ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book represents post-war 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. It argues, instead, that these artists’ 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. The book begins 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.
