Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain

Reconstructing Home

Gregory Salter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000182125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie

In this book, Gregory Salter traces how artists represented home and masculinities in the period of social and personal reconstruction after the Second World War in Britain. Salter considers home as an unstable entity at this historical moment, imbued with the optimism and hopes of post-war recovery while continuing to resonate with the memories and traumas of wartime. Artists examined in the book include John Bratby, Francis Bacon, Keith Vaughan, Francis Newton Souza and Victor Pasmore. Case studies featured range from the nuclear family and the body, to the nation. Combined, they present an argument that art enables an understanding of post-war reconstruction as a temporally unstable, long-term phenomenon which placed conceptions of home and masculinity at the heart of its aims. Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain sheds new light on how the fluid concepts of society, nation, masculinity and home interacted and influenced each other at this critical period in history and will be of interest to anyone studying art history, anthropology, sociology, history and cultural and heritage studies.

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

In 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 post-war 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.

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.

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 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 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 post-war 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, 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 Self-Portraits 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 self-conscious, 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:

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 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 post-war 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 post-war 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:

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...