Time was Away: Masculinity, Sexuality and Travel in late British Neo-Romantic Art, Illustration and Design 1940- 55

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David Alan Mellor's 'A Paradise Lost' (1987) and Malcolm Yorke's 'The Spirit of Place' (1988) characterise Neo-Romantic artists as being on a nationalistic and individualistic quest for a 'paradisiac Britain' in the wartime years, which gradually petered out post-war.As the study of British Art has become more established and has begun to embrace queer studies and postcolonial methodologies, it is time for a reassessment. In recent years Alexandra Harris has traced the influence of Romanticism throughout Modernism (2010), Simon Faulkner has investigated John Minton's scenes of Jamaica in terms of decolonisation (2006), and Simon Martin has explored sexuality in Minton's work for the first time (2017). Many of the artists involved in the movement were queer, but sexuality has not been a focus for scholarship; this project will interrogate this. At the same time, until now, scholars have not specifically focused on second generation Neo-Romantic artists, who began their careers in a world of closed museums and galleries and turned to alternative means of production including literary publishing, for example John Lehmann's publishing house, Penguin New Writing and Horizon magazine. I will explore for the first time how these interdisciplinary networks were productive spaces for the expression of queer communities.In looking abroad for a space of escape after 1945, these queer artists found themselves entangled in national and colonial forces. Jasbir Puar's work on homonationalism has shown how the queer movement and queer identities have been complicit with western nationalisms and neo-colonialism in recent decades, and Hiram Perez's work has begun to historicise homonationalism by tracing its roots back to the nineteenth century. However, no scholarship has considered the shifts that occur between these two moments: no-one has asked how queerness was both entangled with, and outside of, the British nation and its imperial anxieties in the post-war moment, which were present, for example, at the 1951 Festival of Britain, seen by some as the last showcase for Neo-Romanticism. This project will home in on a transitional moment in the history of sexuality and national identity in Britain.I will apply these theoretical frameworks to primary sources which fall both inside and outside of traditional art media, embracing book illustration, theatre design, and literature. My research will suggest how post-war art might be contextualised and exhibited in powerful new ways, more accurately reflecting patterns of collaboration and shared creative endeavour amid shifting global politics in an under-researched period.