experiences, rooted in his sexuality: his pre-war memories in Pagham and Hampstead, the gain and loss of home and community in the NCC, and the continued search for intimacy and home in post-war London amid the vivid, everyday sense that these may not be available to you as a queer man. Vaughan’s art demonstrates a clear awareness of the potential of a flexible approach to time, memory and, by extension, home, rooted in his experience of homosexuality before legalization and the unsteady time of reconstruction. In comparison to Bratby, who pictured memories of war returning violently to the domestic space, and Bacon, who allowed the unsteady time of war and reconstruction to contest reconstruction’s very limits, Vaughan allows the temporal instability of the post-war period to linger and gesture to home’s possibility. His transition from gouache study to final painting bears this out: he transposes the figures to a less ‘real’ landscape, disposing of hints of foliage to the left and flooding their setting with a distinct, golden ground. He parts them too, spreading the bodies out slightly on the canvas to reveal more of this landscape, the golden paint all but dissolving the horizon line – a marker of ordinary time – behind them.

Theseus and the possibilities of reconstructing home The return to a non-wartime home for Vaughan – when his time in the NCC came to an end in early 1946 – brought with it a sense of despair and disorientation as ‘the roots are slowly drawn after five years in the warm earth’.36 The loss of

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the readily available, day-to-day companionship and intimacy of the NCC was, initially, difficult to process. By the end of the year, however, he had settled back in London into a flat in the same building as fellow painter John Minton in Maida Vale. Despite his friendship with Milton cooling somewhat by early 1949, he would remain here until 1952. This home incorporated several new relationships. There was John McGuinness, a seventeen-year-old youth that he met, appropriately, on a return trip to Pagham in 1948 and adopted as a substitute younger brother or son, though their relationship also had a strong sexual dimension. Vaughan apparently gave him his late brother Dick’s clothes to wear and complained that their relationship was entirely one-sided, with McGuinness causing endless worry and anxiety.37 There was also Ramsay McClure, a former student of Vaughan’s who moved in with him in early 1949. McClure would remain a part of his life until his death, a lifelong, stable, loving companion who could also drive the artist to ‘homicidal distraction’.38 This was a domestic situation that seems to have brought stability (it covers a number of years of successful, productive painting) and deep affection as well as frustration: constant partners, in one form or another, seem to have been something that Vaughan had to get used to, reflecting that ‘being loved, in practice, seems only to awake in me over again the distressing sensations of being mothered’.39 Vaughan’s reflections on these relationships suggest a slightly fraught negotiation of the routines, stability and frustrations of domestic life after the war. In his art in this period, however, he alights on a theme that allows him to continue to explore the potential of reconstructing home as a queer figure. This comes from the myth of Theseus, and is first addressed in Theseus and the Minotaure, 1950 (Figure 17). The work was produced for the 60 Paintings for ’51 touring exhibition, organized by the Arts Council in 1951 as part of celebrations for the Festival of Britain. It is set in a minimal, grey interior and contains three figures: a reclining nude male with his body exposed, a bearded standing figure that looks down provocatively on the reclining nude, and a woman, seated on a chair to the side. Years later, Vaughan explained that the painting was inspired by Andre Gide’s short 1946 novel Thésée, ‘in which the Minotaure is depicted not as the horned master of classical anthropology but as a misunderstood youth who spends his time in the Labyrinth eating pomegranates and picking the petals off flowers’. The reclining nude at the centre of the work alongside a bowl containing a lemon and a pomegranate is the Minotaur. Vaughan stated that he saw the contrast between Theseus and the Minotaur as ‘one of volupté’ and explicitly identified the figure on the left of the work as Ariadne, ‘seated with her back turned to the whole affair’.40 Gide had been an important figure for Vaughan for some time – Gide’s journals had partly inspired Vaughan to pursue his own, and he consistently

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FIGURE 17  Keith Vaughan, Theseus and the Minotaure (Interior at Minos), 1950, oil on canvas, 152.5 × 203cm, private collection © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018.

discusses his writing and expresses his admiration for the author in his entries. Theseus and the Minotaure is an example of him using Gide’s text as a jumping off point, focusing in on a particular moment from the text and drawing out its personal resonances and, more generally, home-building possibilities. In the original version of the Theseus myth (before Gide), King Minos of Crete, having defeated the Athenians, demanded that, every nine years, seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls were to be sent to Crete to enter the Labyrinth, built by Daedalus, and battle the Minotaur. On the third of these trips, Theseus volunteered to go and slay the Minotaur, promising his father that, if successful, he would return flying a white sail from his ship. Upon arrival at Crete, Ariadne, one of Minos’ daughters, became infatuated with Theseus and decided to help him defeat the Minotaur, giving him a ball of thread on the advice of Daedalus, with which he could find his way out of the maze. Inside the Labyrinth, Theseus slayed the Minotaur with a hidden sword, before escaping and fleeing Crete with Ariadne and her sister, Phaedra. On the return journey to Athens, he abandons Ariadne on the island of Naxos but forgets to change his sail from black to white, causing his father to mistakenly believe he has failed and throw himself into the sea.

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In Gide’s retelling of the story, the myth of Theseus is recast as a parable of a victory of self-mastery and masculinity over desire and femininity.41 Theseus has to overcome several temptations – aspects of the pederastic, decadent society at Crete and the infatuated Ariadne, who assists him in escaping the Labyrinth by tying the end of the ball of thread to herself. Most importantly, he must overcome the narcotic perfumes that Daedalus has diffused throughout the Labyrinth and, unexpectedly, the temptations of the Minotaur himself, who he finds at the centre of the maze, in ‘brilliant sunshine’: Facing me, and stretched at length upon a flowery bed of buttercups, pansies, jonquils, tulips and carnations, I saw the minotaur … The monster was beautiful … there was in his person a harmonious blending of human and animal elements. On top of this, he was young, and his youthfulness gave an indefinable bloom to his good looks; and I am more vulnerable to such things than to any show of strength.42 Gide’s Theseus struggles to steel himself against the beauty of the Minotaur and accomplish what he needs to do: What I did next, and what happened, I cannot exactly recall. Tightly as I had been gagged, my mind had doubtless been benumbed by the gases in the first room; they affected my memory, and if, in spite of this, I vanquished the Minotaur, my recollection of the victory is confused, though on the whole, somewhat voluptuous.43 After Theseus escapes the labyrinth with the help of Ariadne’s thread, the rest of the myth plays out in its original form. It is unsurprising to find Vaughan honing in on this pivotal, ambiguous moment of ‘voluptuous’ contact between Theseus and the Minotaur at the centre of the labyrinth, while straying from the text in several ways. In Vaughan’s painting, the setting has been transferred from the sunlight and flowers of the centre of the Labyrinth to the grey interior, to the extent that the arrangement of the figures and the pieces of furniture read like a vision of a particularly strange domestic drama. Ariadne has been brought directly into the action, sitting on the left as a bulky impassive figure who stares out into the distance. Gide’s part-human, part-animal Minotaur has become the muscled male figure, slumped provocatively on a couch, one arm dangling languidly over its edge and genitals exposed. Standing close by and watching over him is the bearded figure of Theseus. Placed here, he appears to be positioned somewhere between retreating into the darkness (a door or entranceway can be made out in the wall behind him) and succumbing completely to the Minotaur. Vaughan illustrates the very moment of Theseus’s confusion and

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(implied in Gide but made explicit here) lust. Theseus’s encounter with the Minotaur is transformed, via Gide, from a battle of strength to a drama of choice that openly displays its homosexual potentiality. The statuesque figure of Ariadne, removed to one side, comes to represent what Theseus would return to, should he resist the Minotaur. However, it is the possibility that Theseus will give in to his desire for the Minotaur and the potential that this holds – to go off script, to find queer intimacy where it has previously not been present – that appears to concern Vaughan most here. Theseus and the Minotaure, then, is a moment when Vaughan engages with the question of forming an intimate life in the Britain in the post-war period as a homosexual, by drawing on language and themes of myth and literature that had a particular, personal resonance for him. In adapting Gide’s myth and honing in on and emphasizing this moment of queer potential, he creates a moment where the normative bonds of the myth – and, more broadly, of the home and society – might be re-thought. That this emerges from the interior – the space that, as we have seen, Vaughan was renegotiating, like many others in post-war Britain at this moment – is key. For queer men, the interior, if available, could be a space of retreat and invisibility, in the face of the increased surveillance of homosexuality in public after the war. It is appropriate, therefore, that Vaughan depicts this space as, in part, an enclosure – it stands in here, after all, for the labyrinth – but also as a realm that is imbued with queer possibility and deviance from an expected script. It is crucial, too, that Vaughan made this, admittedly coded, queer statement in a work that toured in the 60 Paintings for ’51 exhibition, which was linked, explicitly, to the Festival of Britain and its focus on post-war reconstruction. This is a story, at a moment of national rebuilding and reassessment, being re-told in a new way. The Theseus myth continued to be a great source of inspiration for Vaughan beyond this painting. He produced a number of studies and smaller works that take the action outdoors, and these relate to a large-scale mural that he produced for the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain, fifty feet in width and titled At the Beginning of Time. It was one of several murals commissioned from contemporary artists for the Festival, an event intended to boost national morale after six years of post-war austerity, to celebrate Britain’s achievements in science, art, industry and design, and to look to a new, reconstructed, post-war future. The mural, reproduced in a 1951 edition of Architectural Review, depicted young male nudes gathered in a landscape setting, with a mastodon skull close by – it combines the themes of Theseus and the Minotaure with the kinds of settings, figures and memories found in his Assemblies.44 One contemporary critic described Vaughan’s mural as ‘outlandishly inappropriate  … [a] batch of lads striking poses beside a mastodon skull’: you sense that the artist may have misjudged his audience

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by turning to a vision of homoerotic pre-history as a way of decorating a distinctly modern building that aimed to showcase Britain’s continued futurethinking in design and science.45 However, Vaughan must have had both the focus of the Festival and wider cultural and political debates around postwar reconstruction in mind when deciding to continue to depict the Theseus myth in the mural. He may have, in part, sought to posit his interpretation of the myth as offering the potential for a new way of life.46 Unsurprisingly, viewers were more likely to find the work inappropriate rather than engage with its potential implications. Despite this, the very fact that these ideas were made public, that Vaughan felt the possibilities of the Theseus myth merited a grand statement (albeit in a particularly coded fashion), is perhaps enough. In the mural, the possibilities Vaughan found in Theseus meet the bodies and memories of wartime and beyond, and the joys, struggles, limits and deviations of a queer post-war home are made to speak, falteringly and quietly, to a wider vision of reconstruction Britain.

Memories of kinship in Lazarus At the centre of this vision and active re-thinking of home in Vaughan’s art are bodies and bonds between bodies – known, retained, imagined, remembered and lost. They are the very basis for Assembly of Figures I and its restatement of the bonds and intimacies of Pagham, Hampstead, the NCC and elsewhere. A potential moment of two bodies coming, unexpectedly, together is the basis for the reimagining of myth in Theseus and the Minotaure. At their heart, Vaughan’s representations of home are necessarily temporally and spatially unstable, though they return to the body and its bonds for a sense of stability, renewal and possibility. The sense that an expansive sense of home can be built on non-familial relationships and bonds – a kind of non-heterosexual kinship – has been the focus of theoretical work by Judith Butler. Drawing on the rebellious and ultimately doomed figure of Antigone, she has framed kinship as ‘doing’, an embodied practice.47 She explores this further in her essay ‘Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?’, where kinship becomes ‘a kind of doing’ restated over time rather than tied to genealogy, and thus opened up ‘to a set of community ties that are irreducible to family’.48 Similarly, theorist Elizabeth Freeman has also explored how kinship can be queered. She frames kinship as both ‘resolutely corporeal’ (dependent on an interaction and dependency between bodies) and something where attachments between bodies are ‘created, transformed, and sustained over time’.49 She suggests that kinship can be considered primarily relational, and sustained by the renewal of those relationships across time, between present, past and future.

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This kind of kinship is not by any means solely ‘queer’, but both Butler and Freeman present it as a workable means for queer individuals to form and retain satisfactory social bonds. This relational and expansively temporal approach to social bonds certainly echoes Vaughan’s flexible approach to home in his work. There is also a sense, in his statements on his art, that he was seeking to explore a way of being that operates differently to given standards. In an interview in the early 1960s, for example, Vaughan suggested that an artist ‘rejects the readymade social formulas because he has to pursue his own truth, his own reality. He doesn’t know what that reality is exactly until he has done the painting.’50 Vaughan never explicitly defined ‘his own reality’ outside of his painted canvases, but the possibilities of a bodily, temporal, relational kinship are certainly different to the social formulas set out in British reconstructive society, and perhaps even offer a more appropriate means of negotiating and conceiving of this highly unstable moment of home, between war and its aftermath. Later in the 1950s, Vaughan turned to another recurring subject that develops these ideas. From 1956, he produced a number of single figure male nudes, to all of which he gave the title Lazarus. The first work in the series depicts a nude male figure emerging from an ambiguous landscape (Figure 18). The colours are largely cool and restrained – there are the familiar green/brown tones, along with greys and blues – though there are also elements of yellow and gold. These tones are distributed across the figure’s body in geometric, rectangular patches and show the way in which Vaughan had begun to assimilate the style and techniques of Nicolas De Staël into his art as the 1950s progressed; they give the impression of a body being gradually built up, out of tones and brushstrokes, taking shape over time.51 Vaughan’s biographer Malcolm Yorke states that the Lazarus works had ‘no real narrative or religious content’ and that the title only came to Vaughan after the first work (originally an attempt to depict a man turning from dark to light) had been completed and ‘the warm yellows in the cool greys of the torso began to suggest the return of life to a corpse’.52 The paintings may well refer, in part, to the figure of Johnny Walsh, a youth who Vaughan met at the start of 1956. Just after meeting him, Vaughan describes Walsh in his journals as ‘l’archange of Jean Genet’ with the ‘captivating face of a young boxer’. He finds out that Walsh had been certified as schizophrenic during his adolescence, had spent time in prison and was currently sleeping rough or at the homes of the men who picked him up (and who he usually robbed).53 Vaughan tore out long passages that relate to their relationship from his journals, fearing, every time Walsh had a run-in with the police, that they would be examined as evidence, though enough remains to suggest that he was as infatuated with Walsh as he was driven to distraction. Walsh enters and leaves Vaughan’s life consistently over the late 1950s, and while, at times, Vaughan conceptualizes their relationship as ‘a sort of ideal father-son relationship’, they

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FIGURE 18  Keith Vaughan, Lazarus, 1956, oil on board, 110.5 × 81.2cm, private collection © The Estate of Keith Vaughan. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: © 1997 Christie’s Images Limited also embarked on an affair that lasted several years.54 The multifaceted nature of Vaughan’s relationship with Walsh was not uncommon between queer men

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at this time. Additionally, while Walsh becomes, for Vaughan, ‘the embodiment of all my longings’, he is also a figure to be helped and saved: ‘If there is the slightest chance I can help him to straighten out and live a respectable life I must take it.’55 It is tempting to tie Lazarus to the figure of Johnny Walsh. Vaughan clearly loves and obsesses over him, repeatedly resolving to help him settle down, and the connotations of rebirth and new life in the title of the work would certainly allow for a reading like this. Building on the queer conceptions of kinship, however, we might find other, competing possibilities here too. The resurrection of the single nude male figure in Lazarus could conceivably refer to the resurrection of memories – specifically the nude figures on the beach at Pagham and at Hampstead, twenty years prior to these works. There is also the possible allusion to Vaughan’s brother Dick, connected to Pagham and killed in action in the war. This male figure, then, could be interpreted in terms of a number of lost intimacies and relationships: the idyllic Pagham, a deceased brother and the juvenile delinquent whose life consistently looked to be falling apart. At the same time, Lazarus embodies several relations of kinship: the lover, the brother, the father and son. That multiple memories and relationships could be conceived as being embodied in one figure speaks to the ideas about the doing and re-doing of bonds across time that form the basis of the kinship put forward by Butler and Freeman and, more broadly, the themes and preoccupations of Vaughan’s work elsewhere. This appears to be reflected not just in the range of relationships that Lazarus might embody, but also in the surface of the canvas again. Individual blocks of colour – like aspects of individual bodies – are brought together to form the figure. Touch is evoked as well. Thin, branch-like forms are made to reach in from one side and glow with a golden light where they touch Lazarus’s shoulder and arm; they appear to act as means of evoking the feeling of touching the warm body of a loved one now lost. The same glow emanates from under Lazarus’s hand, almost as if that touch could, after a period of days, months, even years, be returned. This sense of potentiality sits alongside ambiguities and difficulties. Despite the body of Lazarus appearing to exit the shadows of death and step into the light, the tone is melancholic, still: his body is blue, turning to a ghostly white where it emerges from the shadows completely at his torso and right arm. The patchwork quality of his form also has a certain awkwardness: the face is split by a thick black line and its expression is neutral and dispassionate, while the overall form of the body is disjointed. Just as the first Assembly felt like a group of bodies that strove for unity without quite achieving it or Theseus and the Minotaure pivoted on the cusp but not the realization of a potential moment of sensuality and deviation, so Lazarus moves awkwardly into the light: a collection of forms rather than one body. There is, of course, melancholy in returning, in ‘coming back from the dead’; the last verse of

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Tennyson’s interpretation of the Lazarus myth pivots on this, where he notes the lack of a record of Lazarus’s response to his sister Mary’s words, ‘Where wert thou, brother, those four days?’: Behold a man raised up by Christ! The rest remaineth unreveal’d; He told it not; or something seal’d The lips of that Evangelist.56 (XXXI.13–16) Tennyson’s Lazarus does not speak of what he saw in death, and so the miracle of resurrection takes on an anxious, ambiguous quality. Lazarus’s return – his sense of being ‘out of time’ – has a mournful, inexpressible quality as well as a joyful one. This is where Vaughan’s Lazarus speaks to the potentiality and the difficulty inherent in his negotiation of home and intimacy more widely. Lazarus is the body of ‘doing’ kinship – revived, stepping into the light, but bearing the marks of the difficulty of operating out of time. I want to frame Vaughan’s art as something that – in its setting down in paint of a sense of the fluctuating memories and experiences of home that must have seemed intangible and unstable – allows states of joy and sadness, love and loss, life and death, present and past to exist at once. Vaughan is not, I think, interested in the naïve or ideal depiction of the utopian or the idyllic – even as works like his Theseus mural reflect on this possibility – but is preoccupied with the negotiation through art of selfhood, relationships and community that he must navigate as a homosexual in post-war Britain to locate home. Looking to Vaughan’s art, then, reveals the nature of post-war queer home on his terms: as connected less to the particularity and stability of specific spaces and encapsulated, instead, in moments of intimacy and memories of bonds with other men. Lazarus brings this chapter to an end because that figure, in its shift from death into life, embodies the productive temporal complication of queer home for Vaughan – a complication rooted in and brought by the impact of war. If the task of the reconstruction of home for a queer figure like Vaughan was sometimes anxious and constrained, his response is to look back to the bonds of wartime and their resonances in reconstructive life and look to the future from war’s losses. This chapter has argued that Vaughan’s negotiation of home in the time of reconstruction in paintings like Assembly of Figures I and Lazarus is built around the privileging of the bonds of home and community, captured and held in representations of the male body. It has also traced how Vaughan sought to, tentatively, adapt the experiences of queer home to a vision of the reconstructive future more widely, through the figure of Theseus. Vaughan

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has developed our understanding of post-war queer home in ways that build on Bacon – both artists locate home across public and private spheres, with a significant degree of transience, and as shaped by the impact of war – though Vaughan’s focus on the male body ultimately puts forward a more sprawling vision of home, from the beach to the barracks to the pick-up, that finds solidity in relationships between bodies. Home as multi-spatial but body oriented, Vaughan’s work suggests, is a result of seeking home on the margins of but from within public reconstruction in post-war Britain. In the next chapter, Francis Newton Souza’s art takes up a similar framework – the definition of post-war home in terms of the body across spaces – but in a different context, working as a South Asian migrant in post-war London. Souza’s work suggests that the male body was also a productive means through which to negotiate the anxious and often violent experience of home as a migrant in the reconstructive period.

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4 Francis Newton Souza Masculinity, Migration and Home

I

n his autobiographical essay ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’, Francis Newton Souza recounted the period of several months that he spent living in a house in an almost deserted village in Goa, the place of his birth. Souza appears to have relished the relative isolation of this temporary home in a territory that at this point remained under Portuguese control despite India achieving independence from Britain in 1947. He was accompanied by a servant who cooked for him and looked after the house, and he spent his days painting, eating and swimming in a nearby lake. The house itself was half-dilapidated: The house was furnished with an infested bed and a broken chair. There was no table. I had to squat on a mat to write and paint and eat my food. The floor was overlaid with a thick paste of cow-dung spread manually in a pattern of semi-concentric circles. There were little toads in every hole in the walls, and the corners seemed tied together by strings of cobwebs. Two holy pictures hung close to each other: Christ and the Madonna with their hearts in their hands. Placed on corroded nails a wormeaten plank made a simple oratory. Some dead flowers, a candlestick with its socket burnt off, and a small wooden image of St Thomas with a hole in the head for fixing a halo which happened to be missing.1 In this house, only the most basic amenities remain, in very poor conditions. The most stereotypically ‘primitive’ elements of Goan village domesticity – cow dung, a mat on which to write and eat – are combined with decaying objects

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of the Catholicism that had been introduced to the country by Portuguese colonisers in the sixteenth century and which had become the religion of Souza’s family. ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’ was Souza’s big break in Britain; it was published by Stephen Spender in his journal Encounter in 1955 and allowed Souza to develop an audience for his art. This introduction to a wider British audience finds him occupying a makeshift home space that contains both elements of his Goan background and colonial Catholicism.2 The intertwined, complex nature of Souza’s home and identity was not unusual for someone from Goa, given the state’s control by the Portuguese and its proximity to British-controlled India.3 The name Souza was adopted by his ancestors when they converted to Catholicism. Newton, however, points also to a British connection – it was a name his father had inherited from his English godfather. His father taught English and this was the language spoken by both his parents at home; his other relatives spoke Konkani. Additionally, much of Souza’s early life was spent between Goa and India. His father and sister died in quick succession when he was very young and his mother, faced with mounting debts, migrated to Bombay (now Mumbai) and set herself up as a dressmaker. Shortly afterwards, Souza contracted small pox and returned to Goa to recover with his grandmother; later, he returned to India and his mother, attending a Jesuit school from 1937 and then Jamsetjee Jeejebhoy School of Art from 1940. It was in India that he would begin painting independently and where he formed the Progressive Arts Group in 1948 in the wake of Indian independence. Goa, his birthplace, remained under colonial rule until 1961, when it was ceded to India. Souza’s background, then, is a very particular combination of Goan roots and Catholicism, the English language, and schooling and early artistic work in India. It was from India that Souza left for Britain in 1949 with his first wife Maria (who was also originally from Goa). Souza had felt increasingly frustrated by a lack of recognition from the Indian art world and he imagined London, in contrast, as ‘the most cultured city in the world’ that offered the opportunity to make his way as an artist that was not available at home.4 Once he arrived, however, he found himself ‘astonished by the grimness of Britain’ where the ‘empire had been lost; the Labour government was in power; half-baked ideas of socialism floated around; the Marshall Plan with its heavy dose of US aid to Europe was in operation’.5 He arrived at a moment when migration began to have a significant impact on British society and pushed the question of who was or was not at home in the nation to the forefront of public consciousness. From the arrival of the SS Empire Windrush in 1948, the visibility of members of Britain’s former colonies steadily increased across the next decade and a half, though they remained relatively small in number in comparison to the rest of the population. They arrived as British subjects – ‘Citizens of the United

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Kingdom and Colonies’, in the words of the British Nationality Act of that year – underlining the imperial, global nature of the British nation state at this moment.6 This was not an uncontested subjecthood, and was accompanied by instances of racial tension and abuse as well as increasing restrictions on immigration during the 1950s and 1960s. The presence of migrants gave rise to an increasingly narrow, white definition of the national home, rooted in an imagined, ordered national past, and anxieties about the threats of nonwhite masculinities in particular.7 Souza, for his part, arrived in Britain on a Portuguese passport and later claimed British citizenship. He is, from his own distinct position as a Goan, both formally separate from the reshaping of British citizenship in the wake of the empire in the post-war period and fundamentally caught up in these questions. This chapter argues that Souza’s art locates the question of home in the male body, allowing it to register the multiple spaces, experiences and anxieties of home that are the result of migration into a British society that was still recovering from war. Souza’s art, in a break with the other artists in this book so far, does not register the legacies of war and its shaping of home explicitly. Instead, his images of male bodies undermine the certainty of reconstructing home, allowing it to be troubled by legacies of empire and increasing racial tension. At the same time, Souza picks up Vaughan’s conception of post-war home as multi-spatial but body oriented, suggesting that this was a viable means of negotiating home in this period, but at the same time he develops it. The male body, in Souza’s art, registers, most explicitly amongst the artists in this book, the global histories and anxieties of home in post-war Britain. The first section of this chapter addresses one of Souza’s self-portraits, which depicts the artist as tense, mute and afflicted by arrows, and explores the extent to which it deals with questions of assimilation and translation that had to be negotiated by migrants seeking to make a home in Britain at this moment. The second section explores Souza’s Crucifixion (1959), placing it in the context of contemporary racial tensions as well as the enduring violence of colonialism and its aftermath to consider how Souza allows the male body to embody the experience of violence and suffering of homes across time and space. In the last section, it is argued that Souza’s art and writing exhibits an awareness of the inherent instability of masculinity in post-war Britain, and that this instability seeks to complicate and undermine the assumptions of public reconstruction. I read Souza’s works, in other words, with the same attention to their moments of refusal or re-imagining in their representations of home and masculinity as the other artists in this study. The result is to find that Souza’s art speaks of the way the experiences, anxieties and histories of home – as a migrant and within post-war British society more widely – could be registered in and negotiated through the male body.

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Souza, translation and a self-portrait At the end of 1957, Souza was made the subject of a ‘Portrait of the Artist’ written by G.M. Butcher in an edition of Art News and Review.8 The article was accompanied by Souza’s own self-portrait, in both the scratched, crosshatched lines of a pen and ink drawing and in words (Figure 19). On the right, Souza’s drawn self-portrait takes the form of a bald, wrinkled, scarred head. His large, oval eyes look in opposite directions, one right and one left. His teeth are bared in a humourless grimace. Two small arrows pierce one side of his neck. He wears a shirt, buttoned tightly around his neck, a tie and a suit jacket. His shoulders are narrow, sloping steeply at his sides. On the left is Souza’s written self-portrait: Eyes in the brow the better to see with the brain Stars in the face are the scars of smallpox Arrows in the neck like flies mean affliction The grinding of teeth is not in the Day of Resurrection but today The jacket, tie and stiff collar are signs of respectability Souza’s words frame his drawing: this is a self-portrait of the artist on guard, aware of himself and others – eyes perched at the top of his head, looking

FIGURE 19  Francis Newton Souza, Self-Portrait, 1957, pen and ink © Estate of F N Souza. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: Grosvenor Gallery, London.

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both ways, and body wrapped in the uniform of the respectable, Western man – but also enduring suffering, scarred by illness (he had almost died from smallpox as a child, and lived with the scars for the rest of his life), afflicted by arrows, teeth bared as both a symptom of and perseverance in the face of pain. The grinding of teeth is a reference to the weeping and gnashing of teeth that Christ foresaw for those who did not make it into heaven. Here, Souza presents himself as scarred and in pain, though tense, wary, and resolute under this strain. The paintings shown in his 1957 show were imbued with a similar degree of tension. There was his Head of a Man, a similar, though more anonymous figure than the drawn self-portrait. Meanwhile, his Moonstruck Scientist – in the same suit and tie uniform, same narrow shoulders, same small, warped head, same piercing of the body with arrow-like forms – looks up to the sky, mouth agape and teeth clenched in a kind of grimace, with an expression not of wonder and knowledge, but of fear and uncertainty. There were also less easily readable works like Man and Woman Laughing (Figure 20). Set against a vivid blue background, the man and woman of this work, standing shoulder to shoulder, look out, directly from the canvas. Their laughter is something we have to infer from the title: their faces are warped and twisted, their teeth bared in what we could read as grins but could just as easily echo the grinding, clenched teeth of pain of Souza’s self-portrait or a sneer of disdain. Their heads are curved oblongs, with small, intense, oval eyes and long, distorted noses. The man’s beard hangs from his face like a feathery cage, partly obscuring his exposed, grinning teeth behind it. The woman’s hair falls like it is brittle, curving away from her head, and her face has been more severely broken up by black lines, some single and others created out of hatched lines, a Souza trademark at this point. This has the effect of marking, scarring and unsettling her appearance further. Underneath, her mouth – pink lips and bared teeth – sits awkwardly on her face. Their ambiguous expressions – between laughing, grimacing and sneering – and their fragmented, brittle, mask-like faces are difficult to firmly read. Critics and commenters on Souza’s early shows at Gallery One made some attempts to deal with the ambiguity present in his works. Their minds were on a common concern of British audiences faced with the still-new encounter of artworks produced by artists from outside of the West. David Sylvester’s review of Souza’s show in the New Statesman is a prime example. He frames the task of the non-Western artist as one of communication with their Western audience, in a kind of one-sided translation for the world they had just entered. This, he admits, is something of a dilemma, because these artists tend ‘to draw inspiration from that European art which has itself drawn inspiration from his own native traditions’, thus creating a kind of translation of a translation that ends up as a dilution. However, in Sylvester’s eyes Souza has gone some way to resolving this dilemma. He has ‘the gift of breaking

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FIGURE 20  Francis Newton Souza, Man and Woman Laughing, 1957, oil on board, 152.4 × 121.9 cm, private collection © Estate of F N Souza. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: Saffronart.

through the language-barrier’ as ‘a man avid to communicate’ through his art and writing; in other words, Souza’s pure desire to speak allows him to break through to his Western audience. Unfortunately, Sylvester suggests this does not go far enough: he cannot help but find ‘a failure of communication’ in

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Souza’s paintings, within which he can ‘sense only the vehement force and passion behind them, find little of it in them: it is like watching someone singing grand opera on the television with the sound switched off’.9 For Sylvester, there was something being said, but he could not hear it. Other critics echoed these concerns. In 1955, John Berger argued that Souza ‘straddles several traditions but serves none’ and noted how works like an image of two saints in a landscape might evoke, simultaneously, ‘Abraham and Sarah or Bombay shopkeepers’.10 Elsewhere, a quote from the art critic Eric Newton, claiming ‘only when the spectator shares the cultural background and understands the artist’s state of mind can a work of art strike with full effect’, is repeatedly invoked by Souza’s critics.11 This critical writing builds the dilemma of translation – communicating something through your work as a South Asian artist in Britain – into Souza’s wider public perception. It becomes both his distinguishing feature and his inevitable failure. Souza, for his part, appears to have been aware of the difficulties of translation and communication, while positing art as a sphere where this difficulty might be alleviated. As he reflected in ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’: whenever I write, I get a feeling of incompetence. Not so when I paint, for then I feel I am the master of the situation. Words, however, to me are very elusive little things and they fail me … it is difficult for most Indians to articulate by word of mouth or pen. There is an innate paralysis in us; a kind of latent paralysed force.12 Souza, however, clearly does not struggle for words. After ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’ brought him his British breakthrough, a collection of prose titled Words and Lines followed in 1959. His writing can veer from poetic to funny, reflective and provocative. The reason for Souza’s distrust of words, even as he demonstrates his mastery of language, is gestured to in the passage above, where he identifies an ‘innate paralysis’ in Indians that suppresses articulation. As the essay continues, it becomes clear that this lack of communication has its roots, for Souza, in colonialism. He characterizes India and Goa as enduring the oppression of colonists with ‘a stolid, austere resignation. If somebody squeaked, he was quietly smothered and gagged. The rest of us were all tongue tied and dumbfounded, 400 million of us’. Here, the experience of colonial rule becomes one of inarticulation, paralysis and resignation. For Souza himself, there was an extra indignity. He had been raised to read, think and write in English, and this, inevitably, gave him a dislocated sense of communication:

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For how can one articulate in Anglo-Saxon with a jewelled mandible that was fashioned by the ancient Konkan goldsmiths of Goa? It bewilders me to think that my inarticulation was due to England having possessed a lot of boats which had netted India into its vast Empire. The Portuguese too, on the other hand, had colonised Goa and had converted its inhabitants to Christianity, and this also again divided my tongue and minced my words.13 There had been Christians in Goa and India before the arrival of the Portuguese, as Souza goes on to acknowledge, though he had a very personal sense of where his Catholicism had come from and the effect that it had on him. His skill with words cannot repair the traumatic sense of his own divided tongue, as someone forced to utilize the language – and religion – of colonizers. Souza’s awareness of the dilemmas of communication and translation  – the psychological splits and divisions that occur when the colonized subject adopts the language of the colonizer, and his desire, in some way, to transcend, or at least negotiate them – are fundamental to understanding his art. This is the concern of his self-portrait. Here, there are elements of his appearance that suggest some kind of translation to Western culture, most obviously his clothing, with his suit and tie marking him out as respectable, ordinary, professional, British. There is perhaps also his tolerance of the pain of the arrows that afflict him (almost hidden by the collar of his suit), a physical manifestation of the British stiff upper lip. But this seems like a hardly comfortable translation since it is steeped in tension and fear. There are other elements that suggest a refusal of communication. His teeth are gripped into this grimace, grinding together in a way that prevents speech and which suggests pain. They are sketched in and overlaid with thick black areas of ink that seem to hold them together – marks that Souza has made to prevent this image of himself from speaking, communicating, even crying out. This is a self-portrait of the artist as the mute, tense colonial subject, migrant and British citizen – dressed up in a way that suggests an uncomfortable relationship to the West, and always on guard, through those big, searching eyes, for a moment when he might be caught out or succumb to the pain of affliction. The fraught appearance of the self-portrait suggests an uncomfortable negotiation of identity in relation to colonialism and its effects across spaces. It brings to mind Souza’s encounter with the English language in his childhood home which overshadowed the Konkani spoken by his relatives and other Goan Catholics. This English aspect was also something that he and his mother emphasized once they moved to India; she dropped the name Souza when setting up her own business in order to attract European customers and give the impression that her son could be Anglo-Indian, while Souza too signed numerous works as Newton in the 1940s.14 The uneasy negotiation of

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connections to the West and to Britain in particular was a key part of Souza’s time in Goa and India. More broadly, the tense self-portrait also brings to mind assimilation, which was the expectation for migrants who arrived in post-war Britain until the mid-1960s. If you were someone arriving from South Asia, it was expected that, over time, you would abandon what was deemed to be the strange and archaic culture of your home country in favour of a Western lifestyle. Souza was lucky in that he already spoke English and had been raised Catholic. He would have known, however, that assimilation was unrealistic and complex. Migrants faced a prolonged, ongoing process of negotiation after they arrived, picking up or adopting elements of Western culture where necessary while also retaining the beliefs, cultural practices, and even kinship and community networks of the past.15 Souza, for his part, seems to have had an ambivalent relationship to the home he left behind. He made a return visit to India and Goa in 1960, and registered his shock and disconnect from the places of his birth and early years, as well as his disappointment at finding them ‘shabby, desolate, and out of touch’.16 At the same time – and as his writing attests – his personal histories of home, language and their connections to colonialism remained central to his conception of his identity. This is a complex relationship to home, for both Souza and other migrants in their own ways, where it could be both homely and unhomely, here and there, present and lost, simultaneously. As Souza commented, ‘it’s all very well to talk in metaphors about having one’s roots in one’s own country. But roots need water from clouds forming over distant seas; and from rivers having sources in different lands’.17 Souza’s critics and audiences do not necessarily demand assimilation from him: he is, in many respects as an artist, exempt from some of these demands, though he consistently feeds the tropes and experiences of assimilation into his art and writing and, as a Goan artist working in Britain, would have been conscious of his position between cultures, both in this moment and across his lifetime. In some respects, we might consider the extent to which the global language and community of modernism allowed Souza to negotiate these difficult questions of assimilation and home, though the criticism I have cited above speaks of the continual bind that non-Western artists found themselves in – had they slavishly imitated the work of European modernists or retained aspects of their own non-Western identity and thus, perhaps, marked themselves as inferior?18 There were times when critics seemed to prefer the latter: his inclusion in a group show at Gallery One in 1955 led a critic in The Times to fear the influence of European art on him and wonder ‘whether Mr Souza will be able to retain his virtue of being an unusually unspoiled artist’.19 Souza’s early Gallery One shows came under the overwhelmingly white gaze of the British art world, which exhibited a watchfulness that must have been familiar to Souza and other migrants. His

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artworks, however, returned that gaze rather defiantly. In a December edition of the BBC’s The Critics, the contributor Stephen Bone was aware of the way in which Souza’s exhibition created something of a stand-off: ‘Paul Klee once, I remember, said that you look at the picture, but don’t forget the picture looks at you. You can never forget that in front of one of Souza’s fierce heads’.20 Souza’s art certainly looks at and meets the gaze of its white audience – think of the unrelenting stares of his paintings or the swivelling, paranoid gaze of the self-portrait. In the self-portrait, he appears, in one sense, to have submitted to that white gaze –both in his respectable, Westernized dress and in the way his pen and ink medium strips the image of obvious markers of race – in a manner that recalls Frantz Fanon’s description of the colonial subject ‘putting on the white world’.21 Crucially, however, Souza’s self-portrait refuses to submit entirely to it, remaining mute: it bears the very marks of attempting that refusal, with its teeth clenched tight to prevent speech or sound, body tense with a refusal to succumb to that pain, and eyes ready to meet the gaze from all sides – from East and from West, perhaps. Souza’s self-portrait is a refusal of the translation that had been a feature of his experiences since birth, while also being an image that builds in the difficulties and effects of its impossible and ever-present demand. It registers an inherent awareness of the mechanics of representation by the British audience that seek to shape and know him in particular terms that recalls Gayatri Spivak’s analysis of Western representation; Souza’s response is, appropriately, silence.22 If critics either worried that this pure, Indian artist was becoming spoilt or registered their frustration at a communication only half-achieved, then Souza’s self-portrait seems to suggest, instead, that this was merely the necessary, untranslatable experience of the migrant: a muteness that speaks of the unanswerable question of home in these circumstances.

The violence of home in Crucifixion While viewers had been unnerved by the unflinching looks of Souza’s figures, there was also the very real threat and experience of violence, simmering underneath their surfaces and finding expression in other, more explicit works of art. This is a violence that stretches across time and place and varies in nature: from the everyday violence and discrimination faced by migrants in Britain during the post-war period, to the violence of home, from the colonial rule imposed by the Portuguese and British in Goa and India, to the postcolonial chaos that had overwhelmed the latter in the years before he left. This section argues that Souza’s art found the violence of the homes of

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the present and the past, of Britain, India and Goa, in the male body in a way that attests to his shifting experience of home and the limits and exclusions of the reconstructive project in Britain more widely. This is most powerfully expressed in Crucifixion (1959) (Figure 21).

FIGURE 21  Francis Newton Souza, Crucifixion, 1959, oil on board, 1831 × 1220mm, Tate, London © Tate, London, 2017.

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At the centre of the painting is the body of a black Christ in a crucifixion pose, his arms spread out at his sides (though he lacks the support of a physical cross). Souza has painted him out of hues of black, but also vivid blue, which seem to cling to his joints and limbs at his knees, hips and shoulders, as well as browns and the occasional slash of red, around his eyes, on his face and at his side, where he was been pierced by the lance. The head of Christ appears blank with either the pain of suffering or the absence of life. Black, oval pupils are outlined by a terrifyingly empty white. His teeth are visible again, gripped in a grimace that, like his eyes, teeters between life and death. Souza extends the row of white teeth across one side of the Christ’s face, giving it an uncanny, horrifying, Cheshire Cat-like quality (though it does not really grin). Like other figures by Souza, the head, with its broadly triangular form, recalls the African masks that had inspired European modernists in previous decades. However, this mask-like head is augmented with ambiguous forms – somewhere between plants, feathers, thorns or fish scales – that seem to cling to Christ’s face or emerge from it. His body treads a similar line between human and non-human: his legs and feet appear skeletal, while his arms seem to sprout like thorny branches out of his torso, disappearing out of the edges of the canvas abruptly. His limbs are pierced with arrows, while nails protrude from his feet. To either side are figures that Souza identified as John the Baptist and a disciple; which is which is a little unclear, though it is possible that the figure in blue is John, given that he is gesturing to the body of Christ (as he does elsewhere in images of the crucifixion) with his almost skeletal arms. These two figures are black too, their faces bearing similar grimaces that we have seen elsewhere in Souza’s art and their eyes staring intently and resolutely out at us. Together, the trio are positioned against a background of pale, almost scorched colour, pushing their bodies powerfully against the picture plane. At the time, Crucifixion was linked by the critic Neville Wallis to key moments in Souza’s life: his ‘tormented childhood’ in Goa marked by the death of his father and his sister when he was a baby and a battle with small pox that almost killed him and left him permanently scarred, his artistic difficulties in India where he struggled to reach a receptive audience and his paintings were deemed obscene, and then his early years of struggle in London.23 However, Crucifixion is more than a tortured expression of longterm alienation or despair; it is directly linked to the politics of race and colonial and postcolonial experiences that had formed and were forming the basis for Souza’s experience. It is a response, in one sense, to his Catholic upbringing, though he stressed that he became ambivalent about religion in his teens. He recalled his early talent for drawing and the encouragement he received at his Jesuit school to admire the art of Heinrich Hoffman, who produced ‘blood operatic Christs and flaxen-haired shy Virgins’. This, clearly, was an approach Souza rejected: his Crucifixion replaces a dignified, pure, white Christ with the

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distorted, suffering, lifeless body of his black Christ. Souza also recalled the attraction that religion held for him in his childhood: The Roman Catholic church had a tremendous influence over me, not its dogmas but its grand architecture and the splendour of its services. The priest dressed in his richly embroidered vestments, each of his garments from the biretta to the chasuble symbolising the accoutrement of Christ’s passion. The wooden saints painted with gold and bright colours staring vacantly out of their niches. The smell of incense. And the enormous crucifix with the impaled image of a Man supposed to be the Son of God, scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns.24 Souza’s recollection of his attraction to Catholicism – rooted in its grand structures, ceremonial splendour, and horrific images of torture and suffering – must be considered alongside his simultaneous rejection of the European roots and imagery of the religion of his birth. What does it mean to retain the torture, ceremony, and suffering of Catholicism in the face of a loss of faith, the rejection of the ideals and imagery of the church and an awareness of its hand in colonial power? The violent appropriation of the crucifixion is not anything particularly new at this point in Britain: viewers may well have encountered similarly bleak crucifixion imagery in the work of Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon already in the post-war period. What is key here – and what perhaps makes Souza’s crucifixion less easily processed by contemporary British viewers than those of Sutherland and Bacon – is the provocative and evocative potential of the black Christ at the centre of the work. This is a figure with multiple resonances. In one sense, it is a brutal image of the effects of Portugal’s imposition of Catholicism on Goans in the sixteenth century and their continued, though increasingly fragile, hold over the country as calls for independence grew over the 1940s and 1950s.25 Souza’s Christ is a figure that has given himself up to religion but who retains little of the redemptive connotations of a typical crucifixion: he is rigid and distorted with pain, suffering and even death, made inhuman and other by this process. In another sense, given the British context in which this painting was made, Crucifixion also evokes the violences and sufferings of colonial subjects in the past at the hands of the British, as well as their continual suffering as the empire disintegrated, both in the former colonies and, increasingly, in Britain itself. Specifically, it may be linked to the India that Souza left in 1949, only two years after the violence and mass migration of the partition and a year after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi. His experiences of India were marked by either British rule or the violent chaos and widespread poverty of the end of empire. The suffering of Souza’s Christ is, in part, the suffering of India after

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British withdrawal; his appearance seems to hint at the burning and mutilation of bodies and villages of Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs after August 1947.26 There is also a sense that Crucifixion speaks broadly, beyond Goa and India – this mutilated black body evokes the violences of empire across the globe. This is an image of the emerging postcolonial subject of homes left behind in Goa and India, as well as the postcolonial subject more widely, and it embodies and makes visible their experiences and effects. And then there was his new home: Britain. Souza arrived as one of only a small number of South Asians who had made the journey to the UK. He made his home in London only a year after the SS Empire Windrush had received an ecstatic welcome on its arrival from the West Indies. Immigration was actively encouraged by the post-war British government at this stage, partly in order to recruit workers for vacant jobs for the task of post-war reconstruction. For the most part, South Asians, along with a larger number of people from Africa and the West Indies, arrived to take on jobs that white British people were otherwise reluctant to do. They made up a relatively small percentage of the population – there were 120,000 West Indians and 55,000 Indians in Britain by 1958, out of a total population of 50 million – though, very quickly, the perceived growth in number of migrants became the focus of complaints from politicians and members of the public. The possibility of immigration controls had been raised as early as 1950 by a Cabinet Committee and isolated figures in the both the Conservative and Labour Parties made similar calls as the decade progressed.27 The increasingly visible presence of nonwhites in Britain was seen as a threat to the reconstruction of home in Britain in the aftermath of the war. They were perceived as disrupting an imagined conception of the timeless, ordered, national home.28 Within this, black men were considered a distinct threat too, with particular fears around interracial relationships and unlicenced black male sexuality.29 Migrants and commonwealth citizens appear to have been subject to discrimination almost immediately. This was fuelled by stereotypes, and manifested in often small, everyday encounters. For South Asians, there is evidence that, compared to the supposedly more hardworking West Indians, they were considered ‘lazy, feckless, and difficult to place in employment’, marked as other by their diet, clothes and religious beliefs.30 In general, nonwhites of all backgrounds were increasingly seen as associated with vice, crime, disease, and the depletion of local and national resources as their numbers were perceived to grow. Looking back in the late 1970s, Bhikhu Parekh reflected on the difficulties faced by first-generation Asian immigrants, who arrived in Britain ‘frightened and bewildered’ and ‘haunted by a sense of impending tragedy’.31 In his contemporary sociological study The Colour Problem, Anthony Richmond recognized the enduring psychological effect of this state of fear. The migrant ‘never knows when or where to expect’ prejudice;

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when incidents do occur, they can be ‘small and of little significance, but the cumulative effect can have a seriously demoralizing influence on a coloured man already finding it difficult enough to make a successful adjustment’.32 Direct instances of discrimination or second-hand prejudice – a room refused because another resident or neighbour might object, service refused in a restaurant or shop to placate other clients – could break you down. Your home, as a visibly new arrival to Britain, was a space of abuse and consistent, daily racism. It would appear that, on the surface, Souza’s self-portrait speaks more directly to this context than his Crucifixion. As well as a response to the question of translation as a Goan artist, it may also be considered as engaging with the everyday suffering of the migrant. The scars of small pox are visible marks of the pain of a home left behind – in childhood, but also more recently; the arrows become the afflictions of daily prejudice in Britain, the ordinary discrimination that was a feature of everyday life. In this light, Souza’s muteness here – and the muteness and grimaces of his other heads – become not just instances of a refusal to speak but also moments of intense suppression. Migrants were consistently framed by the contemporary press as quiet, humble and vigilant. In February 1955, West Bromwich busmen went on strike to protest at the hiring of an Indian trainee conductor; the conductor in question, Bkika Patel, made it clear that he did not mean any harm, stating ‘I have no wish to cause any trouble and I am keeping clear of the dispute’.33 Souza’s self-portrait, and his other, afflicted painted male heads, feel like instances of this kind of hyper-vigilant self-control; they mute their voices and repress immediately visible signs of pain under the gaze of discrimination. This kind of experience is located purely in the male body, picturing it as a feat of self-restraint that emulates some of the ideals of post-war British masculinity; his endurance is almost masochistic and could be read as an assertion of male power in the face of suffering. At the same time, this very endurance renders him mute, brittle, even vulnerable, undermining possible implications of heroism. The male figure in Souza’s Crucifixion suffers in a very different, though related, way; this feels like a moment when the repressed pain and emotions of works like his self-portrait are unleashed. Events leading up to the creation of this work – wider instances of racial tension that reached boiling point, after years of simmering – were significant here. Over the summer of 1958, this tension turned into threats and attacks directed at the homes and workplaces of non-whites and organized, violent beatings by groups of white teddy boys. This occurred most prominently in North Kensington, an area of London dominated by overcrowded slums occupied by poor black and white households; Souza had lived there when he first arrived in Britain, and far-right parties like Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement had strongholds here. Tension and violence broke out into full-blown riots in Nottingham on 23 August; on

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30 August, the same occurred in North Kensington. The trigger appears to have been an attack on a white Swedish woman, Majbritt Morrison, who was seen arguing with her Jamaican husband Raymond Morrison outside Latimer Road tube station the previous night. The next day, she was set upon by a group of white youths, angered by her relationship with a black man. By the evening, crowds of hundreds of white people were rampaging through the streets, attacking the homes of black people as well as the police; this went on for several days – escalated by sensationalist press reports and the arrival of outsiders to watch and encourage the violence – and led to retaliations from black people, who were forced to carry weapons to defend themselves. The unrest was eventually quelled by the police, with harsh sentences given to white youths in particular, though tensions remained.34 Just a few months later in May 1959, the Antiguan immigrant Kelso Cochrane was murdered by a group of white youths on his way home from Paddington General Hospital. The threat of racial violence was, seemingly, ever present and imminent. The race riots of 1958 were a psychological watershed moment for the majority of migrants and commonwealth citizens where the everyday discrimination encountered since the late 1940s had exploded into violence, and Souza’s Crucifixion was produced in the aftermath of these turbulent, violent months. In this vision of a crucified black body, made inhuman, brittle, skeletal and lifeless, Souza brought viewers face to face with the effects – physical and psychological – of racial discrimination and violence in late 1950s Britain. In doing so, he created an image of suffering that is not noble, hopeful or reassuring. This is far from the angelic image of a muscular Christ, dying with grace, dignity and pain on the cross for the sins of humankind; this is a male body that, instead, takes on the appearance of an evil, threatening being, his thorny arms spread like the wings of a bat. In one sense, this body operates as a representation of the effects of the racism that had underpinned reconstruction Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, a spectre of the beaten bodies, a response, finally, to the slurs and banal aggressions that non-whites faced on a daily basis, and an image of their marginalization and rejection in their new home. In another, the painting is a development of the fears and suppressions of migrant masculinity in his drawn self-portrait; here, they are unleashed in a moment of empty catharsis, the black male body given up to death in response to contemporary violence. But Crucifixion also appears to recast suffering, not as transcendental in the Christian tradition or even as a form of masochistic selfhood as in the self-portrait, but as integral to the migrant experience of home from Souza’s perspective. The suffering in Crucifixion is a multifaceted kind of suffering, reaching from the past into the present. It can be related to Souza’s personal experiences, his roots in Goan Catholicism, colonial and postcolonial India, migration in post-war Britain and the subjects of decolonization more widely. Here, the

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suffering of the past is intertwined with and active within the present and delivered in the form of white Christian iconography. At the same time, he refuses to situate it firmly in one sphere – it is both here and there, in Britain and elsewhere, at home and at a distance. This is an explicit case of ‘bringing the empire home’ or, as artist and critic Rasheed Araeen put it, a ‘return of the repressed’; it troubles the narratives and histories of post-war reconstruction in Britain and decolonization in the war’s aftermath, where the violence of war and empire might be framed as belonging to the past or another part of the world.35 Here, the explicitly or implicitly excluded – the violences of colonialism, the people who arrived in Britain who were beaten or discriminated against or suppressed into silence – are suddenly, undeniably visible. This is an ‘unhomely’ image, in Homi Bhabha’s terms – an instance of ‘the shock of recognition of the world-in-the-home, the home-in-the-world’.36 It is a provocative assertion of non-white presence within Britain as a nation, but also within its histories of empire and Western, Christian iconography. More specifically, it is a moment where the constructed boundaries of post-war home – between national home, empire and globe – crumble, made visible and present through the mobile but brutalized body of the male migrant, who appears to hold these histories and be overwhelmed by them at once. The North American writer James Baldwin took up the question of suffering in his essay ‘Down at the Cross’, first published in 1962. Though he and Souza come from different contexts, there is evidence that Baldwin’s work found a receptive audience in Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s and that his writing and interviews explicitly ‘located the politics of race in Britain within a wider conceptualization of the global dimensions of race and modernity’ in a way that is directly comparable to the implications of Crucifixion.37 Souza and Baldwin also share common ground in their disillusionment with Christianity after engaging with it early in their life, as well as their vivid sense of the relationship between religion and colonialism. In his essay, Baldwin addressed his own loss of faith, and advocates for a turn away from organized religion in the fight for civil rights, emphasizing instead the role that black people can play in deconstructing the myths and assumptions of white society. The key here is seemingly a kind of redemptive suffering by black people, a suffering that stretches back for generations – ‘of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation’ – that nevertheless contains ‘something beautiful’. He continues: I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering – enough is certainly as good as a feast – but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive

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it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth – and, indeed, no church – can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakeable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words.38 This is not necessarily as utopian as it first appears. Here, Baldwin shifts the redemptive idea of Christian suffering into potentially more productive areas: suffering – even in death – becomes a means of selfhood, formed outside of the institutions of white society, while also necessitating an awareness of hidden meanings, codes and the potential for danger behind appearances. Suffering is a means of survival; a black legacy, even as it appears to destroy. Souza is, of course, working outside of the struggle for black civil rights, and his suffering cannot be straightforwardly conflated with the suffering that Baldwin evokes in his essay. However, Baldwin’s sprawling, historical conception of suffering is applicable to the very precise legacy of suffering that Souza’s Crucifixion is intended to address. Alongside this, Baldwin’s insistence that suffering can be considered as a process towards selfhood is crucial and gives the violence of homes that Souza’s male figure embodies a particular implication. Souza’s Crucifixion, in this light, might be considered a testament to histories of violence and an enduring legacy of suffering, one that requires an emblem, a symbol that testifies to its centrality to colonial and emerging postcolonial experience while acknowledging, unflinchingly, its apparent destructive inevitability. We might see Souza’s use of arrows as working in a similar way. They come from the martyrdom of St Sebastian, where the early Christian saint was killed by the Romans by being tied to a tree or a post and shot with arrows, and which has a long tradition in the history of art. However (despite the popularity of this depiction), the arrows failed to kill him, according to accounts of Sebastian’s life. He was found, miraculously, still alive and nursed back to health. As a result, the significance of the arrows can traditionally oscillate between symbols of sacrifice in first instance, or symbols of endurance in the face of suffering in the second.39 Their presence in Crucifixion and in Souza’s art more widely – think of how they pierce his own neck in his self-portrait – act as, in one sense, adaptations of their original symbolism. They are far from noble indicators of martyrdom and instead become symbols of the entwined effects of religion, colonialism and migration that Souza makes the subject of his art. More broadly, they speak, soberly and without sentimentality, of a history of suffering and the necessary, everyday fact of its endurance. Suffering in Souza is not graceful or noble or symbolic; it is a fact of the present and a legacy of the past, the both unifying and destructive presence of history in the body, and an unflinching inscription of home in these terms. A comparison with

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Vaughan is instructive here. Vaughan’s Lazarus allowed the male body to hold the multiple temporalities of home in the post-war period; Souza’s Crucifixion seeks something like this too, allowing the male body to hold the suffering of the present and the past to speak of the struggles and losses of home in Britain at this time.

Masculinity, migration and home Souza largely explores the dilemmas and negotiations of migration, translation and suffering through the male body in Crucifixion. This section expands on this to consider how his art and writing more widely reflect on their implications for the negotiation of masculinity and home in the post-war period. Souza’s choice for the cover of the exhibition catalogue for his 1962 show at Gallery One – his last with the gallery – is a succinct combination of these themes (Figure 22). He took two photographs of himself, taken by the photographer Oswald Jones, and doctored them. The first showed his head and shoulders from the front, his hair parted and beard neatly trimmed, and his clothes – what look like a shirt, tie, cardigan or jumper, and corduroy suit jacket – giving a clear sense of smart, Western assimilation. Souza, however, has sliced across his own mouth and inserted a painted strip of card; this is all black except for a set of teeth bared in an open mouth. If Souza’s painted heads have previously bared their teeth through efforts of suppression or violence, here he looks ready to speak, or bite, or scream. On the back is the second photograph, showing the back of Souza’s head. Here, he has drawn a nowfamiliar arrow, sticking out of the side of his neck. Painted blood trickles down the back of his corduroy jacket. This is in one sense a clever bit of branding on Souza’s part, interlinking the familiar motifs from his paintings with an image of himself in an almost cartoonish and self-deprecating manner. In another sense, his simple act effectively brings together the tensions of migration, masculinity and belonging that his art had so frequently addressed. His adjustments to the photographs directly contradict his assimilative – and, we assume, passive – appearance in the original photographs. The arrow appears again as the allencompassing symbol of affliction and suffering, though the set of teeth in the open mouth are animalistic and violent: they suggest a breaking point, a moment where suppression gives way. This is also a direct contradiction of other photographs taken of Souza that entered circulation. He was photographed extensively by Ida Kar, the photographer and wife of Victor Musgrave, for Gallery One; these images were used to promote Souza’s art in the 1950s and 1960s (a few made their way into his exhibition catalogues

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FIGURE 22  Front cover of F.N. Souza, exhibition catalogue, Gallery One, London, 1962. Original photograph by Oswald Jones. © Estate of F N Souza. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: Grosvenor Gallery, London. for the gallery) and to document his place and persona in the London art world at this time. They present Souza in much the same way as Kar depicted her other artist-sitters – at work, in their studios and at home – though her approach, perhaps unintentionally, creates a particularly normative and assimilative image of him.40 Some of Kar’s images from 1957 focus on Souza

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in his studio, kneeling alongside completed paintings and the chaos of art materials scattered in front of him on the paint-stained floor, or glimpsed, alert and pensive, through laundry hanging on washing lines in the same space. She also photographed him alongside his then partner Liselotte and their daughter Karen (Figure 23). Four years later, Souza was depicted by Kar again. This time, he wore a smart suit and posed more assertively in front of some paintings. In one photo (Figure 24), he is perched on the end of a single bed that is covered with rolled up paper, unstretched canvases and art materials; around him, there are canvases propped against the wall (including a particularly idealized painting of Liselotte on the left), pinned drawings, and sculptures lining the mantelpiece. He looks like an artist who had just arrived in London and found a temporary room, with the detritus of his art scattered around him and wearing his best suit to make a good impression on a potential gallery owner or buyer. We know better than this, though – this is 1961, twelve years after his arrival – but Souza is framed here as both

FIGURE 23  Ida Kar, Liselotte Souza (née de Kristian); Karen Souza; Francis Newton Souza, 1957, 2 ¼in. square film negative, National Portrait Gallery, London © National Portrait Gallery.

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FIGURE 24  Ida Kar, Francis Newton Souza, 1961, 2 ¼in. square film negative, National Portrait Gallery, London © National Portrait Gallery. artist and, in many respects, the assimilative male migrant: smartly dressed, untidily hard working and part of a normative family set up. This, I think, makes the internal juxtaposition in the exhibition catalogue images particularly important. Souza’s intervention with the photograph of himself in 1962 can be seen as, if not a direct response to Kar’s images, then at least as displaying a knowing sense of his own self-presentation as an artist and, arguably, the public perception and stereotypes of migrants in Britain, particularly those from South Asia.41 In one sense, the original photograph plays up to the idea of the South Asian male subject as passive, quiet and even effeminate, which originated, for British audiences, from a colonial context.42 At the same time, that open, animalistic mouth seems to play on a different stereotype: the former colonial subject as degenerate, inhuman, lacking self-control and potentially violent. This was something

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more readily associated with men from the West Indies and Africa, though it appears to have been applied, to some extent, to all non-British colonial subjects.43 As migration increased, this stereotype became the source of fear. Additionally, by 1962, when this exhibition was being staged, British politics was in the midst of what has been termed a ‘surrender to racism’, as Conservative and Labour politicians feared losing votes to fascists or being outflanked by one another on the question of migration. The Commonwealth Immigrants Bill became law in 1962, significantly restricting the admission of commonwealth settlers to those issued with employment vouchers, marking a formal shift in the limits of British citizenship.44 Souza’s photographic intervention, then, is particularly timely, both playing on the demands and stereotypes of assimilation for male migrants and embracing the fears that they embodied at the same time. Souza seems interested in allowing the tension between these two stereotypical visions of masculinity – constructed and disseminated by British institutions and publics – to sit, unresolved, in his own image. He evokes the ‘inaccessible blankness’, as Spivak puts it, of the present but unknown colonial subject, obscured by or lost within these competing constructions.45 The circling, impossible sense that post-war migrant masculinity might be passive and assimilative on the one hand and violent and fearful on the other is something that preoccupies Souza in his writing. At the end of a surreal, visionary essay titled ‘My Friend and I’, published in Words and Lines, he frames masculinity as a kind of masquerade, through the ruminations of a character he adopts called Doctor of Nothing: There are times when I wander in the streets late at night or in the early hours of the morning. I avoid being seen at such times because I get beside myself like a lunatic searching for Light, a glimpse, a fleeting Revelation, a moment of Inspiration, Light, Light … in vain, in vain … a violent longing to kill … a longing to die … On returning home, I dress up, wear a neat tie tucked with a modest pin and having tied my shoe-strings neatly, I meet my family and friends as though nothing has happened – I have acquired a certain contrived stature and respectability among them – or I undress and quietly retire to bed. This passage presents the oscillation between these two constructions of masculinity – abject, dark and potentially violent versus assimilative and passive – as a duplicitous personal drama. It feels, in part, like an adaption of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, though it is also intermingled with religious references. Souza goes on to associate the moment at which he transitions from this abject state back to one of respectability with the sound of a cock crowing, which triggers, on some

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occasions, guilt: ‘I wept, wept bitterly and against the wall. An ancient and bitter remorse’. The wording here recalls the biblical narrative of Peter’s denial that he knew Christ after his arrest; in the gospels of both Luke and Matthew, he is said to have ‘wept bitterly’ after Christ’s prediction – that he would disown him three times before a cock crows that night – comes true. On other occasions, however, Souza states that he would respond to the cock’s crow by crying out, ‘Crito, Crito, I owe a cock to Asklepius; will you remember to pay my debt?’, which were the last words of Socrates before he died. This transition – this oscillation in male identity – is framed in terms of guilt, duplicity and death.46 Souza’s essay suggests some kind of connection between guilt, duplicity and migrant masculinity – it implies, perhaps, the sense of being double and the feeling of working with deceit in order to operate. This is not to suggest that migrants in this position should legitimately have felt a sense of guilt, but it is to register the demands and effects of the negotiation of masculinity and migration that Souza represents in his art and writing. Duplicity may take several forms as a citizen and migrant in post-war Britain: the feeling of changing your clothes and appearance to fit into a white society, the feeling of repressing responses to discrimination – against you or others – to avoid escalation, the feeling of having left homes or families, and the feeling of having survived and escaped the experience of colonialism, particularly knowing its long history of violence. ‘My Friend and I’ is a subversive reflection on this experience, aligning the negotiation of migration and postcolonial experience, knowingly, with a complex and ambiguous sense of betrayal.47 The duplicity of migrant masculinity may not only imply guilt, however; it can also suggest a more radical and even disruptive conception of male identity that expands on the oscillating constructions and empty knowledge of his 1962 exhibition catalogue images. This is present in the rest of ‘My Friend And I’. The essay opens with another drawing by Souza, depicting two men in front of a city landscape (Figure 25). On the left is a white man in a shirt, tie and suit jacket. His head is round and large with a slightly jutting chin. His features, though, are small and arranged close together at the top of his head. On the right is another man. He wears a shirt covered in diamond patterns. His head is long rather than round; his eyes perched at the top and on either side of his head. His face is constructed out of a series of all-over hatched lines that cast his face into darkness and which create a visual effect that is similar to hair. It is this second, slightly strange figure on the right that Souza’s essay focuses on initially. He adopts the voice of the suited man on the left and introduces his friend on the right as Norman Evans to another, anonymous voice in the conversation. He describes Evans as a mathematician, a solicitor and a poet, a range of professions that do not overlap in any logical way in the text and contribute to a sense that he is an indefinable character. He speaks

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FIGURE 25  Francis Newton Souza, ‘My Friend and I’, 1959, pen and ink © Estate of F N Souza. All rights reserved, DACS 2018. Photo: Grosvenor Gallery, London. in circular, imprecise ways, infuriating and confusing the other voice in the conversation (‘Heavens! What on earth does all this mean!’).48 The language consistently recalls the refusal of translation and definition that were features of Souza’s painted heads.

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Souza’s narrator then lapses into a series of contradictory though evocative questions directed at this other participant in the conversation in order to explain ‘the astonishing brain of Mr Norman Evans’. They range from conflating mathematics with the language of male heterosexual desire for the female body (‘Sir, have you ever stretched the circle and shrunk the ellipse and together tasted the pleasure there of?’), meditation (‘Sir, have you shrunk in the tranquility of Ananda, serenely reposed with folded arms and folded legs?’), bodily suffering (‘Sir, have you hung on a cross and suffered the unbearable torments of crucifixion with your limbs stretched out to breaking point … breaking? … Sir, have you had afflictive arrows sticking into your neck while amorous cupid quivers merrily in your heart?’), duplicity and guilt (‘Sir, have you ever wept at cock-crow and drunk your health with hemlock? Sir, have you seen the world through the slits of the hangman’s cap?’), and a state between the human and non-human (‘Sir, are you human and inhuman at the same time like my friend here, Mr Norman Evans? Or are you much too respectable?’).49 Here, identity is slippery, a mesh of competing contradictions that are seemingly unrelated to one another. However, we know these themes already. They touch, in some way, on aspects of Souza’s writing and art, which are linked to migration, colonialism and their histories: themes of masculinity, the body, suffering, guilt, respectability and the abject. The face of Mr Evans is made up of a series of hatched lines that cover his entire head. These are used to create not shading or contours, but a strange fragmented flatness that amount to, as Souza would have it, the absence of a face: Mr Evans needs no face at all. His face is, shall I say, conjured? Observe it again. Observe the lines in his face. It doesn’t contain the lines but they contain the face. If you direct them infinitely, you will find no finite face at all. The sum total or the veritable abstract of the face of Mr Evans is two lines crosshatched on either side. Souza includes a diagram to show what he means, and he goes on to frame them as having broadly spiritual significance. He saw them as akin to tiny units of creation – like a drop of water or a nucleus – that he used and organized like a Creator God to create his art. They were ‘a spinous vertebrae that became life … the beginning, the end, and the beginning’.50 This broadly utopian technique is used to create the unstable, ‘conjured’ face of Mr Evans, which he sees as appropriate for representing the fluctuating and indefinable nature of Evans’ identity. The crosshatched lines were consistent features of Souza’s art in the 1950s, appearing as frequently as his arrows, though they appear in varying forms and with varying intensity. They form the basis for his drawn self-portrait, and, in

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Man and Woman Laughing, they are the basis for the male figure’s beard and distorted sections of the female figure’s face and hair. Tashodhara Dalmia has interpreted these crosshatched lines as Souza’s means of rendering hypocrisy on the ‘mobile’ faces of his ‘men without redemption’.51 These lines, however, also indicate Souza’s active awareness of a link between representation and the instability of identity or, at least, a presented or imposed form of identity. To ‘conjure’ a face in art through the array of units of hatched lines – a kind of visual language – is to paint or draw the very formation of identity, but it is also to build in an awareness of its ‘conjured’ and fragile nature into your images. Souza uses his lines to represent a masculinity that is fluid and indefinable, a masculinity that should not be representable, one that takes shape but, in doing so, underlines its unknowability. And then there is the other figure, the narrator, whose voice Souza has taken on; he introduces himself as ‘Doctor of Nothing’. He is fat, suited, bald and white – someone who is, on the surface, successful. This, Souza reveals, is a mirage, an ‘inflated projection of myself’; he is, in reality, ‘about as average, I would say, as the man in the street or the girl next door’. This figure’s father died after he was born too, like Souza; his life story from this moment on is one of superficially happy and careful assimilation, though it hides a desire to deviate from this, to ‘make others suffer, to make myself suffer’.52 It is this figure that Souza describes wandering the streets at night and returning to put on his respectable uniform and greet his family and friends. Together, these two figures offer us two different, though linked visions of masculinity: there is the contradictory masculinity of Norman Evans, rooted in the apparent indescribability of his nature and represented by those ‘spinous vertebrae’, and there is the assimilative though superficial masculinity of this Doctor of Nothing. They recall the ambivalent workings of mimicry, as defined by Homi Bhabha, where mimicry by colonial subjects of the colonists, ‘at once resemblance and menace’, has the potential to undermine the structures of colonial power.53 To some extent, this is what Souza’s art and writing suggests: a normative, white, British masculinity is performed in his representations in ways that question and undermine its claims to authenticity and its definitive position at the heart of reconstruction Britain. However, Souza continually registers mimicry as unstable, as always on the point of shifting between extremes (like Doctor of Nothing) or inherently unstable in and of itself (like Norman Evans). This speaks, too, to the other themes of Souza’s art in this period, all rooted in the male body: the gestures towards translation but also the tension, failure, or refusal in the face of this, and his historically, spatially and temporally unstable sense of suffering. Across his art, the performance of masculinity begins to take on qualities of the very experience of migration itself: it is mobile, a case of occupying more than one space or state of being at once or moving between them, and built on refusal, compromise and

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contradiction. At its heart is an uncertainty, a ‘blankness’, that implies postwar masculinity’s instability – its limits and silences made present in the male migrant body – as well as a necessary sense of being, for Souza and others, within this. This link in Souza’s work between masculinity and migration returns us to the question of home. Souza’s art has posited the dilemma of home for the migrant – with its questions of movement between spaces, translation, suffering and the legacies of violence – in the male body. The sense of being between spaces – Goa, India and Britain, for instance – is registered in the sense of being between masculinities and of never quite occupying these spaces or masculinities entirely. Souza’s art and writing, crucially, set down these inherently contradictory circumstances. His work continues Vaughan’s focus on the male body as a means of constituting home, suggesting that the body offered a productive scale on which to construct and negotiate home for individuals operating on the margins of public reconstruction. While for Vaughan, the body was a site of home’s intimacies and memories, for Souza the body is a site where home’s histories and anxieties meet. The body as home in Souza’s art is formed within the time of reconstruction that has shaped the work and experiences of all of the artists in this book, though his images work in other temporalities – of empire and its end – that trouble public reconstruction’s linear unfurling and its increasingly strict limits. I have read Souza’s artworks here with an attention to their instability in terms of their representations of home, masculinity and the time of reconstruction: they reveal home lived and negotiated through the body, under the experiences of migration, the legacies of colonialism and the limits of reconstructive society. The next chapter shifts from a focus on the body to a focus on how the ideals of home were plotted onto public spaces in the art of Victor Pasmore. Following the ways that representations by Bacon, Vaughan and Souza have gestured to  the increasingly broader scales of post-war home, Pasmore’s art demonstrates the possibilities and limitations of seeking to translate the private experience of home into public communities.

5 Victor Pasmore Abstraction and the Post-War Landscape of Home

I

n December 2011, Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion (Figure 26) – an abstract, concrete structure erected in 1969 at the heart of the Sunny Blunts area of Peterlee – was listed as a Grade II* building, granting it protection from alteration, extension or demolition. This was seemingly the final chapter in the story of the reversal of the controversial Pavilion’s fortunes: only three years earlier, it had been granted funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and Durham County Council for a full refurbishment and renovation and it re-opened in 2009 in a ceremony attended by Pasmore’s son John.1 As the Pavilion’s listing was announced, securing its position within Peterlee for the future, the chairman of the Apollo Pavilion community association, David Taylor-Gooby, reflected on its significance: I’m not sure I’d say it’s a thing of beauty, I would say a thing of interest and an icon of modernism. It symbolises the philosophy behind Peterlee, which was modernist and trying to create something good and progressive. The pavilion is part of our heritage.2 This mood of celebration was not shared by everyone, however. Joan Maslin, an independent county councillor for nearby Wingate, had campaigned for the Pavilion to be pulled down since the 1980s and told local newspaper The Northern Echo that she would not be attending its unveiling:

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FIGURE 26  Victor Pasmore, Apollo Pavilion, 1970s, photograph © Estate of Victor Pasmore. All Rights Reserved, DACS/Artimage 2018. Photo: John Pasmore. I’m pleased that it’s been cleaned up, but on principle I’m not going, because I feel the money they have spent is absolutely disgraceful … I think it’s been a waste of money from the beginning. All the majority of people wanted was the place cleaned up and security cameras put up. I’m just waiting with bated breath to see how long it stays like it is. It should never have been built here.3 Even in the wake of its preservation, Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion was eliciting polarized responses from local residents. The Apollo Pavilion was designed by Pasmore as an integral part of his wider plans for the Sunny Blunts estate. It was named after the first manned mission to the moon which took place in the year it was constructed and it was intended to span a small man-made lake at the centre of the development. The idea was that it would allow residents to cross from one side to the other, thus linking the two halves of the estate. It is made up of an arrangement of large, geometric blocks of concrete that create two levels: a covered pathway at lake level and an upper area made up of a series of interconnected

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spaces. Two curving, abstract, black murals were painted at either end. It was intended, in Pasmore’s words, as ‘an eye-catcher’ that could give ‘dignity, focus and “impact” at various central points in the environmental complex’.4 He described it as an architecture and sculpture of purely abstract form through which to walk, in which to linger and on which to play, a free and anonymous monument which, because of its independence, can lift the activity and psychology of an urban housing community on to a universal plane.5 It was the culmination of his work at the new town of Peterlee: he had been brought in while the town was under construction in 1954 by the town’s general manager A.V. Williams, in order to bring a more unconventional approach to the work there. Pasmore had insisted that he would agree to be involved if he was allowed to work on building a completely new part of the town, and he worked as part of a team with two architects, Peter Daniel and Franc Dixon. They worked on the interior details of the homes themselves, while Pasmore focused on the aesthetic appearance of the dwellings and their arrangement across the site. He drew on his experiences as a landscape and abstract painter, interpreting this new urban environment as a kind of artificial landscape, a ‘pictorial composition though which you move imaginatively’.6 The Pavilion, with its multiple levels on which to walk, look and play, was the centrepiece of this vision. However, Pasmore’s Pavilion very quickly fell into disrepair. There appear to have been discontented rumblings in the local press about the Pavilion even as his work in the town was nearing completion in 1976.7 After 1978, when ownership and responsibility for the Pavilion passed from the Peterlee Development Corporation to the District of Easington Council, its condition appears to have declined considerably. It became populated by drug addicts and teenage drinkers, and was the focus of other nuisances, listed as ‘vandalism, noise, litter, courting couples (with the emphasis on the coupling)’ in one letter to Pasmore from the Peterlee Development Corporation; meanwhile, The Northern Echo quoted one local resident who claimed it was used ‘as a brothel and urinal’. By late 1981 word appears to have reached Pasmore that local public opinion was leaning towards the Pavilion’s demolition; in the meantime, the council was wondering whether they could ask a local scout group to clean up the structure as part of their entry to an annual environmental cleanup competition by ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken Co.’, or whether army engineers might be willing to dismantle it free of charge as a training exercise. In some ways, what appears to have saved the Apollo Pavilion at this point is the lack of money to dispose of it. Pasmore visited Peterlee in early 1982 to see the condition of his Pavilion for himself and hear complaints from local residents.

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He seemed relieved to find it still standing, and even joked about the vandalism on its upper level (‘when I was confronted upstairs with a gay and colourful exhibition of free child art I was so relieved that I could not help laughing and joking about it’) but sympathized with concerns about noise and its proximity to a select number of houses. A compromise was reached, however, by 1984: the staircase was removed, taking away access from the upper platform, which was turned into an area for plants and flowers.8 This was largely how the Pavilion remained until its renovation, over twenty years later. Why did the Apollo Pavilion fail so spectacularly in the decades after its installation in 1969? Pasmore had his thoughts on this, bemoaning the lack of money for maintenance and a lack of a ‘grand opening’, which meant that ‘the whole complex of Pavilion and Lake’ had not been ‘accepted psychologically as a valuable environmental amenity’.9 The Peterlee Development Corporation’s Gary Philipson noted with some sympathy in return that the local council had argued: The Pavilion is vandalised because its only function nowadays is as a meeting place for the idle and the ill-disposed. In other words, if a valid alternative use could be found for it, and one to which it could be put on a regular basis, then if it were put to this use after being put back in good order the vandal problem would sort itself.10 The Pavilion’s failure could be attributed, then, to its lack of psychological acceptance by the community and its lack of obvious purpose – in many ways, the two deficiencies go hand in hand. Pasmore’s structure had been intended as a pivotal object within Sunny Blunts, a visual and structural focus point around which the community could be oriented and united. Peterlee was a brand new home for its residents who had moved in from the surrounding mining towns and villages, and the Pavilion, in Pasmore’s mind, could help solidify a sense of belonging in this new community. But this was not the Pavilion’s fate: it was an empty, unused space, difficult, in terms of its form and function, for the local residents to know what to do with it. Rather than helping to assist and symbolizing the foundation of a community and sense of home, it became a distinctly unhomely space, a structure that could literally and symbolically be linked to the breakdown of community ties. In many ways, Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion shares its fluctuating fate with other post-war modernist structures that were built in an attempt to foster and develop new homes and communities: emerging out of the post-war optimism of the 1950s and 1960s, becoming sites of social breakdown and poverty in the economic turmoil of the 1970s and structures of ridicule and disdain in the individualistic, Thatcherite 1980s, before being held up, by certain sections of the British public, as sites of heritage and importance in

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the twenty-first century. Rather than continuing to trace this broad narrative, this chapter explores how Pasmore arrived at this public, abstract statement of community and home. It argues that Pasmore’s artistic developments that led to the construction of the Pavilion were driven by an awareness of home under threat during wartime – the Pavilion is, in effect, shaped by his attempts to grapple with the time of reconstruction and the question of home across nearly twenty-five years. In previous chapters, this book has focused on instances of artists representing home by moving increasingly away from the stability of the domestic space (partly, though not always, as a result of marginal masculinities); Pasmore, similarly, traverses boundaries between public and private, though he does so not out of a need to define home for himself but to form home on a community scale in the aftermath of war. His work attests to the possibilities and failures of imagining home for others – for a town, for the nation – through a subjectivity that was shaped by war and reconstruction. The first section of this chapter traces how Pasmore’s paintings of the 1940s and 1950s – domestic scenes like Lamplight, 1941, riverscape images like The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith, 1944–7, and abstract landscapes like The Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White, 1950–1 – responded to home under threat. In Pasmore’s art, that home stretches from the domestic sphere to visions of the national landscape as he seeks to find an artistic language that can speak to the task of public reconstruction. The second section of this chapter explores Pasmore’s work at Peterlee that led to the construction of the Pavilion, tracing how this retained the methods and concerns of his works that responded to war. I return to British psychoanalysis to understand how the subjective experience of home under threat influenced the construction of the environment at Peterlee. At the centre of this is the Pavilion, which stands, at the end of this chapter, as a flawed vision of a form of public reconstruction that sought to make home on a community scale while grappling with the unsteady time of reconstruction.

Pasmore’s paintings in the 1940s and 1950s and the legacy of war In an interview with Denis Duerden in 1970 – not long after the Apollo Pavilion was constructed – Pasmore looked back on the rapid development of his art from the 1940s onward and saw clear links in the way he had progressed. To him, designing the south west area of Peterlee had been like working on an enormous landscape painting, to the extent that, from his point of view, ‘the landscape painting, the relief, and architecture, they all tie up’.11 The

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start of this journey appears to have been his contact with the writings of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists in the later years of the Second World War. Pasmore and his family had experienced the impact of war from their home in London and spent periods of time out of the city. They took up residence when they could at Biddesden House in Wiltshire, owned by Pasmore’s friend Bryan Guinness, where Pasmore found himself exploring their temporary home’s extensive library. He explored writing by Cézanne, Seurat, Van Gogh and Turner, amongst others, and claimed that he found ‘a theory which gave a new dimension to visual representation by uniting subjective and objective factors in a dialectical relationship’.12 In more ordinary terms, he seems to have viewed the writings of key artists from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as enabling him to think about his position as an artist and an individual, in relation to his subject matter and the world at large. For Pasmore, to be a modern artist was to recognize that ‘there is no clear division between the artist, the sensibility and the mind of the artist, and the object he is painting’.13 His role was to negotiate the relationship between the outer, objective world and inner, subjective experience, creating works that operated somewhere between those experiences. This is key to understanding the development of his painting in the 1940s and 1950s, where he turns specifically to reflecting on the individual and the environment, and their connections to an ever-widening conception of home in the context of war and its aftermath. This concern for the relationship between the subjective and objective, the internal and the external, begins with wartime paintings like Lamplight, 1941 (Figure 27). Here, two figures are seated at a table in an interior. On the right of the canvas is a female figure: this is Wendy Blood, Pasmore’s wife, sitting with her head bowed, immersed in an activity – she may be reading (there are books on the table in front of her) or sewing (Pasmore had depicted her doing this in other works around this time). On the left of the canvas, on the other side of the table, is Pasmore himself. He is leaning back in his chair, one arm raised towards his mouth as if he is holding a pipe and the other resting on his knee. At the centre of the work, placed on the table, is the lamp of the title, creating a crisp, bright white silhouette and throwing light, and dramatic shadows, around the room in a way that distorts and obscures its figures, objects and actions. Pasmore seems concerned with the tonal effects and distortions of light and colour in a contained space: the light from the lamp pools and glows in the green jug in front of it, and throws one stalk of leaves from the bunch of flowers within it into relief. The green of the wall behind the sitters, also modulated by the lamplight, is echoed in other areas of the painting, such as Pasmore’s jacket, Wendy’s shawl, the glass of the jug and even the leaves of the flowers. This is an image that is beautifully, atmospherically lit and is arranged around a harmony of unified green tones.

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FIGURE 27  Victor Pasmore, Lamplight, 1941, oil on canvas, 635 × 762mm, Tate, London © Tate, London, 2017. The effect is to give a sense of all-pervasive unity to the composition in terms of light and colour that also reflects the unity and partnership of its two sitters. The deep shadows, warm, well-lit centre and arrangement around the table also lend the work undertones of contentment, self-containment and selfsufficiency. It has the kind of atmosphere we might expect from an image of a couple in a domestic interior: warm, contented, comfortable, cosy and private. This was an atmosphere that had very recently been disrupted. In July 1940, Germany began bombing British towns and cities and the Blitz followed from September 1940, bringing an ever-present and immediate threat to the lives and homes of the people in major British urban centres. Pasmore experienced the bombing early on from his home in Ebury Street, not far from Victoria in central London. He began a letter to then Director of the National Gallery and family friend Kenneth Clark in July 1940 by expressing the anxiety of being under attack: ‘Perhaps you can sleep through all the noise, I wish I could. But having no suitable air raid shelter in my house, it is difficult to take one’s mind off the proceedings.’14 In March 1941, Pasmore wrote to the artist Graham Bell and described how a bomb had fallen ‘uncomfortably close’ to

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his studio, with destructive effects: ‘The whole of the glass roof and plaster of the ceiling fell in while we were sitting by the fire.’ He frames the effects of the Blitz as bursting catastrophically through the ceiling, shattering an almost clichéd moment of domestic ease. Just a few weeks later in April, Pasmore mentioned further destruction in another letter to Clark – ‘One section of Ebury Street, unfortunately our section, is practically a shambles and seems to have been specially selected’ – but assured him that he was consoling himself ‘by painting a view of the remains’.15 Lamplight bears the marks of this destruction: it was torn by flying glass and was subsequently patched up on the back. The stability of Pasmore’s home was not just called into question by bombs, but also by the looming threat of conscription. He initially tried to register as a conscientious objector, though appears to have failed to convince a tribunal of adequate reasons for this in early 1941. By the end of the year, he had been conscripted and was posted in Edinburgh, then Sandhurst, where he appears to have had a change of heart after moves were made to station him abroad, and he absconded while on leave in London in the summer of 1942. He was quickly arrested and sentenced to three to six months in prison. While in prison, Pasmore mounted several appeals, arguing that he had initially attempted to meet the requirements of the army without violating his conscience, but eventually realized this was not possible. He was backed by letters of support from artist Augustus John, critic Clive Bell and most notably Kenneth Clark, who describes Pasmore as one of the six best artists in the country at the time, whose ‘first duty to society is to paint’. These appeals, bolstered by the words of support from Pasmore’s influential connections, were successful in September 1942, when he was granted complete exemption from further military service and re-joined his family, who were now living in Chiswick in West London.16 Pasmore’s wartime experiences – ranging from the physical destruction of home by bombs and the rupture of familial relationships through conscription – were not necessarily unusual. Nevertheless, he consistently registered aspects of wartime experience and elements of his home that he felt important to retain. Lamplight could be read as a painted statement of home and companionate marriage in the face of wartime rupture, while he also produced several portraits of Wendy over this period too, commenting in a letter to Clark that ‘without her I should find it very difficult, probably impossible’.17 More generally, Pasmore spoke of a desire to retain a sense of normality in the face of war, again to Clark: ‘I feel very strongly that the permanent things of life, among which painting has a place, must, must, if it is humanly possible, continue unruffled by the vandalism that is now taking place.’18 Lamplight can be considered as a tentative exploration of the relationship between the individual, environment and the question of home, at a moment when their relationship was threatened and disrupted by war.

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As the 1940s progressed, landscape became a key subject for Pasmore and the question of the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity became a more explicit concern. Initially, Pasmore drew on the landscape around his home in West London in the final years of the war. A key example is The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith, No. 1, produced between 1944 and 1947 (Figure 28). It is based on a view from Pasmore’s home at 16 Hammersmith Terrace on the southern side of Chiswick Mall, which looked across neighbouring gardens over to the River Thames. The painting is constructed with minimal, geometric forms that approximate certain objects and fixtures of the landscape, as well as pale, watery tones of colour. On the left side of the canvas are the Hammersmith gardens of the title. Pasmore turns their fences or walls into barely there structures, defined by thin grey diagonal lines. The repetitive, surging effect of gardens at the back of a row of houses will be familiar to anyone who has ever looked down at a view like this from an upstairs window, though Pasmore has chosen to imbue them with a sense of simple indeterminacy. There are trees, flowers and foliage in these gardens, though he has simplified those too. Tree branches reach out, above their spaces, picked out with thin, well-defined lines of grey or black paint. To the left of the centre of the canvas, in front of the horizon, these tree branches appear to begin to form into a flat, linear, abstract composition, at least semiindependent of the space and subjects around it. Other features of the gardens

FIGURE 28  Victor Pasmore, The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith, No. 1, 1944–7, oil on canvas, 791 × 1097 × 25mm, Tate, London © Tate, London, 2017.

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are picked out in small red, maroon and green dots of paint that immediately recall the Pointillist technique of French Post-Impressionist Georges Seurat. Pasmore makes them modulate in flat swarms, at times forming them into the approximate shape of a bush or hedge and allowing them to spread and settle into less well-defined states at others. In the background, to the right, is the River Thames. It is calm and quiet with little sign of the industry that still dominated sections of the river in this area in the 1940s. It is depicted in a cool blue, subtly reflecting hints of light. Above, the sky is represented in atmospheric grey tones modulated with hints of blue, orange and pink, with the moon at its centre. The calm atmosphere of The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith and the sense that Pasmore was using this kind of work as a site for painterly improvisation places it at odds with the experience of this area of London and the River Thames more generally during wartime. Hammersmith and Chiswick were, like much of London, subject to Nazi bombing raids. Though this particular area of the city escaped the brunt of the attacks (by the end of the first wave of the Blitz in 1941, only 4 per cent of houses here were classed as destroyed, demolished or damaged, compared to 38 per cent in the City and 26 per cent in Stepney), the London County Council bomb damage maps record that they were affected.19 By 1945, Hammersmith in particular had suffered several V1 hits: they are recorded as having landed to the south and the west of the town hall and riverside gardens, completely destroying sections of surrounding buildings. Along Hammersmith Broadway, further major destruction is recorded. Down at Hammersmith Terrace, the location of the second house that Pasmore took in the area and where he would have been living during this second wave of attacks, they appear to have managed to escape any direct damage. However, at the end of the terrace, and along Chiswick Mall where Pasmore had previously lived, there is general blast damage recorded, along with some, isolated, very serious destruction of entire buildings.20 While these incidents of bomb damage pale in comparison to parts of central and East London and the area around the Docklands, they nevertheless demonstrate that bombs fell not just on Pasmore’s doorstep, but around the subjects that he was obsessively painting at this time. He records his own impressions of this destruction in a letter to William Coldstream from Hammersmith Terrace in late 1944, mentioning ‘a few crazy interludes, first the flying bomb and now the rocket’ though claims that London remains ‘much the same as when you left it … I cannot imagine anywhere else more enchanting at this time of the year’.21 During the Blitz, the River Thames as a whole became the explicit target for Nazi bombing. This occurred largely towards the east, with the river appearing to have been engulfed by a ‘hurricane of fire’ during its early attacks when warehouses on the shore were bombed and vital goods and

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materials destroyed.22 The Thames was targeted not just for practical reasons, however: it served a symbolic role as the river running through the heart of the nation’s capital, so that, as historian Jonathan Schneer has put it, ‘the fate of the nation and the fate of the river’ were ‘inextricably intertwined’ at this point.23 To produce images of the Thames at this wartime moment, then, is to represent a subject of attack as well as one of vital symbolic purpose. The section of the river around Hammersmith and Chiswick did not suffer the most brutal effects of the bombing and the painting, it is worth noting, was produced over a period of time when the threat of bombardment from the skies would have waned and then ceased. However, this may well have made this section of the river particularly appealing for Pasmore: it was a still intact area of the symbolic heart of London and the nation, and his paintings give little indication of destruction or its threat. Pasmore had gained some direct wartime experience of the Thames himself, so would have been aware of the threat it had faced in recent years: he took on river patrol work in the River Emergency Service in 1939 before he was conscripted, working as part of the crew of the boat of the writer and MP A.P. Herbert.24 He also appears to have found it to be a comforting subject to paint during wartime: Wendy mentions to Clark in a letter c. 1942–3 that Pasmore, then based at Chiswick, was ‘finding consolation in the pleasant view from his window’.25 The Thames was a subject that had connections, for Pasmore, Londoners and the nation, with home under threat. The River Thames was a productive subject for Pasmore at this moment, both artistically and personally. The landscape clearly held contradictory meanings at this moment too: this was an area that was close to home, subject to the possibility of wartime destruction, but it was also the symbolic heart of the city and the nation that would, in time, require reconstruction. The contradictory nature of this environment at this particular moment is represented in Pasmore’s tentative, painterly approach. The features and aspects of the gardens are allowed to begin to detach from any immediate, solid, representational grounding: the branches of trees curve and intertwine into distinctly flat, geometric arrangements, the outlines of garden fences dissolve into diagonal grids, and the foliage of bushes and shrubbery become light clouds of Pointillist dots that drift across the surface of the lower part of the landscape. Space is indeterminate as a whole, with river and the land joining at some uncertain point, somewhere in the centre of the canvas. Even in the gardens, the space is blocked out with short, loose brushstrokes that give the supposedly dry land the appearance of a rippling pool of watery reflections. Above, the sky offers no more certainty. Is this the beginnings of sunrise, with subtle, hopeful hints of lilac and orange under the slate-grey London sky? Is it an atmospheric sunset, with the greys modulating more spectacular colours? Is it a grey afternoon or a night scene, made otherworldly from Pasmore’s

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window and studio? Time and space are difficult to read here, bearing little relation to how this kind of view might ordinarily be seen: landscape paintings like this were, after all, inventions. The title of the work underlines this with a touch of humour, referencing the mythical Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It is the multifaceted resonances of the River Thames in wartime – a space that had been under threat but which had also endured, an external space that also had personal resonances for Pasmore and other Londoners – that makes it a viable area for experimentation here. The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith is a response to the indeterminacy and uncertainty of the wartime riverscape. Space is broken and shifted, as features of the landscape are set down, altered and re-arranged into increasingly flat surface patterns. Time is made ambiguous too, as the painting cannot be placed concretely at dawn or dusk. Produced at a moment when war was becoming peace, this work seems to intentionally suggest both an end and a beginning, both destruction and creation. This is an image of the riverscape held in a moment of indeterminacy and transition; it seems to suggest both repair and desolation, both history and the specificity of this present moment. It builds in uncertainty, but seems to find, in its improvisatory passages, moments of creativity and self-affirmation. The uncertainty of The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith appears to have been something that plagued Pasmore; looking back on works like this one, he registered a sense of dissatisfaction: ‘It became more and more clear that one couldn’t finish one’s work, it was impossible to make a final statement.’ He frames this as being related to what he saw as the problem of the unstable relationship between artist and subject, individual and environment that was at the heart of his thinking at this moment. He felt that his experimental and still largely figurative style was not allowing him to explore this as he hoped, and he turned to abstraction in the years after the war. The joint exhibition of work by Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1945 – containing works that still had the power to shock and appal British viewers and that triggered hysterical write-ups in the popular press – merely underlined the creeping sense for Pasmore that abstraction was calling. The exhibition, in his words, ‘torpedoed the whole thing’, though it was not until 1947 that he would paint his first abstract works and he would wait until 1948 to show them publicly. In doing so, Pasmore began to develop a new approach: ‘I thought I must start again’.26 He adopted a new visual language for his art, based around arbitrary geometric forms – squares, rectangles, triangles – applied, initially, to painted canvases, before, in the coming years, experimenting in collage and relief. This step into abstraction was significant for Pasmore beyond formal considerations; it represents a further expansion of his concerns with

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the relationship between artist and subject, individual and environment, subjectivity and objectivity, and their relationship to the negotiation of war and its aftermath. This is encapsulated in a post-war abstract work by Pasmore: The Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White, 1950–1 (Figure 29). While Pasmore focused on simple geometric shapes in his early abstract canvases, he embraced the spiral form by 1950. This was a form that occurred in nature. Pasmore read d’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form, which argued that the spiral occurred in the structures of plants and living organisms as well as in the molecular structures of rock forms. The spiral can also be formed by creating and dividing a rectangle in terms of the Golden Ratio. In The Snowstorm, the Golden Ratio has been used to place one of the two dominant spirals on the canvas, to the right of the centre; the other dominant spiral is placed in the centre. Both are picked out in thick white lines, emphasized with black, with varying intensities. The rest of the canvas appears to emanate from these forms, with curving and linear geometric forms moving out and across the rest of its surface. There is, however, something of a division about a third of the way down the canvas:

FIGURE 29  Victor Pasmore, The Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White, 1950–1, oil on canvas, 119.4 × 152.4cm, Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London © Estate of Victor Pasmore. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2018.

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you can make out the faint trace of a line and the spiral and curving forms in the upper part of the picture are fainter, less strictly defined than those below. It is difficult not to read this like a horizon line. Pasmore’s title of The Snowstorm underlines this kind of reading, even as his less evocative subtitle – Spiral Motif in Black and White – seeks to emphasize the painting’s formal process. The tension in a work like The Snowstorm between the references to the external world and formal abstraction is something that Pasmore struggled to articulate, though this also proved evocative and intriguing for those who came into contact with his spiral works. On the one hand, Pasmore continually emphasized that ‘the spiral was simply one sort of arbitrary form which … did not represent anything, from which I could start from’. However, he acknowledged the sense that, from this start, representation might emerge, particularly as he was already a landscape painter: I was interested in what these things became. To some extent a lot of pictures do look rather like landscapes, but only because I’m interested in what concrete form, line, spiral, or square will become … I started with a spiral and they became landscapes and one found at an early stage I was inevitably putting a horizon somewhere or other out of sheer force of habit.27 It is difficult to call a work like The Snowstorm either abstract or representative; for Pasmore, it began in the former but developed into something that inevitably recalled the latter. On one evening in January 1951, Pasmore’s spiral works and other abstract paintings were under discussion at the ICA in London. This was the inaugural Public View, an event chaired by art critic David Sylvester and based around an idea by the artist Richard Hamilton, who suggested that a regular evening at the gallery be devoted to critics and artists discussing works of art in current exhibitions in front of an audience. Pasmore attended to hear his works, then on show at the Redfern Gallery, discussed alongside works from the Italian artist Orneore Metelli’s show at the Hanover Gallery. At one point in the evening, the spiral forms became a focus for debate. The artist William Matvyn Wright compared them to the Greek meander pattern, in the way they ‘seem to take you into the centre, but also bring you out again’ and observed that they seemed, to him, like a ‘tentative groping away from geometry into feeling’ through forms that may well have particular emotional resonances for Pasmore and viewers. He follows this with a question to Pasmore, asking him for whom he is painting and why, which appears to make Pasmore a little uncomfortable and encourage him to make preparations to leave (‘I

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think it’s time I went’), though discussions continue after he goes. The artist Patrick Heron pinpoints the trouble that many viewers have in describing Pasmore’s spiral works as either abstractions or landscapes, driven by a desire to ‘stop floundering in doubt’. However, for Heron, ‘it is just the sensation of floundering when confronted with such a picture that I appreciate’. Artist and ICA founder Roland Penrose appears to have brought his own position in Surrealism to Pasmore’s spirals. Rather than painting his dreams as the Surrealists had done, which to Penrose was akin to painting ‘a dead memory’, Pasmore ‘seemed to build his pictures as he dreamed’, which was seemingly a more active and profound way of composing a work. Richard Hamilton was less convinced, however, describing Pasmore’s works as ‘limited expressions in the field of basic design’.28 The question of the nature and implications of the spirals was clearly intriguing, but hardly certain. The variety of responses to Pasmore’s spirals from this art world audience is indicative of the extent to which they posed a number of questions and elicited personal, searching answers. There is the possibility that these forms might move into emotional expression (Matvyn Wright), that they may be a constructive sort of dreaming through art (Penrose), that they may induce, in their indefinable position between abstraction and landscape, a state of floundering that is perhaps productive and meaningful (Heron). Heron had reviewed Pasmore’s Redfern show that formed the basis for this discussion just a month earlier, in an issue of Art News and Review. He grapples with the inability to completely place the spiral forms here again in a contradictory passage. For Heron, the spirals ‘invent and define space’ in a new way without any reference to ‘this or that in the world of appearances’. But there remains something of the world in them: they are ‘demonstrations of an elemental force-pattern in the physical universe’ that he links to Leonardo Da Vinci’s illustrations of whirlwinds and whirlpools.29 Heron’s distinction is key here, but it continues to posit Pasmore’s spirals and works like The Snowstorm in some indeterminate realm; their forms become the basis for a new construction of space that nevertheless remains rooted in if not the physical form of the landscape then at least its natural and elemental forces. Pasmore, for his part, spoke in the pages of Art News and Review in February 1951 and also sought to emphasize the sense that the spirals were not derived from nature but did echo its processes and rhythms: What I have done … is not the result of a process of abstraction in front of nature, but a method of construction emanating from within. I have tried to compose as music is composed, with formal elements which, in themselves, have no descriptive qualities at all.30

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There is, here, this sense of these seemingly objective forms being utilized in a deeply subjective way in the process of painting. Pasmore’s suggestion that they lack any descriptive qualities completely is correct to some extent, and yet they do create space, an approximate kind of landscape (that horizon line drawn in ‘out of sheer force of habit’) that has strange, indeterminate qualities. This is a landscape that refuses to settle, which seems to be building and constructing before our eyes in a way that echoes Pasmore’s description of his painting process. Forms grow and move out from one another, veering and emanating in gentle curves in some sections of the canvas and interlocking like simple jigsaw pieces in others. At the same time, this is an unsettling space to construct. The flat, all-over white and black forms vary little, aside from subtle modulations in tone and line in the two uneven halves of ‘land’ and ‘sky’. There is a sense of something akin to the disruption and distortion of space in a snowstorm – the bleaching of colour, the levelling of forms and depth in a blanket of falling and fallen snow. Again, to follow Pasmore, this is not a representation of a snowstorm, but an image of its effects perhaps – its disorientation, its mixture of familiarity and strangeness. It is significant, then, that Pasmore considered the spiral form to be a relevant and timely theme to continue to explore in 1951 for works that he created for the Festival of Britain. The Snowstorm was painted for the 60 Paintings for ’51 exhibition, organized to coincide with the Festival (Keith Vaughan’s contribution to this is discussed in Chapter 3), and was one of the submitted works that was acquired by the Arts Council at the exhibition’s close. Art played a significant role not just in the exhibition, which travelled around the country, but also in the construction of the Festival’s centrepiece on the war-scarred, slum-ridden south bank of the River Thames in London. This became the South Bank Exhibition, made up of a series of exhibits contained in modernist buildings focusing on The Land and The People of Britain, with the Dome of Discovery at its centre (which celebrated the achievements of Britain in science and technology) and overlooked by the giant, cigar-shaped, aluminium-clad Skylon. Murals by British painters decorated the buildings, while sculptures populated the outdoor areas. Pasmore contributed here too: he designed a mural for the outer wall of the Regatta Restaurant, which overlooked the river. The mural’s official title was The Waterfall, though retrospectively he also referred to it as A Jazz Mural; it was, inevitably, made up of spirals painted onto the tiled surface of the wall. Pasmore considered the spiral form to be a suitable means of encapsulating the post-war reconstructive spirit, which he connected with the explosion in the arts after the renewal of free expression at the end of the war. He was excited by the opportunity to work on something that could operate alongside architecture, and sought to ‘transform’ the building and space ‘optically through means of contrast’. As he designed the spiral mural that would tumble down one side of

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the building, he worked with ‘the idea of “exploding” the Regatta Restaurant’ through the use of the spirals.31 There are ways, then, in which the spiral forms of a work like The Snowstorm appear to have represented something of a breakthrough for Pasmore. The spiral was an abstract element that could form the basis for works of art that could construct and alter space – whether in the imagined landscape of The Snowstorm or running down the side of the Regatta Restaurant. If the partly figurative experimentations of works like The Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith allowed for meditative reflections on a moment of transition and uncertainty, then Pasmore seems to have been determined that spirals offered a way of imagining a new relationship with space and the external world at this celebratory moment of post-war reconstruction. At the same time, however, it is hard to shake off the connotations of a word like ‘exploding’ that Pasmore uses to describe the intended effect of his mural The Waterfall. He of course intended this as a way to describe the vivid, active way the spirals would interact with the modernist architecture of the restaurant for viewers, though it also has destructive connotations, particularly within a commission so closely related to post-war recovery. This also underlines the unsettling implications of The Snowstorm. This is a constructed landscape that bears many of the connotations of renewal and growth that Pasmore framed as key to their development, but it also contains destructive elements. The bleached colour and dizzying, all over effect of the spirals create a space that refuses to settle, beyond the faint horizon, into readable space. It is unpopulated and empty: this could perhaps have given a sense that something could develop here, inspired by the natural forces that seem to remain, but it also holds connotations of destruction, perhaps echoing the kinds of landscapes of destruction that British viewers would have encountered at home during the war and known to have existed elsewhere (the snowstorm of the title could even bring connotations of a nuclear winter in the aftermath of an atomic bomb). Traces of war, still, remain. In this way, Pasmore’s spirals and his more general progression into painted abstraction take on less of the forced optimism of 1951 and more of the realities of living and working through a period of war and reconstruction, with all of its fears, anxieties, hopes and imaginings. These works appear to encapsulate the contradictions of this time: the urge to reconstruct and recover, always underpinned by the spectre of war. The tentative responses of art world figures to Pasmore’s spirals seem increasingly appropriate here: we might follow Penrose to think of Pasmore dreaming through art, processing the construction and deconstruction of this uncertain period, and we might embrace Heron’s state of floundering in front of a work and technique that creates an ambiguous space of post-war recovery. To trace the development of Pasmore’s painting in the 1940s and 1950s – from domesticity-focused

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images of the home under threat, to improvisatory, indeterminate landscapes of a symbolic wartime target, and the spiral works that appear to contain both construction and destruction – is to find an artist pursuing a concern for the relationship between the individual and environment that was formed, inherently, under wartime conditions, and, in doing so, moves gradually outward, from domesticity to the broader homes of the city and the nation. This is a response that is influenced, in part, by this historical moment of flux between war and its aftermath, where the boundaries that war removed between self and environment were still being reformed. More specifically, home unfurls here in ever broader terms as the years pass because Pasmore is seeking a specific, public role for art within the reconstruction of home. He would find that role, and a way to adapt the approaches that he had developed in painting, at Peterlee.

Peterlee, play and post-war reconstruction Pasmore’s artistic journey so far has been dominated by an interest in the relationship between what he referred to in quite broad terms as objectivity and subjectivity, and what I have explored as the relationship between the individual and their environment and its connections to the question of home, across scales, in the post-war period. His artworks – in their embrace of indeterminacy and their folding in of destruction within construction – have been spheres for the exploration of these ideas that also attest to the ambiguities of this reconstructive moment. When Pasmore takes up his role as Consulting Director of Urban Design for the South West Area of Peterlee New Town in Country Durham in 1954, these concerns – for individual and environment, for war and reconstruction, for home – are part of his artistic language and inform his designs for the town. This section reads Pasmore’s designs at Peterlee, including the Pavilion, alongside British psychoanalysis, particularly the work of D.W. Winnicott, as a way of contextualizing and understanding his concern with the relationship between individual and environment and exploring how concepts of home were influential in Pasmore’s approach to town planning. Looking back on his commission at Peterlee in an interview in the 1980s, Pasmore described how the town had been intended to house residents of the declining mining villages in the Country Durham area; it was to be, with all the optimism of the post-war reconstructive spirit, ‘the greatest city on earth for miners’.32 It was first conceived by C.W. Clark, surveyor to the local council, in the mid-1930s; a complete scheme for a new town had been developed by the end of the Second World War. An article in Picture Post from

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late 1948, ‘Peterlee: A Miners’ Town to End Squalor’, covered the early stages of the development of the town and reflected the sense that it was to be ‘a new centre of life and hope’, removed from the poor conditions of the pits. Named after Peter Lee, the celebrated Durham miners’ leader and the first Labour Chairman of a County Council in England, it was intended to embody his spirit of justice for the local mining community, with new expansive green spaces and vastly improved living conditions, and reflect ‘what miners think of themselves’.33 The original architect, the Polish modernist Berthold Lubetkin, initially conceived a design based on large, looming tower blocks, though these proved unbuildable due to subsidence in an area that had already been extensively mined and he resigned in the early stages. In the aftermath, A. V. Williams, the town’s general manager, was keen to retain an element of forward-thinking design for Peterlee and was inspired to contact Pasmore after attending a retrospective show of his work. Pasmore insisted on visiting the site before agreeing to anything and, having been unimpressed with other new town developments that he had seen, was moved to accept: ‘I thought to myself this is a challenge I can’t refuse if I’m supposed to be an artist.’34 After getting Williams to agree to let him start from scratch on a brand new section of the town in its south west area and securing the help of a whole team of architects who would focus on the actual structures of the buildings leaving Pasmore free to work on the aesthetics and the layout, planning began. Pasmore’s approach to Peterlee was specific and tied to his own artistic explorations that had developed in the war and its aftermath. He seems to have worked with two now familiar concepts in mind, which inevitably intermingled: landscape, and the physical experience of the environment by the individual. He described how the plan of the whole of the south west area was conceived to ‘make an architectural impact against the landscape’ and spoke of his role as, very broadly, an ‘aesthetician’.35 Having determined that the housing units would begin as basic, flat-roofed cubes, Pasmore, with the help of his architects, began to plot their arrangement. This was done, first of all, through on-site visits. Pasmore and his team would move around the space and discuss possibilities, which he would then work up into a sketch or a layout, thinking all the time of the effect of moving about in the space of the town: It’s a kinetic process. As you walk there, turn here, through a little passage there, out into an open space here, meet a tall building there, a gable-end here, a group of houses there and so forth.36 This process had a landscape element, just like his paintings. For Pasmore, landscape and the experience of space were inseparable – ‘landscape is

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environment’ was how he summarized their connections – so that just as painters develop a ‘sense of form and space as a mobile experience’ so do architects and designers. The difference was ‘in landscape painting you create an imaginary environment; in urban design you make a real one’.37 Rather than using a model, as architects or other designers may have done, he plotted out the arrangement of his section of the town using his own experience of the space and a flat plan. He described it as a process of ‘designing from the inside’ in a phrase that recalls the improvisatory, subjective use of basic forms in his abstract landscape works. He made rough plans for the area, seen from above, where cubic houses are arranged in clusters around curving roads and cul-de-sacs, with an intentional balance between blocked forms and curving lines, recalling, broadly, his abstract works from previous years. In February 1961, Architectural Review examined the first fruits of Pasmore and his team’s plan and included a series of photographs of the new houses in their particular settings. These were intended to indicate not only the ‘balance of unity and variety’ in the buildings themselves, but also their ‘intricate but systematic grouping’, which ‘contrasts sharply with the green landscape and has a positive visual relationship to it’.38 The photos themselves focused on particular views down streets, with houses and flats framed by the surrounding landscape, or demonstrations of the multi-levelled pedestrian areas and the scattered, unique arrangements of the buildings themselves. They also include empty prams outside homes or children playing on modernist sculptures to suggest that people – and particularly families – were already beginning to find a home here. Pasmore’s concern with designing an environment that is not just to be moved through, but also to be explored, aesthetically enjoyed and lived in – as Architectural Review sought to emphasize – had been a feature of his practice more widely prior to and alongside his work at Peterlee. He began working in relief for the first time at the end of 1951: these were works constructed out of a combination of man-made materials like painted wood, Perspex and plastic. They were arranged with the intention of creating effects of light and movement for viewers in front of them, instigating a more dynamic relationship between viewer and artwork. These ideas were explored on a larger scale in Pasmore’s collaborations with Richard Hamilton and Lawrence Alloway on an Exhibit, 1957 and an Exhibit II, 1959. These were interactive installations, made up of coloured sheets of rectangular plastic, hung and arranged in the gallery space. In Pasmore’s words, they were attempts ‘to produce an abstract painting through which you could actually walk’. The exhibition catalogue and invitation card for the installation of an Exhibit at the ICA in London introduced it as ‘a game, an artwork, an environment’ that was ‘pre-planned, individuated, verbalized’ by Hamilton, Pasmore, and Alloway, to be ‘played, viewed, populated’ by its visitors. The meaning was dependent on

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those visitors, as the piece was ‘a game, a maze, a ceremony’ completed by their participation.39 Pasmore was increasingly seeing the potential in creating static environments that viewers could inhabit, activate and, in doing so, complete. This approach suggests a number of parallels with the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott and his theory of play. For Winnicott, play occurs in a potential space, between the objective, external world of reality and the subjective, inner world of the individual. It first occurs in young children and relates to the infant’s engagement with transitional objects, where they relate to and use external objects in their development from a state of complete dependence on the mother to one of relative independence. As the child gets older, the engagement with transitional phenomena becomes play, a creative activity in which elements of the external world are imbued with personal, inner experiences and relevance. Winnicott links play with creativity, though this is not necessarily the explicit creative act of the artist: it is a more ordinary, everyday creativity, found in hobbies, activities, conversation and active experience within a community. Play is a kind of searching and seeking out of selfhood within a potential space between objectivity and subjectivity, and is crucial, in Winnicott’s formulation, to the development of selfhood.40 These ideas offer a striking parallel to Pasmore’s interest in the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity, and his desire to encourage an active, everyday relationship between individual and environment at Peterlee. Winnicott’s ideas, as I outlined in my introduction, had permeated the institutions and discourses of post-war British society and had come to inform popular conceptions of subjectivity, the family and community. Crucially, these ideas had emerged from anxieties about the disruption of family life during wartime.41 It was from this context that his theory of play emerged too: through play, the child moves from dependency on its mother, to transitional objects, which in turn form the basis for its relationship to the outside world. This was Winnicott’s adaptation of Kleinian thought that made the relationship between individual, family and environment a ‘question of social integration as national policy’.42 This strand of British psychoanalysis, then, offers a means of understanding Pasmore’s approach to the design of Peterlee in terms that were particularly influential in contemporary British society. Pasmore’s concern with art’s active role in influencing the relationship between viewer and environment as a kind of game suggests that he was interested in something akin to Winnicott’s play in his art and collaborative work. Pasmore’s kinetic process of ‘designing from the inside’ at Peterlee might be considered a form of play – he places himself in the position of a resident (like Alloway’s participant), organizing the placements of structures, roads and pathways in order to create a dynamic, productive relationship to environment. Pasmore also sought to encourage a state of play – an active,

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ordinary engagement between individual and environment – in the day-today experiences of the Peterlee residents themselves. In this way, both Winnicott and Pasmore share an interest in the way in which play could be a means of cementing subjectivity within the context of a wider community; for Pasmore this was the resident in Peterlee, for Winnicott this was the individual in democratic society. Both figures move from the space of physical or psychic interior outwards, too. Winnicott’s theory of play emerges from the relationships of the familial home (particularly the mother and child); Pasmore, meanwhile, reflected that ‘urban space is interior like the interior of a house, but on a huge scale’.43 Both men are seeking a vision of post-war home and community that allows subjectivity to form the objective world. The response of Peterlee’s residents to Pasmore’s designs, however, even before the construction of the Apollo Pavilion in 1969, was mixed. There was a feeling amongst some that the development of Peterlee was disrupting the sense of community that had formed in the mining villages in the area: one attendee at the annual meeting of the Durham County Association of Parish Councils passionately argued that local communities were being ‘wiped off the face of the earth – bulldozed to the ground … it’s all wrong’.44 Later in the year, an anonymous ‘Aged Villager’ sent a poem to the letters page of the Durham and Chester-le-Street Chronicle that mourns the loss of village community life: Ye villagers of Durham, oh, do assert yourselves, Before these planning officers wipe out our country ‘elves’, And all our country customs, and country ways of life, And plant us all in dismal towns, ‘mong stress and strain and strife …45 Peterlee’s planners appear to have been aware of the need to establish a sense of community in the town, placing particular emphasis on the areas of the home and wider community where everyday instances of play might occur: its tenants handbook included instructions on how to best tend to the interior and exterior decoration of its homes, extended guidelines on how to make the most of the gardens, and details on local doctors and churches.46 By the early 1960s, however, some residents had begun to settle, as James Jackson, a local police officer, asserted: Slowly but surely a real community spirit is developing and although the town has its critics, none can deny it is a much more delightful place to live in than many of our derelict colliery villages.47 The difference in standard of living to the colliery villages was certainly appreciated by Peterlee’s residents. In contrast to the cramped terraces of Easington or Monk Hesleden, where homes were owned by the collieries and

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workers were continually threatened with eviction, the modernist buildings were a huge step up (Mr P. Rogerston, interviewed by the Northern Echo, agreed: ‘It’s a different atmosphere altogether from the colliery’).48 The new buildings were not always to everyone’s tastes or free of problems: a local reporter records some local residents comparing them to ‘rabbit hutches’ and ‘boxes with windows’, and there do appear to have been some structural problems due to the need to build quickly. Others, however, seemed to relish their modern amenities. One housewife described being in Peterlee as ‘ideal living’, while another was particularly taken with her home’s up-to-date facilities, which were ‘every woman’s dream’.49 The problems of community do seem to have remained in Peterlee, however. By the mid-1970s, the performance artist Stuart Brisley had begun a project with local residents that attempted to create a social history of the new town in order to develop a greater sense of local community, built out of photographs and interviews. A Guardian article written at the time echoes this need for a sense of identity in Peterlee: Shared experience, rich memories and humour born of tough times, and a sense of continuity with the past are some of the key things that kept those villages together. Peterlee is not alone among the new towns in its problem, since it is in the nature of new places that they have no history.50 A lack of history is something to which Pasmore’s new language had little response. The villages that Peterlee sought to replace had been formed and developed in the shadow of the coal mining; though this was an industry now well into its decline, the structures, institutions and emotions of community had remained, to some extent. In Peterlee, there was no new industry to unite the community and support it quite like mining had done. At the same time, old identities, roles and communities did not necessarily have a place in a new town like this. Brisley’s work appears to have been an attempt to link the past, shared histories of the mining villages with the emerging histories and memories of Peterlee; Pasmore’s design appears to have paid little attention to any sense of local, collective history or its lack, despite his approach having its roots in his response to war. Pasmore’s work at Peterlee struggled to engage its residents in part because his approach of ‘designing from the inside’ worked from a number of assumptions: that his conception of the experience of space would be applicable to others, that the ordinary routines of day-to-day life could enliven the spaces that he created in a form of play, and that a sense of belonging and identity could be formed out of an aesthetic, active response to an environment. This way of thinking develops, as we have seen, in a wartime and post-war society where broadly psychoanalytic conceptions of subjectivity

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and the individual’s relationship to their environment had permeated general discourse. For Pasmore, it meant that he could envision a means of working from individual experience out to create an external environment out of and in response to subjective experience. Sociologist Richard Sennett has argued that the attempt to foster communities in such personal, subjective terms by post-war planners like those in Peterlee amounts to a flawed attempt to ‘make psychological values into social relations’.51 As we have seen, the realities of post-war life for Peterlee’s residents – the uprooting of a shared community and history, the impact of economic decline – meant that Pasmore’s design was a game that many could not – or would not – play. Much the same issues lie at the heart of the poor reception for the Apollo Pavilion. This too was a space designed to encourage some kind of active engagement between the residents of Peterlee and their environment: it was to be a space of everyday play, where mothers would stop and chat with neighbours on their way from one side of the estate to the other, where children could play and run about together, where people could linger and relax. It was also something to be looked at – a central monument to be seen from the surrounding homes – as well as something to be looked from, creating views across the town and the surrounding landscape. Pasmore envisioned the Pavilion as a modern-day equivalent of a temple, church or mosque – a ‘free and anonymous monument’ that could ‘lift the activity and psychology of an urban housing community on to a universal plane’, as he described it at the beginning of this chapter. However, whereas religious buildings represented belief and deeper meaning that created some kind of shared emotional investment from the surrounding community, Pasmore’s Pavilion struggled to unite its residents in the same way. Rather than allowing for an aesthetic appreciation of its geometric forms or creating vistas and views that would somehow imbue a sense of place and community in those who participated in them, it appears to have become a structure for the breakdown of community – daubed in graffiti, a space of anti-social behaviour. In this light, the Apollo Pavilion is the flawed culmination of an investment in a particularly broad, universalizing idea of the relationship between individual and environment, both on Pasmore’s part and on the part of the wider reconstructive project in Britain. Its broad stated aims – a space to look at or look from, for children to play on or families to socialize – have clear parallels with Winnicott’s focus on the ordinary, integrative play of everyday life and the wider social democratic, highly relational aims of post-war British society. Pasmore’s subsequent failure to unite the community of Peterlee, particularly around the contested and unloved Pavilion, speaks of the already waning influence of the idealism of the post-war settlement that had infused his own art and the institutions of British society. Historian Mathew Thomson,

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for instance, has demonstrated how the ideas and advice of popular British psychoanalysis began to be questioned and contested from the early 1960s onward, and were put under further pressure by economic decline in the late 1960s and 1970s.52 However, Pasmore’s Pavilion also troubles this relatively straightforward narrative. The Pavilion, like the wider aims of planners and psychoanalysts, had emerged from the trauma, upheaval and uncertainty of war. I have traced how Pasmore’s approach to the design of Peterlee and the Apollo Pavilion developed out of painted experiments that focused on home and the landscape under threat and recovery, and which hold the uncertainty of their subject matter on their surfaces. War haunts the Pavilion in this respect; its anxieties are present in its very construction, in the desire to create, rebuild, and fix a sense of the individual and environment, the home and community. The contradictions and uncertainties that inhabited Pasmore’s landscape paintings inevitably remain. This is not to suggest, of course, that the Pavilion’s connections to war were palpable to Peterlee’s residents and the Pavilion’s critics, and, of course, the town’s conception was not initiated by wartime destruction but the need to rehouse the mining communities. But war and reconstruction are part of the Pavilion’s history, as I have shown. Completed nearly twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War, Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion was a monument to wartime experience and the desire to reconstruct and reform homes and communities across Britain. It requires an understanding that holds these elements of its history together, that traces how this structure resonates with the unsteady time of the reconstruction of home. This chapter has argued that Victor Pasmore’s art and town-planning were shaped by the dual influences of a desire to make art speak to wider reconstructive aims and the experience and memories of the home under threat during wartime. These concerns were explored by Pasmore through his enduring interest in the role that art could play in mediating the relationship between objectivity and subjectivity. The parallels between Pasmore’s thinking and those of British psychoanalysis, particularly Winnicott’s theory of play, underline the way that his practice is embedded in contemporary discourses around home, family and subjectivity. While the other artists in this book have looked to negotiate home across increasingly broader spaces between public and private experience, Pasmore’s art shed those boundaries entirely, seeking to imagine the public reconstruction of home – for a community, a nation – in distinctly subjective terms. He offers not an encapsulation of the lived experience of home, but an example of the ways in which discourses around home permeated thinking about community and belonging in post-war Britain, with flawed results. His work also attests to the ways in which these discourses were simultaneously formed and undermined by the unsteady time of reconstruction. In the conclusion, I turn to a performance by the artists

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Gilbert & George that speaks of how the memories of war continued to shape imaginings of home and masculinity in another space of reconstruction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and I reflect on how their work underlines the negotiation of home and masculinity under reconstruction.

Conclusion Gilbert & George and the Persistence of Reconstruction

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n 1968, just before construction began on Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion, Gilbert & George declared themselves to be ‘living sculptures’. The two men were students at St Martin’s School of Art and had met one year earlier. Their decision to work together and to designate themselves as artworks reflected their aim of bringing art closely into contact with life. From 1968 until 1972, the artists gave performances like Underneath the Arches. This performance is the focus of the conclusion to this book, as it finds the artists exploring questions of home, shifting understandings of masculinity and the lingering legacy of the war. Just as Pasmore’s Pavilion held the enduring contradictions of reconstruction, Gilbert & George’s performance returns to wartime destruction, home and identities almost twenty-five years after the war’s end. This conclusion explores how Underneath the Arches performs the enduring temporal disruption of war as a way of underlining its continued centrality to and troubling of categories of home and masculinity in Britain in the late 1960s. Gilbert & George’s work is also a means of reflecting on the key findings of this book on home, masculinity, reconstruction and art in postwar Britain. The title of Gilbert & George’s performance came from the music that soundtracked it – ‘Underneath the Arches’ was a song by the music hall double act Flanagan and Allen from 1932. Its lyrics are about homelessness and refer to men sleeping rough under railway arches. For their performance, Gilbert & George wore what would become their conservative uniform for the rest of their career – shirts, ties and flannel suits – and moved with fluid but

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mechanical movements to the song. As they moved, they sang along; they became ‘singing sculptures’. One held a cane and the other held a glove, and, in several performances, the bodies of both men were covered with metallic paint to give them the appearance of bronze sculptures. Once the recording ended, the person holding the glove moved to restart the recording, the two men then exchanged glove and cane, and the performance began again. Underneath the Arches was presented in galleries, both in London and internationally; it also took place in the street. In October 1969, Gilbert & George celebrated the one-year anniversary of developing the work by staging a performance of it in East London. They made up invitations to advertise the performance to people in the art world as well as locals. It included a sketch of the artists standing next to a record player and called Underneath the Arches ‘the most fascinating, realistic, beautiful, dusty and serious art piece you have ever seen’. It continued: We would very much like you to be present at 3pm on 26th October when we present the above piece in the most naturalistic form, revealing to you a clear picture of avant garde art. Heading East from the Tower of London along Royal Mint Street brings you to Cable Street where we have chosen Railway Arch No. 8 for the historical occasion of our anniversary of ‘Underneath the Arches’.1 This seems to have been an attempt to mark the anniversary of the work by rooting it in the setting of its lyrics – they chose a railway arch, just off Cable Street and close to Limehouse Station. Fittingly, when they arrived for the performance – faces and hands covered with the usual metallic paint – they found that the arch was already occupied by two men sleeping rough: ‘When we arrived we found two tramps were already there. They didn’t pay any attention to us at all, nor to the few people who came to watch us. We thought that was wizard.’2 For this performance, Gilbert & George stood underneath railway arch no. 8 and performed, dressed in their usual flannel suits and accompanied by music from a record player.3 They erected small ropes behind and in front of themselves, like makeshift versions of the ropes you might encounter around sculptures in art galleries. They had an audience, made up of some adults, more teenagers and young people, and a significant number of children, who clustered to watch at the end of the archway. You can imagine the music and Gilbert & George’s strange repetitive movements and atypical clothing transfixing the children in particular. This setting was particularly important. The ground under the arches was muddy, scattered with debris, and worn, jagged debris hung from the underside of the arch, just above the heads of the two performers. In amongst the audience there

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was a pile of rubble, which some of the children clambered on in order to get a better view. Behind the audience was a derelict wall as well as a more recently erected corrugated fence. Behind this, blocks of flats were under construction, with scaffolding supporting the brick frameworks of new homes for this part of East London – homes that were perhaps even intended for some members of the audience. The context for this particular performance was a site bearing the signs of post-war reconstructive flux – new homes and homelessness, the debris of construction as well as decay – and its audience was, it would seem, predominantly young: the post-war generation. Their presence here recalls the continual presence of children in areas of destruction (bombsites) and reconstruction in London in the post-war period, as landscapes of war became landscapes of play for the new generations of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The robotic movements and the repetitive nature of Gilbert & George’s performance – with one of the pair restarting the song each time – are reminiscent of mannequins and automata. These automata had been prominent aspects of fairgrounds and theatres throughout the nineteenth century, and continued to have a presence in leisure activities in the postwar period.4 In 1956, Lindsay Anderson’s short film O Dreamland had made them a significant focus of his critical documentation of the amusement park Dreamland at Margate. One of the featured attractions is a ‘Torture through the Ages’ exhibit, made up of moving mannequins, including a recreation of the execution of ‘atom spy’ Julius Rosenberg by electric chair, presided over by a manically cackling policeman. A voiceover intones, ‘This is history portrayed by life-size working models. Your children will love it!’.5 Gilbert & George’s performance was significantly less morbid, though the appeal to children in O Dreamland – and Anderson’s constant shots of children’s faces, enraptured but vacant – recalls the significant number of very young people watching Underneath the Arches at Cable Street. There is a distinct possibility that the performance would have brought to mind, for this highly mixed audience, the experience of automata from fairgrounds or the seaside. The artists, as a result, must have seemed only semi-human, like mannequins come to life. The distinctly odd, semi-human performance of Underneath the Arches also engages with home – or, more appropriately, homelessness – from within this enduring moment and landscape of post-war reconstruction. Gilbert & George’s chosen version of the lyrics is worth dwelling on here. I have seen two versions of the lyrics to this song published alongside the work – one in the first person singular (using I, my, etc.) and the other in the first person plural. In their statements and material for Underneath the Arches, produced across the years in which it was performed, they, crucially, used the plural:

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The Ritz we never sigh for The Carlton they can keep There’s only one place that we know And that is where we sleep Underneath the arches we dream our dreams away Underneath the arches on cobblestones we lay Every night you’ll find us tired out and worn, Happy when the daybreak comes creeping heralding the dawn Sleeping when it’s raining and sleeping when it’s fine We hear trains rattling by above. Pavement is my pillow no matter where I stray Underneath the arches we dream our dreams away6 The lyrics evoke, in this iteration, communal sleeping between displaced men. They dwell on the difficult experiences of being homeless, endured together; ‘tired out and worn’ from sleeping rough, but persevering through rain and a lack of comfort. But they also consistently gesture to the possibility of transcending these circumstances. The repeated refrain of ‘underneath the arches we dream our dreams away’ gestures to sleep, obviously, but also another possibility – another way of life and, perhaps, a home. With Gilbert & George performing this together and singing in unison, there are tentative, gentle undertones of homosocial bonding in admittedly bleak circumstances, and even homosexuality. This may well have played on popular assumptions about the relationship between homelessness and queerness. These emerged via concerns about the homosocial spaces of the Victorian workhouse and had continued to have a presence in writing on London’s poor well into the twentieth century.7 To be homeless, then, was to be marginal, in several respects, and Gilbert & George, in their own way, have presented themselves as marginal figures throughout their career. Gilbert was a migrant, arriving in Britain from a poor rural family in Italy in only 1967, to begin his studies at St Martin’s. He has registered his initial struggles in his new home, and his partnership with George occurred despite this – ‘It’s very simple. George was the only one who accepted my pidgin English’.8 George, though English, also framed himself as an outsider – brought up in a poor rural family in Plymouth, arriving in London in 1965. As they began to produce art, they were also – at least initially – outsiders at St Martin’s and in the London art world more generally (their work digressed from prevalent concerns with abstraction in sculpture at this moment). There is also, of course, their marginality as queer figures – the two men have lived and worked together from their home and studio in Fournier Street in East London since 1968.9 This sense of marginality, but also

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its possibility, is expressed in their 1969 text on Underneath the Arches. The two artists introduce themselves, briefly outlining the families and homes that they had left behind: Gilbert was born in a Dolomite village, and left behind ‘a house, a mother, 3 sisters, and one brother that I like very much’, while George mentions that he was born in Devon, where his mother and brother still live, and that he had an absent father (he does not mention, however, his wife and family, who he was with when he met Gilbert; this was uncovered by journalists in the 1990s, much to George’s anger, though this detail perhaps underlines the poignancy of homelessness here).10 Underneath, centred and indented, is a statement on their meeting and the possibilities it provoked: We Met in London Last Year We began to dream of a world of beauty and happiness of great riches and pleasures new of joy and laughter of children and sweets of the music of colour and the sweetness of shape, a world of feeling and meaning a newer better world, a world of delicious disasters of heartrending sorrow, of loathing and dread a world complete, all the world an art gallery.11 Gilbert & George tend towards declarative and almost utopian statements like this in the early part of their career – they are undoubtedly connected with their repeated aim at this point of creating ‘Art For All’.12 It is crucial, however, that this particular statement of possibility is made within the context of displacement – the displacement in Underneath the Arches and the displacement of the artists themselves that brought them together. The possibilities of togetherness and the quiet homosociality of ‘Underneath the Arches’ that their performance arguably amplifies can be read as troubling more normative conceptions of masculinity from this marginal position. Gilbert & George seem to have been aware that their partnership, presence and behaviour were capable of this, and that there were, inevitably, potential consequences. In an interview with the writer Gordon Burn in 1974, speaking, as ever, from their home in Fournier Street, the artists described what it was like to step out of their home as a couple: Gilbert: … We used to go into a pub very near here where all the lorry drivers used to be, and we made them completely crazy. We went in there, started to dance together, and they couldn’t dance, you see. George: They wanted to. We were dancing like some other couples, boys and girls, were dancing and everyone was sitting very relaxed. And the lorry drivers would be standing there with their pints doing this, and they’d come a bit nearer, and we’d say something, and they’d nearly start to dance, then they’d go back for a pint, yes? And they would have liked very much

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just to have danced. Not with us necessarily, but with anyone, or alone or something. And they could never actually make that step, just to dance. Absolute frustration. Here, the artists frame the presence of their bodies and their act of dancing together as inherently disturbing to the heterosexual masculinity of the lorry drivers in the pub that they enter. But they describe the other men’s reactions as curious, and their own presence as offering the potential for a moment of shift, change and letting go through dancing, a moment that they, it is implied, desire. This moment of potential never forms into something solid, however. Gilbert & George leave the pub with some friends and are followed home by the men who throw milk bottles through their window. George comments, with a mixture of anxiety and exhilaration, that it was ‘shocking, really. Such a desperate thing, hmm? All this glass in the air. Can you imagine? It was quite exciting in a way’.13 As in Underneath the Arches, queerness and unhomeliness are intertwined in this anecdote. This disruptive potential of the bodies and performance of Gilbert & George can complicate or extend a reading of Underneath the Arches. Their identification with a song about homelessness through their performance becomes not only a representation of their own position as marginal figures – as symbolically ‘homeless’ – but it also provides a moment where anxieties about definitions and boundaries of gender, sexuality, space and home might come to the surface. The moment of violent exhilaration that George described when the lorry drivers attacked them attests to the way that the very suggestion of intimacy between two men could threaten the selfhood of a watching audience as well as the boundaries of their own home. In Underneath the Arches, however, the artists’ self-presentation as these only semi-human figures allows this to occur at a slight remove from, perhaps, dancing in the local pub. Any potential undertones of queer bonding and possibility are, arguably, tempered, but they remain. The performance of Underneath the Arches may, however, have proved disturbing for their audience in other ways. The original song took on new resonance during and just after the Second World War and appears to have become something of a tonic to those who faced nightly threat from bombardment. Newsreel footage from 1941 shows Flanagan and Allen making an appearance at a communal feeding centre in Kentish Town (dubbed The Arches Restaurant), which had been set up to provide meals for those who had lost homes during the Blitz.14 They served food and then led a singalong with the audience to ‘Underneath the Arches’. For the two artists to revive and perform a song like this in the context of late 1960s and early 1970s Britain is to (depending on your audience) evoke nostalgia for a moment of ‘pulling together’ in wartime or to appear strangely out of time. Their appearance

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would have underlined this; Daniel Farson has described how the pair ‘stood out a mile’ in their flannel suits.15 However, returning to the memory of the railway arch evokes a darker, seedier history of wartime experience. Railway arches had been adopted by those who lost everything during the Blitz and had nowhere else to turn; they were also used to house makeshift and not entirely legitimate stores and businesses.16 They were also spaces of crime and vice, and were notable spaces for gay cruising, particularly during the blackout.17 Given the artists’ encounter with rough sleepers when they arrived to perform in 1969, it is clear that railway arches had retained a sense of being spaces of marginality. As a result, there are competing evocations of the recent past at play in Gilbert & George’s performance: nostalgia for wartime pulling together and community and a less easily recalled, though clearly intertwined history of homelessness, crime, vice and social decay. Underneath the Arches, then, works around a sense of rupture, of bringing the past into the present. This was something that interested the artists: Gilbert: We believe very much that we are trying to accept the modern and the old at the same time. We don’t want to say that only what is modern is right. George: All history together with today is what is modern, not just the now modern. Gilbert: The complication of it, we believe, is good.18 Underneath the Arches is an example of Gilbert & George performing this temporal complication. To present a song that held such resonances from the near past – wartime nostalgia, but also wartime destruction of homes and social limits – in this late 1960s moment of ongoing reconstruction is to create a rupture. It is to summon, simultaneously, the spectres of national community and individual marginality that the song evoked. As a performance, it encapsulates the strange temporality of war and the reconstruction of home: war returns as destruction, as nostalgia for togetherness found under threat (a togetherness that arguably never actually occurred and which requires a selective approach to the recent past), and as the model for a longed-for, though unachievable, post-war consensus society based on that togetherness.19 Gilbert & George perform the strangeness of post-war reconstruction – this unsteady amalgamation of nostalgia and anxiety – in their old-fashioned clothing and robotic, automata-like movements. At the same time, they imbue this state with another potentially disturbing element: queerness. This performance of the temporal rupture at the heart of reconstruction allows a moment of queer potential to occupy it – to become visible to those who may wish to find it. This, in some ways, re-animates a marginal space with suggestions of marginal identity and behaviour.

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Their performance, as I have shown, hints at the queer potential within the homosocial lyrics and, in doing so, troubles straightforward nostalgia with the spectre of gay cruising and its connections to crime. This never, as I have suggested, finds complete expression – it is tempered and implied rather than declared, but is enough to upset apparently stable categories of masculinity, the linear workings of popular memory and the superficially straightforward aims of post-war reconstruction. Here, war remains, returning to a space of reconstruction in terms of sound (Flanagan and Allen’s song), sight (those ghostly, semi-human men in flannel suits) and the entangled recent history of railway arches. Gilbert & George’s vision of home in Underneath the Arches is idiosyncratic and specific: inherently homosocial, devoid of consumption and the material culture of home, formed out of loss and displacement, and rooted in both past and present. In a literal sense, home, for Gilbert & George, famously was – and still is – Fournier Street; they have become almost synonymous with this particular home and the surrounding location of East London. But Underneath the Arches seems to stray from the certainty of a specific location and structure, allowing the experience of homelessness to be transfigured into a performance that evokes queer masculinity, the uncanny workings of popular memory, and a home simultaneously embodied, dreamt and just out of reach. In moving into this strange, indistinct imagining of home, Gilbert & George’s performance makes visible the pervasive fragility of home and instability of masculinity that have been features of the works of the artists throughout this book. In Underneath the Arches, home is both lost and longed for, and masculinity is present in its imagined stability and experienced uncertainty. In a simple way, Gilbert & George’s work attests to the enduring memories of war and their ability to shape visions of home and masculinity. But beyond this, the artists’ performance – the simple gestures, utterances and dreams of bodies in a post-war space in flux – encapsulates what it means to make and imagine home in Britain after the Second World War. There are the competing questions that animated public and personal reconstruction, the pervasive sense of loss and anxiety, and a continued focus on the body and subjectivity – the locus of the definition and negotiation of home, in some way, for all the artists in this book, from the domesticity-focused representations of Bratby to Pasmore’s vision of a post-war community inhabited and completed by the bodies of post-war citizens. Like Gilbert & George, the artists in this book have rarely represented postwar home in terms of stable or specific spaces – even those that do find these spaces inhabited by the lingering memories and anxieties of wartime, like Bratby, or open them up on a community scale in a way that undermines their certainties, like Pasmore. This book has argued, instead, that these artists’

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works attest to the way in which home in post-war Britain was defined not through the ideal stability of the household, but the very permeability of its boundaries, spatial, temporal or both, and the possibilities and difficulties of that state. This negotiation of home, as I have argued, takes place across a variety of scales – from the domestic interior with Bratby, to Bacon’s unhomely public spaces, Vaughan’s focus on memories of home in the male body, Souza’s negotiation of migration through the body, and Pasmore’s mapping of private emotions and anxieties of home onto community spaces. This breadth attests to the way in which discourses of home widely permeated aspects of experience and society in post-war Britain, and underlines how home was negotiated, out of necessity, in a variety of ways. This variety comes, in one way, from the different ways in which home is constituted in terms of masculinity by these artists. Their work makes visible the ways in which categories of masculinity informed the negotiation of home in post-war Britain in highly subjective ways – I have sought to avoid defining heterosexual or queer or migrant homes in specific ways as these artists underline the way in which personal definitions of home emerged from within the public parameters of post-war reconstruction. This variety also comes, in another way, from the influence of what I have called the time of reconstruction – the lingering memories of war and temporal complexity in post-war Britain. This book opened with Keith Vaughan recording a sense of floundering for a sense of home and selfhood in the face of post-war reconstruction; these artists’ works are responses to this uncertainty, representations that are marked by the effects of war and the necessity of some kind of response. In this book, I have worked with the idea that art has the ability to represent – to set down, to illuminate – the often contradictory impact of war and reconstruction on home and masculinity, and to allow for us – falteringly and incompletely, of course – to witness it and begin to speak of it. In closing, it is fitting, I think, to return to Vaughan’s words in Chapter 3, where he described each of his paintings as attempts ‘to find an equivalent image for the perplexity of our identity and flux and contradiction of one’s relationship to an environment – to the life of one’s time – if it would only keep still long enough to be measured’.20 Art, for Vaughan and for the other artists in this book, became a sphere where the uncertainty of post-war reconstruction might be pictured, negotiated or merely present, where it might be bound, reworked or allowed to unravel. This can be a role for art, for art historians or historians more widely, but also, most pressingly, for all of us: a space of representing and witnessing histories and possibilities – of identities, of homes – that may be difficult to speak of or firmly grasp.

Notes Introduction 1

Keith Vaughan, Journal 31, 15 March 1946, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/31.

2

Keith Vaughan, Journal 12, 19 July 1942, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/12.

3

Keith Vaughan, Journal 31, 15 March 1946, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/31.

4

Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 212;

5

Kobena Mercer, ‘Stuart Hall and the Visual Arts’, Small Axe 19, no. 1 (2015): 82.

6

Lisa Tickner, Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (London: Yale University Press, 2000), 211–12.

7

Stuart Hall, ‘Black Diaspora Artists in Britain: Three “Moments” in Post-War History’, History Workshop Journal 61, no. 1 (2006): 23.

8 Tickner, Modern Life and Hall, ‘Black Diaspora Artists’, 23. 9 Tickner, Modern Life. 10 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 64. 11 For important, influential studies on particular art movements in this period, see Alastair Grieve, Constructed Abstract Art in England after the Second World War: A Neglected Avant-Garde (London: Yale University Press, 2005); Anne Massey, The Independent Group: Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain 1945–59 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995) and Out of the Ivory Tower: The Independent Group and Popular Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); David Mellor, A Paradise Lost, the Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain: 1935–55 (London: Lund Humphries in association with Barbican Art Gallery, 1987); Frances Spalding, The Kitchen Sink Painters (London: Mayor Gallery, 1991); and Brian Wallis, This Is Tomorrow Today: The Independent Group and British Pop Art (New York: Institute for Art and Urban Resources, 1987). 12 The key thematic studies on British post-war art are Lisa Tickner and David Peters Corbett, eds., British Art in the Cultural Field, 1939–69 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) and Margaret Garlake, New Art New World: British Art in Postwar Society (London: Yale University Press, 1998). On realism, James Hyman, The Battle for Realism (London: Yale University Press, 2001);

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and Juliet Steyn, ‘Realism Versus Realism in British Art of the 1950s’, Third Text 22, no. 2 (2008): 145–56. On the nuclear threat, Catherine Jolivette, ed., British Art in the Nuclear Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). On landscape and national identity, see David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell, eds., The Geographies of Englishness (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Catherine Jolivette, Landscape, Art and Identity in 1950s Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). On migration, Leon Wainwright, Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011); Simon Faulkner and Anandi Ramamurthy, eds., Visual Culture and Decolonisation in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009); Lizzie Carey-Thomas, ed., Migrations: Journeys into British Art (London: Tate, 2012); Shulamith Behr and Marian Malet, eds., Arts in Exile in Britain 1933– 1945: Politics and Cultural Identity (New York: Rodopi, 2005); and Cheryl Buckley and Tobias Hochscherf, eds., ‘Special Issue: Transnationalism and Visual Culture in Britain: Émigré and Migrants 1933 to 1956’, Visual Culture in Britain 13, no. 2 (2012). On art in London in the 1950s, Martin Harrison, Transition: The London Art Scene in the 1950s (London: Merrell, 2002). 13 Lynda Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 2017), 251. 14 Stephen Brooke, Reform and Reconstruction: Britain after the War, 1945–51 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995). 15 On post-war housing, see Nicholas Timmins, The Five Giants: A Biography of the Welfare State (London: Harper Collins, 1995), 139–47; David Donnison and Clare Ungerson, Housing Policy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), 14–47; and Peter Hennessy, Never Again: Britain 1945–51 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 163–74. 16 Becky E. Conekin, ‘The Autobiography of a Nation’: 1951 Festival of Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003) and Ian Cox, The South Bank Exhibition: A Guide to the Story It Tells (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1951). 17 Humphrey Jennings, Family Portrait: A Film on The Theme of the Festival of Britain 1951 (London: Wessex Film Productions, UK, 1951). 18 Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, Home (London: Routledge, 2006), 27. Postwar homes are defined in these terms in Claire Langhammer, ‘The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History 40, no. 2 (2005): 341–2 and Graham Crow, ‘The Post-War Development of the Modern Domestic Ideal’, in Home and Family: Creating the Domestic Sphere, ed. Graham Allan and Graham Crow (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1989), 14–32. 19 As Nead puts it, setting up home after the war ‘carried the weight of the future of the nation’, 248. 20 Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Post-War Britain, 1945–1968 (London: Tavistock Publications, 1980), 41–59. 21 Stephanie Spencer, Gender, Work and Education in Britain in the 1950s (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 22–48; Denise Riley, War in the Nursery: Theories of Child and Mother (London: Virago, 1983); and

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NOTES Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977).

22 See Michael Young and Peter Wilmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), and its critique in Wilson, Only Halfway, 62–8. 23 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London: Allen Lane, 1974), 228–31; and Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: A Social and Cultural History of Psychoanalysis (New York: Alfred A Knopff, 2004). 24 On the immoral queer man in public space, see Richard Hornsey, The Spiv and the Architect: Unruly Life in Post-War London (London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010); and Frank Mort, ‘Scandalous Events: Metropolitan Culture and Moral Change in Post-Second World War London’, Representations 93, no. 1 (2006): 106–37; on the partial legalization of homosexuality and domesticity, see Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (London: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 195–218; and Matt Cook, Queer Domesticities: Homosexuality and Home Life in Twentieth-Century London (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 144–8. 25 Cook, Queer Domesticities, 10. 26 Cook, Queer Domesticities, 143. On the relationality of queer home, see Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Colombia University Press, 1991; Judith Butler, ‘Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?’ in Undoing Gender (London: Routledge, 2004), 102–30; and Elizabeth Freeman, ‘Queer Belongings: Kinship Theory and Queer Theory’, in A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies, ed. George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 295–314. 27 Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘”Coming home”: queer migrations and multiple evocations of home’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 4, no. 4 (2001): 405–424, 420. 28 On migration and citizenship, see Gurminder K. Bhambra, Connected Sociologies (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 154; and Randall Hansen, Citizenship and Immigration in Postwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 29 Bill Schwarz, ‘“The Only White Man in There”: The Re-racialisation of England, 1956–1968’, Race & Class 38, no. 1 (1996): 73; and Memories of Empire, Vol.1: The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 12. 30 Blunt and Dowling, Home, 1–3. 31 On the shifting and historically contingent category of ‘the normal’, see Peter Cryle and Elizabeth Stephens, Normality: A Critical Genealogy (London: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 32 Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (London: Virago, 1997), 1–25. 33 Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), 8–10.

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34 Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 151–96. 35 On wartime homosociality, see Emma Vickers, Queen and Country: Same Sex Desire in the British Armed Forces, 1939–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 50–74; on women in wartime, see Rose, Which People’s War? 107–50 and Virginia Nicholson, Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives in War and Peace, 1939–1949 (London: Viking, 2011). 36 Alan Allport, Demobbed: Coming Home after the Second World War (London: Yale University Press, 2010). 37 On anxieties around masculinity in post-war Britain and the United States, see Segal, Slow Motion; James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (London: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (London: Yale University Press, 1993). 38 On the repression of male homosexuality, see Houlbrook, Queer London. On the homosexual as a social being, see Chris Waters, ‘The Homosexual as a Social Being in Britain, 1945–1968’, Journal of British Studies 51, no. 3 (2012): 685–710 and, in the United States, Margot Canaday, Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 39 Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London: Routledge, 1996), 23–5; more generally, Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1984); and Colin Holmes, John Bull’s Island: Immigration and British Society, 1871–1971 (Macmillan: Basingstoke, 1988). 40 Chris Waters, ‘“Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963’, Journal of British Studies 36, no. 2 (1997): 207–38; and Schwarz, ‘The Only White Man’, 73–4. 41 On the relationship between ideal – or hegemonic – masculinities and other masculinities, see R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd edn. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005). 42 Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the 1950s (1958; repr. Wendover: John Goodchild Publishers, 1985), 204. 43 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990; repr. London: Routledge, 2006), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985, repr. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (1990, repr. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 44 Butler, Gender Trouble, 45. 45 Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992), 2–3. 46 Some notable studies of art and masculinity in the twentieth century include Amelia Jones, ‘“Clothes Make the Man”: The Male Artist as a Performative Function’, Oxford Art Journal 18, no. 2 (1995): 18–32; Amelia Jones, ‘Dis/ playing the Phallus: Male Artists Perform Their Masculinities’, Art History

176

NOTES 17, no. 4 (1994): 546–84; David Hopkins, Dada’s Boys: Masculinity after Duchamp (London: Yale University Press, 2008); Natalya Lusty and Julian Murphet, Modernism and Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Lisa Tickner, ‘Men’s Work? Masculinity and Modernism’, in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (London: University Press of New England for Wesleyan University, 1994), 42–82.

47 Frank Mort, Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society (London: Yale University Press, 2010), 10. 48 Nead, The Tiger in the Smoke, 28, 51, and 56–7. 49 Cathy Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory (London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 4–5. 50 Jenny Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 15–16. 51 Petra Rau, ed., Long Shadows: The Second World War in British Fiction and Film (Evanston, IL: North Western University Press, 2016), 15–16. 52 The memory of the war and its enduring, changing mythological power has been a focus in Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Pimlico, 1992); Mark Connolly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson, 2004); Rau, Long Shadows, 15–16; and Marianna Torgovnick, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 53 On the temporality of post-colonial trauma, see Stef Craps, Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan: 2013), 32. On the contradictory presence and absence of empire in British post-war memory, see Schwarz, Memories, 8–10. 54 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996; repr., Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), 24. 55 Victor Pasmore, ‘Abstract Painting in England’, The Listener, 13 September 1951, 427. 56 The Blitz as a domestic experience is echoed in Tom Harrisson, Living through the Blitz (1976; rep., London: Faber and Faber, 2010), 37 and 67–8. 57 Eli Zaretsky, ‘“One Large Secure, Solid Background”: Melanie Klein and the Origins of the British Welfare State’, Psychoanalysis and History 1, no. 2 (1999): 136–54; and, more generally, Zaretsky, Secrets, 2004. 58 John Bowlby, Child Care and the Growth of Love, ed. Margaret Fry (London: Penguin, 1965), 77. 59 D.W. Winnicott, The Family and Individual Development (London: Tavistock Publications, 1965), 160, and, on the good-enough mother, 16–19. 60 Kaja Silverman has argued that the temporal disruption and devastating effects of the war in America caused a loss of faith in the ‘dominant fiction’ of masculinity, which required a period of reassurance and ‘binding’ to reinforce its terms: Silverman, Male Subjectivity, 54–65. 61 Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 1–19. See also, for

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example, Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (London: New York University Press, 2005); and Muñoz, Cruising Utopia. 62 Laura Doan, Disturbing Practices: History, Sexuality, and Women’s Experience of Modern War (London: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 63 Cryle and Stephen warn against this tendency in queer theory, Normality, 6–7. Conceiving of queer as a disturbing or disruptive process is advocated by Doan, Disturbing Practices, viii–ix, and developed in Matt Houlbrook, ‘Thinking Queer: The Social and the Sexual in Interwar Britain’, in British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives, ed. Brian Lewis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 134–64. 64 This progression is implied in the focus of David Kynaston’s series of books on this period, moving through Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (London: Bloomsbury, 2007); Family Britain, 1951–57 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); and Modernity Britain, 1957–62 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Similarly, see Dominic Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good: A History of Britain from Suez to the Beatles (London: Abacus, 2006), though the 1960s is presented as a decade of conformity and conservatism in Dominic Sandbrook, White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties (London: Little, Brown, 2006). 65 Nick Bentley, Radical Fictions: The English Novel in the 1950s (Oxford: Lang, 2007); Alice Ferrebe, Literature of the 1950s: Good, Brave Causes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012); Peter Hennessey, Having It So Good: Britain in the Fifties (London: Allen Lane, 2006); Mort, Capital Affairs, and Gill Plain, Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar, and ‘Peace’ (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

Chapter 1 1

John Berger, ‘John Bratby’, New Statesman and Nation, 25 September 1954, 358.

2

David Sylvester, ‘The Kitchen Sink’, Encounter, December 1954, 61.

3

This marks the beginning of a particularly productive period of writing for Bratby: he produced and successfully published another three novels by 1963, and several more went unpublished within this time. The published novels are often as personally revealing as his paintings, with many of their incidents and characters seemingly drawn from Bratby’s own life. He took some pains to deny this, and Breakdown opens with a statement that the characters contained in the book are entirely fictitious, drawn ‘completely from the author’s imagination’ – see John Bratby, Breakdown (London: Hutchinson, 1960), 5. You get a sense, however, that this statement may be intended more as a legal precaution rather than an artistic statement.

4 Bratby, Breakdown, 23. 5 Bratby, Breakdown, 24. 6 Bratby, Breakdown, 27.

178

7

NOTES Lawrence Thompson, ‘Portrait of the Artist as a Displaced Person’. The John Bratby Archive, Julian Hartnoll Gallery, London.

8 Bratby, Breakdown, 27. 9 Bratby, Breakdown, 29. 10 There are clear parallels with concerns about companionate masculinity in post-war America – see Gilbert, Men in the Middle, 3. 11 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (London: Penguin, 1992), 16–56. 12 Allsop, The Angry Decade, 168. 13 Colin Wilson, The Outsider (1956; repr., London: Phoenix, 2001), 14 and 20. 14 Allsop, The Angry Decade, 193. 15 Bratby, Breakdown, 101–9. 16 In Look Back in Anger, Jimmy plays his trumpet off stage after being sent out for scalding his wife Alison with an iron in Act One. Numerous Bratby paintings from around 1956, including self-portraits, include trumpets. 17 Anon, ‘Black Boadicea’, Royal Academy of Arts, https://www.royalacademy. org.uk/art-artists/work-of-art/blast-boadicea. 18 Robin Gibson, John Bratby Portraits (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1991), 7. 19 Andrew Lambrith, Jean Cooke: A Reputation Reassessed (London: Piano Nobile, 2007), 8. 20 Maurice Yacowar, The Great Bratby: A Portrait of John Bratby RA (London: Middlesex University Press, 2008), 21–6; Anon, ‘Jean Cooke’, The Telegraph, 22 August 2008 https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/2604169/JeanCooke.html and Philip Vann, ‘Jean Cooke’, The Guardian, 29 August 2008, 36. 21 Yacowar, The Great Bratby, 24–5. 22 Lambrith, Jean Cooke, 8. 23 David Piper, ‘The New Realism’, Architectural Design, April 1957, 135–7. 24 On stereotypes of gender in heterosexual artist-couple representations, see Leja, Reframing, 254–5. 25 D.W. Winnicott, ‘The Mother’s Contribution to Society’, in Home Is Where We Start From: Essays by a Psychoanalyst, ed. Claire Winnicott, Ray Shepherd and Madeline Davis (Middlesex: Penguin, 1986), 124. 26 Winnicott, ‘The Mother’s Contribution’, 125. 27 Melanie Klein, ‘The Importance of Symbol Formation in the Development of the Ego’, in Love, Guilt and Reparation and Other Works, 1921–45 (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1981), 219–32. 28 John Bratby, ‘How I Painted the Picture That Won the Guggenheim Award’, Art News and Review, 27 October 1956, 9. 29 For example, John Golding emphatically states in an art review titled ‘Look Back in Anger’: ‘Mr Bratby is the leader of the look-back-in-anger painters, simultaneously condescending his subjects and revealing them for their own sake.’ See New Statesman and Nation, 22 December 1956, 816–17.

NOTES

179

30 John Osborne, Look Back in Anger (1957; repr., London: Faber, 1975), 24. 31 Osborne, Look Back in Anger, 26–34. 32 Osborne, Look Back in Anger, 33–4. 33 Osborne, Look Back in Anger, 37–8. 34 Winnicott, ‘The Mother’s Contribution to Society’, 125. 35 D.W. Winnicott, ‘This Feminism’, in Home Is Where We Start From, 193. 36 Osborne, Look Back in Anger, 84–5. 37 Bratby, Breakdown, 78. 38 Bratby, Breakdown, 78. 39 Bratby, Breakdown, 80. 40 Mary Allen, Social Work and Intimate Partner Violence (London: Routledge, 2013), 1–12. 41 Allen, Social Work, 13–31; her quote comes from 20. 42 Jeff Hearn, The Violences of Men: How Men Talk about and How Agencies Respond to Men’s Violence to Women (London: Sage, 1998), 144–5. 43 D.W. Winnicott, ‘Discussion of War Aims’, in Home Is Where We Start From, 210–20.

Chapter 2 1

Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s (London: Yale University Press and the Sainsbury Centre, UEA, 2006), 31.

2

Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens, eds., Francis Bacon (London: Tate, 2008), 124.

3

David Sylvester, Looking Back at Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000), 72. Bacon is quoted in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 116.

4

For queer readings of Bacon, see Simon Ofield, ‘Comparative Strangers’, in Francis Bacon, ed. Gale and Stephens, 64–73; Nicholas Chare, After Francis Bacon: Synaesthesia and Sex in Paint (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); and Catherine Howe, ‘Beautiful Bodies’, in Queer British Art, 1861–1967, ed. Clare Barlow (London: Tate, 2017), 159–63.

5

Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (London: Constable and Robinson, 2008), 124–9.

6 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy, 163–4. 7 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 146. 8 Houlbrook, Queer London, 221–41. 9 Cook, Queer Domesticities, 144–5. On the climate of fear and arrests of queer men, see Matt Cook, ed., A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men since the Middle Ages (Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing,

180

NOTES 2007), 167–71 and Hugh David, On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality, 1895–1995 (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 151–76.

10 Hornsey, The Spiv, 44–52 (on town planning) and 81–116 (on the homosexual in urban space). 11 Hornsey, The Spiv, 1 and Waters, ‘The Homosexual’. 12 Cook, A Gay History, 172–7 and David, On Queer Street, 177–96. 13 Cook, Queer Domesticities, 144–9. Houlbrook concludes with similar reflections on the implications of the Wolfenden Report, Queer London, 256–61. 14 Cook, Queer Domesticities, 143–90. 15 Sylvester, Interviews, 120. 16 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in the 1950s, 33. 17 Henry Geldzahler, Francis Bacon, Recent Paintings 1968–1974 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1974), 15–16. 18 Alistair O’Neill, ‘Available in an Array of Colours’, Visual Culture in Britain 10, no. 3 (2009): 271–91. 19 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy, 97. 20 Grey Gowrie, ‘Homage to Work and Love’, The Guardian, 29 April 1992, 38. 21 Bacon’s Books: Francis Bacon’s Library and Its Role in His Art, Trinity College Dublin, https://www.tcd.ie/History_of_Art/research/triarc/bacon.php. While Proust’s reputation in his native France appears to have fluctuated after his death, he was ‘immediately and continuously hailed’ in the UK. Scott Moncrieff’s translations appeared in the decade after Proust’s death and influential criticism from Clive Bell and Samuel Beckett was published in English alongside them; after the war, the number of critical studies only increased. See Vincent Ferré, ‘Early Critical Responses, 1922 to 1950s’, in Marcel Proust in Context, ed. Adam Watt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 191–8. 22 Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time: Part IV, Cities of the Plain, trans. S.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), 1–38. 23 Proust, In Search, 5. 24 Proust, In Search, 10. 25 Proust, In Search, 15 and 16–17. 26 Proust, In Search, 23, and 17–38 on ‘inverts’. 27 Mark W. Turner, Backward Glances: Cruising the Queer Streets of New York and London (London: Reaktion, 2003), 43–67. 28 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait. Essays and Interviews (London: Yale University Press, 2008), 181. 29 Sedgwick, Epistemology, 213–30. 30 A broader reading like this is gestured to in Gale and Stephens, Francis Bacon, 122. 31 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy, 31. 32 Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon in Your Blood (London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2015), 10–11. 33 James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1957; repr., London: Penguin, 2007), 76–9.

NOTES

181

34 Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, 92–3. 35 Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, 142. 36 Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room, 80–2. 37 James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name (1964; repr., London: Penguin, 1991), 17–23. 38 Sylvester, Looking Back, 22 and Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy, 132. 39 Martin Hammer, Francis Bacon and Nazi Propaganda (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), 89–99. 40 Sylvester recognizes both intentions but suggests the microphone as the more likely possibility – Sylvester, Looking Back, 22. Gale and Stephens suggest a still of a machine gunner’s face from Sergei Eisenstein’s October (1927) as a possible source, Francis Bacon, 60–2. 41 Martin Hammer and Chris Stephens, ‘Seeing the Story of One’s Time: Appropriations from Nazi Photography in the Work of Francis Bacon’, Visual Culture in Britain 10, no. 3 (1999): 346–7. 42 Similarities between Bacon and Genet are noted in Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy, 279. They are also compared in Brian O’Doherty, ‘On the Strange Case of Francis Bacon’, Art Journal 24, no. 3 (1965): 288–90. 43 Jean Genet, Funeral Rites (1969; repr., London: Faber and Faber, 1990), 38–42. 44 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy, 122–4. 45 See Leo Bersani, ‘The Gay Outlaw’, Diacritics 24, no. 2/3 (1994): 4–18; James Creech, ‘Outing Jean Genet’, Yale French Studies, no. 91 (1997): 117–40; and Christopher Lane, ‘The Voided Role: On Genet’, MLN 112, no. 5 (2003): 876–908. For a recent reflection on Genet’s ‘unease’, see Kadji Amin, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History (London: Duke University Press, 2017). 46 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). 47 See Rose, Which People’s War? 154. 48 On the construction of this division more widely and the othering of Fascism, see Petra Rau, Our Nazis: Representations of Fascism in Contemporary Literature and Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 49 Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Anatomy, 101–2.

Chapter 3 1

Keith Vaughan, Journal 14, 4 April 1943, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/14.

2

All sixty-two volumes of Keith Vaughan’s journals are now kept in the Tate Gallery Archive. They have been published as Keith Vaughan, Journals 1939–1977 (London: Faber and Faber, 2010) and Keith Vaughan, Journal and Drawings, 1939–1965 (London: Alan Ross, 1966).

182

NOTES

3 Vaughan, Journals 1939–1977, 142. 4

Keith Vaughan, Journal 2, 6 February 1940, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/2.

5

Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work (London: Constable, 1990), 47–8.

6

Keith Vaughan, Journal 2, 6 February 1940, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/2.

7

Abigail Grater, Keith Vaughan: Paintings and Drawings (London: Osborne Samuel, 2007), 12.

8 Vaughan, Journal and Drawings, 1939–1965, 18. 9

Colin Cruise, Keith Vaughan: Figure and Ground (Bristol: Sansom, 2013), 89.

10 The Highgate Ponds album is discussed in Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan: Photographs (Pagham: Pagham Press, 2013), 35–7. 11 Keith Vaughan, Journal 5, 3 January 1941, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/5. 12 Keith Vaughan, Journal 5, March 1941, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/5. 13 Vaughan, Journals 1939–1977, 52. 14 Keith Vaughan, Journal 7, 24 September 1941, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/7. 15 Keith Vaughan, Journal 8, 12 January 1942, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/8. 16 Muriel ‘Babs’ McMillan, interview, 10 March 1981, Imperial War Museum Collections, Cat No. 4829. 17 Ronald Pinfield, interview, 18 April 1988, Imperial War Museum Collections, Cat No. 10236. 18 Raymond Garfield Williams, introduction to diary no. 1, Private Papers of RG Williams, Imperial War Museums Collections, Cat No. 3567 85/13/1. 19 See Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion, 1996); Sarah Cole, Modernism, Male Friendship and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Kathy J. Phillips, Manipulating Masculinity: War and Gender in Modern British and American Literature (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 20 Ken Shaw, Interview, May 1992, Imperial War Museum Collections, Cat No. 13197. 21 Raymond Garfield Williams, 20 February 1942, Private Papers of RG Williams, Imperial War Museums Collections, Cat No. 3567 85/13/1. 22 Cole, Modernism, 152–3. 23 Keith Vaughan, Journal 12, 19 July 1942, Tate Gallery Archive, 200817/1/12. 24 Vaughan frets that leaving the army at the end of the war ‘will be leaving one sort of imprisonment to return to an old and even more devastating one’: Keith Vaughan, Journal 10, 1 May 1942, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/10.

NOTES

183

25 Keith Vaughan, Journal 19, 7 March 1944, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/19. 26 All quotes come from a single journal entry: Keith Vaughan, Journal 23, 25 September 1944, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/23. 27 Keith Vaughan – miscellaneous statements about his work from MS notes, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/6/2. 28 Keith Vaughan, Some Notes on Painting, August 1964, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/6/2. 29 Patrick Procktor, Interview with Keith Vaughan, from the Russian Programme broadcast on the BBC, 1962, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 2008/17/6/2. 30 The gouache is reproduced in Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan: Gouaches, Drawings and Prints (London: Osborne Samuel, 2011), 37. 31 Anthony Hepworth and Ian Massey, Keith Vaughan: The Mature Oils 1946– 1977 (Bristol: Sansom, 2012), 30. 32 Vaughan, Journals 1939–1977, 117. 33 Hastings, Keith Vaughan: Photographs, 161. 34 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 21–6. 35 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 25. 36 Vaughan, Journal 31, 15 March 1946, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/31. 37 Yorke, Keith Vaughan, 132–3 and Philip Vann and Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan (London: Lund Humphries, 2012), 75. 38 Yorke, Keith Vaughan, 133–7. 39 Yorke, Keith Vaughan, 136. 40 25 From ’51: 25 Paintings from the Festival of Britain (Sheffield: Sheffield City Art Galleries, 1978), 18. 41 This reading has been put forward by, amongst others, Winifred Woodhull, ‘Out of the Maze: A Reading of Gide’s Thésée’, The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 21, no. 1 (1988): 1–14. 42 André Gide, Theseus, trans. John Russell (London: Horizon, 1948), 35. 43 Gide, Theseus, 35–6. 44 The mural is captioned as Discovery and is called an ‘effective decorative gesture’ in Anon, ‘Exhibitions’, Architectural Review 110, no. 656 (1951): 142–4. 45 Yorke, Keith Vaughan, 151. 46 Similarly, Margaret Garlake describes the mural as ‘Vaughan’s dream of a Golden Age to emerge from the ashes of war’ and became, in its prominent display at the Festival, ‘a poignant public statement of private distress’. See Garlake, New Art, 184. 47 Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life and Death (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 57–8. 48 Butler, ‘Is Kinship’, 126–7. 49 Freeman, ‘Queer Belongings’, 295–314.

184

NOTES

50 Procktor, ‘Interview with Keith Vaughan’. 51 Vaughan visited an exhibition of De Stael’s work at the Matthieson Gallery on London’s Bond Street in February 1952: see Yorke, Keith Vaughan, 159. 52 Yorke, Keith Vaughan, 179–80. 53 Vaughan, Journal 35, 8 January 1956, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/35. 54 Vaughan, Journal 36, 17 December 1956, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/36. 55 Vaughan, Journal 37, 29 July 1957, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/1/37. 56 Alfred Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., the Poems of Tennyson in Three Volumes, Vol. II, ed. Christopher Ricks (Harlow: W.W. Norton and Co., 1987), 349.

Chapter 4 1

Francis Newton Souza, ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’, in Words and Lines (London: Villiers, 1959), 12–13.

2

On Goa, colonialism and Catholicism, see Alexander Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa: Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), 1–4.

3

On the hybrid nature of Goan identity, see Teotonio R. de Souza, ‘Is There One Goan Identity, Several, or None?’ Lusotopie, no. 7 (2000): 487–95.

4

Francis Newton Souza, ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’, in Words and Lines (London: Villiers, 1959), 7.

5

Rasheed Araeen, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989), 11.

6

On the British Nationality Act, see Alison Blunt, Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 118–19. On the nation state as imperial state, see Bhambra, Connected Sociologies, 153–4.

7

See Schwarz, ‘The Only White Man’ and Waters, ‘Dark Strangers’.

8

G.M. Butcher, ‘Portrait of the Artist: Francis Newton Souza’, Art News and Review, 7 December 1957, 3.

9

David Sylvester, ‘A Goan Painter’, New Statesman, 14 December 1957, 816–17.

10 John Berger, ‘An Indian Painter’, New Statesman and Nation, 26 February 1955, 277–8. 11 Newton is referenced in, for example, G.M. Butcher, ‘Indian Painters in Europe’, Envoy (November/December 1958): 25 and Neville Wallis, untitled essay, FN Souza, ex. cat (London: Gallery One, 1959. 12 Souza, ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’, 13. 13 Souza, ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’, 14.

NOTES

185

14 See Shelley Souza, ‘A Tribute to My Parents’, in Francis Newton and Maria Souza: A Life Partnership in Art (New York: Christie’s, 2004), 9 and Aziz Kurtha, Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art (Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2006), 15. 15 On South Asian men, home and assimilation, see Brah, Cartographies, 23–5 and Panikos Panayi, An Immigration History of Britain: Multicultural Racism since 1800 (Longman/Pearson: Harlow, 2010), 104–5. 16 Francis Newton Souza to Victor Musgrave, Bombay, 3 May 1960, FN Souza, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 8714/3/24 and Edwin Mullins, FN Souza (London: Anthony Blond, 1962), 29. 17 Mullins, FN Souza, 6. 18 Partha Mitter calls this the ‘Picasso manqué syndrome’; Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion, 2007), 7. On negotiations of modernity and identity by Indian artists, see Rebecca M. Brown, Art for a Modern India, 1947–1980 (London: Duke University Press, 2009). 19 Anon, ‘Work of Five Young Artists’, The Times, 4 August 1955, 11. 20 The Critics, 1 December 1957, Gallery One Press-cutting Album with brown hard cover, March 1957–July 1958, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 8714/7/2. 21 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (1952; repr. London: Pluto Press, 2008), 23. 22 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 271–313. 23 Wallis, untitled essay. 24 Souza, ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’, 9–10. 25 P.D. Gaitonde, The Liberation of Goa: A Participant’s View of History (London: C. Hurst and Company, 1987). 26 Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (London: Yale University Press, 2008), 6 and 128–42. 27 Fryer, Staying Power, 372–5 and Holmes, John Bull’s Island, 256–62. 28 Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’, and National Identity, 1945–64 (London: UCL Press, 1998), xii–xv and Schwarz, ‘The Only White Man’. 29 Waters, ‘Dark Strangers’, 212. 30 Hansen, Citizenship, 85. See also Shinder S. Thandi, ‘Migrating to the “Mother Country”, 1947–1980’, in A South Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Sub-Continent, ed. Michael H. Fisher, Shompa Lahiri and Shinder S. Thandi (Oxford: Greenwood World Publishing, 2007), 159–81 and Dilip Hiro, Black British White British: A History of Race Relations in Britain (London: Grafton Books, 1991), 111–15. 31 Fryer, Staying Power, 376. 32 Anthony H. Richmond, The Colour Problem: A Study of Race Relations (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 248–9.

186

NOTES

33 Kynaston, Family Britain, 453. 34 On the 1958 race riots, see Fryer, Staying Power, 376–8, Hansen, Citizenship, 80–9, and Hiro, Black British, 37–40. 35 Barnor Hesse and S. Sayyid, ‘Narrating the Postcolonial Political and the Immigrant Imaginary’, in A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain, ed. Nasreen Ali, Virinder S. Kalra, and S. Sayyid (London: Hurst and Company, 2006), 13–31 and Araeen, The Other Story, 23. 36 Homi Bhabha, ‘The World and the Home’, in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Post-Colonial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shoat (London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 445. 37 Rob Waters, ‘“Britain Is No Longer White”: James Baldwin as a Witness to Postcolonial Britain’, African American Review 46, no. 4 (2013): 715–30, 726. 38 James Baldwin, ‘The Fire Next Time’, in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948–1985 (London: Michael Joseph, 1985), 376. 39 David Hugh Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 352–3. 40 Clare Freestone and Karen Wright, Ida Kar: Bohemian Photographer (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2011). 41 On the stereotype, Homi Bhabha, ‘The Other Question’, Screen 24, no. 6 (1983): 18–36. 42 Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The ‘Manly Englishman’ and the ‘Effeminate Bengali’ in the Late Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 1–17. 43 On subaltern subjects as ‘both warlike and effeminate’ and degenerate, see Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 81. 44 Fryer, Staying Power, 381–2. 45 Spivak, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ 294. 46 Francis Newton Souza, ‘My Friend and I’, in Words and Lines (London: Villiers, 1959), 26–7. 47 Geeta Kapur identifies a similar dilemma in Souza’s art, suggesting that he never realized that ‘a colonial inherits a fractured psyche and that he must first smash the reflecting mirror the West has provided him if he is to begin to see himself clearly’; my reading of his work suggests that this dilemma, if not its transcendence, is integral to his art: Geeta Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists (New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1978), 40–4. 48 Souza, ‘My Friend and I’, 22–3. 49 Souza, ‘My Friend and I’, 23–4. 50 Souza, ‘My Friend and I’, 24. 51 Tashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Indian Art: The Progressives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 83–4. 52 Souza, ‘My Friend and I’, 25–6. 53 Homi Bhabha, ‘Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse’, October 28 (1984): 125–33.

NOTES

187

Chapter 5 1

The ‘history and revalorisation’ of the Pavilion is discussed in Graham Farmer and John Pendlebury, ‘Conserving Dirty Concrete: The Decline and Rise of Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion, Peterlee’, Journal of Urban Design 18, no. 2 (2013): 263–80.

2

Mark Brown, ‘Apollo Relaunch: Peterlee’s Brutalist Blast Is Given a Grade II* Listing’, The Guardian, 15 December 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/ culture/2011/dec/15/apollo-pavillion-peterlee-listed-building.

3

Mark Tallentire, ‘Pavilion’s £400,000 Revamp “a Disgrace”’, The Northern Echo, 11 July 2009, http://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/4487749. Pavilion___s___400_000_revamp____a_disgrace___/.

4

Victor Pasmore to the General Manager of Peterlee Development Corporation, 30 May 1976, http://www.apollopavilion.info/wp-content/ uploads/sites/19/2016/07/30-May-1976.pdf.

5

Alan Bowness and Luigi Lambertini, Victor Pasmore (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 230.

6

Bowness and Lambertini, Victor Pasmore, 259.

7

Pasmore to GM of PDC.

8

The decline of the Apollo Pavilion can be traced through archival material made available at apollopavilion.info. See Chief Housing Officer, Easington District Council to Victor Pasmore, 12 November 1981, http://www. apollopavilion.info/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2016/07/12-November-1981. pdf; Victor Pasmore to Chief Housing Officer, Easington District Council, 19 November 1981, http://www.apollopavilion.info/wp-content/uploads/ sites/19/2016/07/19-November-1981.pdf; Gary Philipson, General Manager of Peterlee Development Corporation to Victor Pasmore, 12 February 1982, http://www.apollopavilion.info/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2016/07/12February-1982.pdf; Minutes of Peterlee Development Corporation Meeting, 8 April 1982, http://www.apollopavilion.info/wp-content/uploads/ sites/19/2016/07/Corporate-Meeting-8-April-1982.pdf; and Victor Pasmore to Gary Philipson, 23 April 1982, http://www.apollopavilion.info/wp-content/ uploads/sites/19/2016/07/23-April-1982.pdf.

9

Pasmore to Chief Housing Officer.

10 Philipson to Pasmore. 11 Transcript of Victor Pasmore in conversation with Denis Duerden, 4 March 1970, Tate Archive, TGA 8121/1/2, 20. 12 See Bruce Laughton, The Euston Road School: A Study in Objective Painting (London: Scolar Press, 1986), 229–30 and Pasmore with Duerden, 9. 13 Pasmore with Duerden, 12. 14 Victor Pasmore to Kenneth Clark, 13 July 1940, Tate Archive, TGA 8812/1/1/6. 15 For Pasmore’s letter to Bell, see Alastair Grieve, Victor Pasmore: Writings and Interviews (London: Tate Publishing, 2010), 26. For Pasmore’s letter to Clark, see Victor Pasmore to Kenneth Clark, 24 April 1941, Tate Archive, TGA 8812/1/1/6.

188

NOTES

16 Details of Pasmore’s conscription, military service and tribunals are outlined in Laughton, Euston Road School, 225–6 and Grieve, Victor Pasmore, 2010, 31–2. There was an outline of the tribunal published in Anon., ‘Artist Wants To Leave Army As C.O.’, News Chronicle, 1 October 1942, 3. 17 Victor Pasmore to Kenneth Clark, 28 September 1940, Tate Archive, TGA 8812/1/1/6. Pasmore expresses similar sentiments in a letter to Bell, quoted in Grieve, Victor Pasmore, 28. 18 Victor Pasmore to Kenneth Clark, 19 May 1941, Tate Archive, TGA 8812/1/1/6. 19 Ann Saunders, ed., The London Country Council Bomb Damage Maps 1939–1945 (London: London Topographical Society and London Metropolitan Archives, 2005), 22. 20 Saunders, map no. 85. 21 Victor Pasmore to William Coldstream, 16 December 1944, Tate Archive, TGA 8892/4/471. 22 On the early attacks on the Thames, see Peter Ackroyd, Thames: Sacred River (London: Vintage Books, 2008), 211 and Jonathan Schneer, The Thames: England’s River (London: Little, Brown, 2005), 200. 23 On the symbolic power of the River Thames, see Schneer, The Thames, 197 and Ackroyd, Thames, 212. 24 On Pasmore’s river patrol duty, see Jenny Pery, The Affectionate Eye: The Life of Claude Rogers (Bristol: Sansom, 1995), 108. Schneer recounts the heroic experiences of A.P. Herbert on the Thames during the blitz, including his sailing up the blazing river on 7 September 1940: ‘He loved the river’s every twist and turn; its injuries pained him; he wrote almost as if he thought of it as a living thing’: Schneer, The Thames, 204–5. 25 Wendy Pasmore to Kenneth Clark, undated (c. 1942–3), Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 8812/1/1/32. 26 Pasmore with Duerden, 10–11. 27 Pasmore with Duerden, 14. 28 Notes from a Discussion at the ICA: Public View No. 1, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 955/1/7/18, 10–14. 29 Patrick Heron, ‘Victor Pasmore’, Art News and Review, 30 December 1950, 4. 30 Victor Pasmore, ‘The Artist Speaks’, Art News and Review, 24 February 1951, 3. 31 Mary Banham and Bevis Hiller, eds., A Tonic to the Nation: The Festival of Britain, 1951 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976), 102. 32 Victor Pasmore, ‘The Case for Modern Art: Interview with Peter Fuller’, Modern Painters 1, no. 4 (1988/89): 29. 33 David Mitchell, ‘Peterlee: A Miners’ Town to End Squalor’, Picture Post, 14 December 1948, 26–9. 34 Victor Pasmore, ‘The Case for Modern Art: Interview with Peter Fuller’, Modern Painters 1, no. 4 (1988/89): 29. 35 Victor Pasmore, Roy Gazzard and Peter Daniel, ‘Housing Experiment at Peterlee’, AAJ, 19 June 1961, 6–26 and Pasmore, ‘The Case for Modern Art’, 30.

NOTES

189

36 J.M. Richards, A.V. Williams, A.T.W. Marsden and Victor Pasmore, ‘Peterlee: A Symposium’, in Bowness and Lambertini, Victor Pasmore, 261. 37 Richards et al., ‘Peterlee: A Symposium’, 259. 38 Peter Daniel, Frank Dixon and Victor Pasmore, ‘Housing at Peterlee’, Architectural Review 129, no. 768 (1961): 88. 39 Reproduced in Elena Crippa and other authors, Exhibition, Design, Participation: ‘an Exhibit’ 1957 and Related Projects (London: Afterall Books, 2016), 114–18 and 133. 40 D.W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971; repr. Oxford: Routledge, 2005), 51–70. 41 See Michal Shapira, The War Inside: Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Post-War Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 112–37. 42 Zaretsky, ‘One Large Secure’, 149–51. 43 Richards et al., ‘Peterlee: A Symposium’, 261. 44 Anon., ‘Village Life Is Threatened: Parish Councils Raise Their Voices in Protest’, Durham and Chester-le-Street Chronicle, 29 June 1956, 1. 45 Anon., ‘Voice of the Villagers’, Durham and Chester-le-Street Chronicle, 28 September 1956, 8. 46 Peterlee Development Corporation, Peterlee New Town: Tenants Handbook (Gloucester: The British Publishing Company, 1960). 47 Anon., ‘Peterlee Delightful Town to Live in, Says Resident’, Durham, Chesterle-Street and Seaham Chronicle, 27 May 1960, 4. 48 Anon., ‘People Like Living in County Durham’s New Towns’, Northern Echo, 26 May 1960, 9. 49 Anon., ‘Peterlee Delightful Town to Live In, Says Resident’ and Anon., ‘John North Visits Peterlee’, Northern Echo, 26 May 1960, 9. 50 Caroline Tisdall, ‘Caroline Tisdall describes How the People of Peterlee, a 30-Year-Old “New Town”, Are Creating Their Own Archive’, The Guardian, 10 June 1977, 8. 51 Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (1986; repr. London: Penguin, 2002), 298–301. 52 Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 93–104.

Conclusion 1

Carter Ratcliif and Robert Rosenblum, Gilbert & George: The Singing Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 53.

2

Ratcliff and Rosenblum, Gilbert & George, 53.

190

NOTES

3

My account is drawn from documentary photographs of the artists’ performance, which I was unable to reproduce here: see Ratcliff and Rosenblum, Gilbert & George, 53.

4

Martin Lister, New Media: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2003), 354–5 and Lynda Nead, The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film, c. 1900 (London: Yale University Press, 2007), 85.

5

Lindsay Anderson, O Dreamland, 1956, Sequence Film, UK.

6

For example, these were the words published in souvenir leaflets given to attendees at their European performances in 1970: Ratcliff and Rosenblum, Gilbert & George, 54.

7

Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 25–87.

8

Wolf Jahn, ‘Naked Human Artists’, Tate Etc., Spring 2007, http://www.tate .org.uk/context-comment/articles/naked-human-artists.

9

The artists have consistently rejected being labelled as gay, denied an interest in gay liberation and refused the idea that they make ‘gay art’: ‘We never did gay art, we never did, ever’, Daniel Farson, Gilbert & George: A Portrait (London: Harper Collins, 2000), 75. In response, they put forward a fluid if defensive approach to gender and sexuality: ‘we know much younger friends … post-G&G people you can call them … they just don’t think of sexuality in divisions … They don’t think “gay” or “straight” or “queer”. They don’t ask if the friend coming over to dinner is queer or not, it’s not an issue’: ‘From Wasteland to Utopia – the visions of Gilbert & George: Interview with Simon Dwyer, 1995’, in The Words of Gilbert & George: With Portraits of the Artists From 1968 to 1997, ed. Robert Violette and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 209 and Farson, Gilbert & George, 76.

10 Farson, Gilbert & George, 29–32. 11 Farson, Gilbert & George, 52–3. 12 See, for example, Violette and Obrist, ed. The Words of Gilbert & George, 16 and 21. 13 ‘Gilbert & George: Interview with Gordon Burn 1974’, in Violette and Obrist, The Words of Gilbert & George, 72. 14 Flanagan and Allen, Underneath the Arches, 1941, Pathé Gazette, UK, http:// www.britishpathe.com/video/flanagan-and-allen-underneath-the-arches. 15 Farson, Gilbert & George, 43, and Pierre Saurisse, ‘Sculpting Etiquette: G&G’s Radical Good Manners’, Visual Culture in Britain 14, no. 1 (2013): 101–14. 16 On makeshift spaces for the homeless, see Juliet Gardiner, The Blitz: The British Under Attack (London: Harper, 2010), 115–38; on wartime railway arches, see Andrew Sinclair, War Like a Wasp: The Lost Decade of the Forties (London: Faber and Faber, 2011), 55. 17 On cruising and the blackout, see Cook, A Gay History, 148–50; on the railway as a space of cruising, see Houlbrook, Queer London, 48. 18 Farson, Gilbert & George, 42. 19 On the Blitz and popular memory, see Calder, Myth. 20 Keith Vaughan – miscellaneous statements about his work from MS notes, Tate Gallery Archive, TGA 200817/6/2.

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Index ‘Aged Villager’ (poem by anonymous) 158 Allen, Mary 48, 163 Alloway, Lawrence an Exhibit 156 Exhibit II 156 Allsop, Kenneth 12–14, 30 Anderson, Lindsay, O Dreamland 165 Araeen, Rasheed 125 Architectural Review 101, 156 art. See also specific artists abstract 17 masculinities’ relationship with 15–16 reconstruction effects 16–20 relationship to historical understanding 3–4, 10, 15–16, 20, 171 Art News and Review 42, 112, 151 Arts Council 98, 152 Bacon, Francis 3, 7, 15–17, 20–1, 24 Figure in a Landscape 22, 55, 70–2, 74–7 Gowrie’s obituary 62–3 Man in Blue series 22, 55, 60–70, 72, 75, 77 Nazism and 72–6 on queer experiences 53–77 reflections on home 55–7 sense of intimacy 59–66 studio of 56–7, 59–60, 68 Two Figures 8–10, 53–5, 59–60, 67–70, 75, 77 ‘wanderjahren’ 56 Baldwin, James 66–7, 69, 125–6 Giovanni’s Room 55, 67–9 Bell, Graham 143 Berger, John 26, 115 Bevin, Ernest 5

Bhabha, Homi 135 Blood, Wendy 142, 144, 147 Bone, Stephen, The Critics (BBC) 118 Bonnard, Pierre 26 Bowlby, John 18 Bratby, John 3–4, 6, 13–17, 21–2 artistic ideals, post-war masculinity 27–35 Breakdown 28, 30–1, 47 on gender and sexuality 38–41 Guggenheim Award 42 home and domesticity 26–7 Jean and Still Life in Front of a Window 41–2, 45, 48–9 Jean at the Basin 36–8, 40 John Bratby Portraits 35 Kitchen Sink Painters 26–7, 42 Kleinian psychoanalysis, use of 27 profession and family life 25–6 Three Self-Portraits with a White Wall 13–14, 27–35, 49 on violence towards women 46–52 Brausen, Erica 54, 57 British Nationality Act 1948 8, 111, 184 n.6 British society black migrants 12 family life during wartime 157, 160 migration, impact on 110–11 otherness 11 violence towards women 48–9 Burn, Gordon 167 Butcher, G.M 112 Butler, Judith 15, 102–3, 105 Caruth, Cathy 16–17 Cézanne, Paul 142 Clark, C.W. 154 Clark, Kenneth 143–4, 147, 154

INDEX Coldstream, William 146 Cole, Sarah 91–2 Colebrook, Harold 84 Cook, Matt 7, 58 Cooke, Jean 13, 21, 25, 27, 35–52 Self-Portrait 33–5 John Bratby (1954) 49–52 John Bratby (1962) 51–2 Cubism 26 Dalmia, Tashodhara 135 Daniel, Peter 139, 169 Danquah, Paul 56 Da Vinci, Leonardo 151 Dixon, Franc 139 Doan, Laura 19 Encounter (journal) 110 Family Portrait (film) 5 Farson, Daniel 169 Festival of Britain 5, 98, 152 Dome of Discovery 81, 101 60 Paintings for ’51 exhibition 152 First World War 91 Flanagan and Allen 163, 168, 170 Fortier, Anne-Marie 7 Freeman, Elizabeth 19, 102–3, 105 Geest, Bill 79 Gender. See also specific artist’s representation English conception 11, 15–16 home, post-war reconstruction 4, 6, 10, 12–13 Genet, Jean 73–75, 103 Funeral Rites 55, 73–4 Giacometti, Alberto 26 Gide, André 4, 98–9, 101 Thésée 23, 81, 98 Gilbert & George 3, 7, 15, 17, 20 ‘Art For All’ 167 on homelessness 163, 165–70 as living sculptures 163 on queerness 166, 168–71 as singing sculptures 164 Underneath the Arches 4, 24, 163–70 Goodliffe, Michael 5 Gowrie, Grey 63–4

205

Greaves, Derrick 26 Gruber, Francis 26 Guinness, Bryan 142 Hall, Eric 70–2 Hall, Stuart 3 Hamilton, Richard 150–1, 156 an Exhibit 156 Exhibit II 156 Hammer, Martin 71 Hearn, Jeff 48 Herbert, A. P 147 Heron, Patrick 151, 153 heterosexuality 7, 10–12, 15, 39, 58, 62, 66, 68–70, 102, 134, 168, 171 Hoffman, Heinrich 120 Hoggart, Richard 30 home 5–10, 19, 24, 33, 71, 79–80, 89– 90, 92, 140–2, 154, 161, 165–9 artworks 3 Bratby’s representations of 22, 25–7, 29, 36, 41, 49, 52 and gender 4, 25 Gilbert & George’s vision of 170 and masculinity 2, 4, 10–16, 19–21, 30–2, 35, 39, 75, 127–36, 162–3 migration and 127–36 Pasmore’s art 24, 144–5, 158 post-war 2, 5–6, 8, 10, 13, 16, 18–19, 21–5, 52, 60, 77, 81, 102, 107, 111, 125, 136, 158 pre-war memories of 81–7 queer (Bacon’s art) 22–3, 52, 55–60, 66–70, 75, 77, 81, 106–7 Rau on 17 reconstructing 94–102 Souza’s negotiation of 24, 110–11, 116–17, 171 Titmuss on 17–18 Vaughan’s representation of 77, 79–81, 102–3, 106, 171 violence in Crucifixion 118–27 homosexuality 1, 7–8, 11, 22, 24, 54–5, 58, 62–9, 77, 92, 97, 101, 106, 166 Jennings, Humphrey 5 Kar, Ida 25–6, 127–30 Klein, Melanie 18, 39–40

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psychoanalytic theories 39–40 Kristeva, Julia 75 Lacy, Peter 54, 56 Light, Alison 10, 131 Lubetkin, Berthold 155 masculinities. See also specific artist’s representation categories 76 domestic space 141 English concept 11 familial 11 heterosexual 11 migration and 12, 136 non-familial 13 non-white 111 post-war categories 10, 12, 16 pre-war 10 queer 22, 55, 60–2, 66, 68, 70, 72, 75, 77, 101 wartime 11 Matisse, Henri 26, 148 McClure, Ramsay 98 McGuinness, John 98 Mercer, Kobena 3 Metelli, Orneore 150 Middleditch, Edward 26 Minton, John 98 Mort, Frank 16 Mosley, Oswald, Union Movement 123 Muñoz, José Esteban 3–4, 96 Muybridge, Eadweard 54 Nead, Lynda 5, 16 Newton, Eric 115 Northern Echo 137, 139, 159 Orwell, Sonia 72 Osborne, John 44, 90 Angry Young Men 44 Look Back In Anger 31, 44 Parekh, Bhiku 122 Pasmore, John 137 Pasmore, Victor Apollo Pavilion 24, 137–41, 158, 160–1, 163 art and town planning 154–62

concepts of home 154–62 as Consulting Director of Urban Design for the South West Area of Peterlee 154 Hanging Gardens of Hammersmith, The 141, 145–6, 148, 153 Lamplight 141–4 on Nazi bombings 143, 146–7 Snowstorm: Spiral Motif in Black and White 141, 149–53 war paintings (1940-1950) 141–54 Waterfall, The 152–3 Penrose, Roland 151, 153 Peppiatt, Michael 56, 59, 66 Picasso, Pablo 148 Picture Post, ‘Peterlee: A Miners’ Town to End Squalor’ 155 Pinford, Ronald 91 Piper, David 36, 38 Pollock, Peter 56 Porter, Jimmy 46 post-war home. See also specific artist’s representation definition 6, 21 gendered assumptions 6–7 ideals or norms of 20 public reconstruction 7–8 queer theories 7–8, 19–20 trauma of wartime 16–19 Priestley, J.B 76 Proust, Marcel 4, 62–7 queer See also specific artist’s representation homes 7, 52, 55, 58 intimacy 22, 55, 60–2, 66, 68, 70, 72, 75, 77, 101 theory 19–20 Rau, Petra 17 reconstruction. See also specific artist’s representation; homosexuality government policy 20 non-linear time 16–20 post-war home vs 18 psychoanalysis 19–20 Second World War’s legacy 21–4 use of public shelters 17–18

INDEX Richmond, Anthony, The Colour Problem 122 Rodewald, Cosmo 79 Rose, Sonya O. 11, 75 Rosenberg, Julius 165 Russell, John 72 Schneer, Jonathan 147 Schwarz, Bill 8 Second World War 1, 11, 17, 19, 21, 48–9, 58, 73, 79–80, 88, 91, 94, 142, 154, 161, 168, 170. See also reconstruction Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 15, 65 Segal, Lynne 10 Sennett, Richard 60, 160 Seurat, Georges 142, 146 Sexuality. See also gender; heterosexuality; homosexuality assumptions and ideals 6–7, 10 concepts 15 Sexual Offences Act 7 Shaw, Ken 91 Silverman, Kaja 15 Smith, Jack 26 South Bank Exhibition 5, 152 Souza, Francis Newton 3–4, 8, 15, 17, 21, 23–4 Catholic upbringing 110, 116–17, 120–1, 124 on colonized subjects 116–18 Crucifixion 23, 111, 118–27 on discrimination 122–3 Head of a Man 113 home, Goan background 109–10 Man and Woman Laughing 113–14, 135 masculinity and migration 111, 124, 127–36 on migrants to Britain 122–3 Moonstruck Scientist 113 ‘My Friend and I’ 131–3 ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’ 109–10, 115 Progressive Arts Group 110 response to race riots 123–4 self-portrait 112–18 translation and communication, dilemma 113–18 violence of home 118–27 Western audience 113–14

207

Words and Lines 115, 131 Spender, Stephen 110 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 131 Staël, Nicolas De 103 Stevenson, Robert Louis, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 131 Surrealism 26, 151 Sutherland, Graham 121 Sylvester, David 26–7, 54, 59, 114–15, 150 Taylor-Gooby, David 137 Thompson, d’Arcy Wentworth, On Growth and Form 149 Thompson, Lawrence 29 Thomson, Mathew 160 Tickner, Lisa 3 Titmuss, Richard 17–18 Turner, Mark W. 142 Van Gogh, Vincent 142 Vaughan, Keith 1–4, 7, 11, 15–16, 15–17, 20–1 Assembly of Figures I 23, 81–4, 87–8, 94–6, 102, 106 At the Beginning of Time 101 Camp Construction 89–90 Dick’s Book of Photos 85–8, 94 on group living 90–1 home reconstruction 97–102 kinship memories 102–3 Lazarus 23, 81, 102–5, 127 on NCC during war 80–1, 89–91, 93–8, 102 on non-wartime home 97–8 nude male images 87–8 pagan, sensual days 84, 86 pre-war photographs 85–9 queer experiences 79–81, 93, 96–8, 101–7 reflections on intimacy 80, 84, 86–8, 91–4, 97–8, 101, 106 on Stephen Tennant’s Wiltshire home 79–80 Theseus and the Minotaure 81, 98–9, 101–2, 105 Third and Sixth Assemblies 95 wartime experiences 1–2, 80–1 Vuillard, Edouard 26

208

INDEX

Wallis, Neville 120 Walsh, Johny 103–5 Wildeblood, Peter, Against the Law 58 Williams, A.V. 139, 155 Williams, Raymond 3, 91, 139, 155 Willmott, Peter, Family and Kinship in East London 6 Wilson, Colin, Outsider, The 30 Winnicott, D.W 18, 41 concept of home 154 ‘Discussion of War Aims’ 49 ‘Mother’s Contribution to Society’, The 39, 45

theory of play 157–8 on war and violence 46 Wolfenden Report 7, 11, 58, 180 n.13 Wright, Karen 150–1 Wright, William Matvyn 150–1 Yacowar, Maurice 36 Yorke, Malcolm 103 Young, Michael 6, 44 Family and Kinship in East London 6 Zaretsky, Eli 18

209

210