ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book 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. It also reflects on the challenge of engaging with artworks that refer to domestic violence perpetrated by the artist himself. The book 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. It explores how Vaughan adopted the mythological figure of Theseus as a figure of queer potential. The book 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.
