Description / Expertise
KEITH VAUGHAN (British 1912-1977)
Wooded Landscape
Pen and ink
Floated in an Italian cassetta brown marbled & gilded frame
KEITH VAUGHAN (1912-1977)
Famed for his depictions of the male nude, landscapes and combinations of the two, Keith Vaughan’s singular and striking work has led him to be viewed as one of Britain’s most significant Post-War artists.
Born in Selsey Bill, Sussex, Vaughan grew up in North London where he lived for most of his adult life. The artistic training he received at Christ’s Hospital School, Horsham, was the only formal tutoring Vaughan received. 1930s Britain was in the midst of the Depression, so out of financial necessity Vaughan sought employment instead of continuing to art school. From 1931 to 1938, Vaughan worked as a trainee artist at Lintas, the advertising arm of Unilever, and painted in his spare moments.
Registered as a conscientious objector in the Pioneer Corps during World War II, Vaughan spent most of the war near Malton, Yorkshire, employed as a German interpreter, and simultaneously creating powerful paintings and drawings in gouache and ink. His wartime contributions to Penguin New Writing, resulted in him being invited to exhibit his works in a war art exhibition at the National Gallery, London. Here he met Graham Sutherland and other artists such as John Minton and John Craxton, whom were involved in the reflective and visionary Neo-Romantic movement, which influenced much of mid-40s British art. Sutherland’s late 1930s work had also concentrated on semi-abstract compositions of boulders, trees and roots found in his trips to Pembrokeshire. Thus the influence of Sutherland and Neo-Romanticism combined with the inspirational rugged Yorkshire landscape Vaughan was surrounded by at this time all contributed to the present work.
The sombre palette of blues and ochres, was to form the colour basis for much of Vaughan’s work throughout his career. A continuous concern of Vaughan’s was his debate regarding the relationship between abstraction and the figurative in art. He stated in 1950, ‘My aim is to produce a painting which, by its associations of form and colour, offers a visual experience as abstract and self-contained as a piece of music, and human in the sense that it appears to belong to the world of living men..I prefer to discover forms which retain the essence of their origins in nature and can at the same time be combined into a single unity’. This work depicts earthly stones arranged within a composition that almost creates a solo abstract form.
In 1944, Vaughan had his first one-man exhibition at the Reid & Lefevre Gallery, where he exhibited until 1952 and thereafter at major London galleries and abroad. In 1951 he was commissioned to produce a mural for the Dome of Discovery at the prestigious Festival of Britain. From 1948-52 he shared a house with Minton but started to move forward from Neo-Romanticism towards a more personally distinctive style. An exhibition in 1952 at Matthiesen Gallery, London, of Nicolas de Stael’s work aided Vaughan’s concern with the merging of abstraction and the figurative within a single work, and encouraged a greater freedom in his use of paint and the colour and form within his painting.
Vaughan taught at Camberwell College of Art between 1946-8, Central School of Art between 1948-1957, and the Slade School of Art from 1959, where David Hockney was a pupil of his. He was made a Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1964. Vaughan traveled extensively throughout his career, making trips to Europe, visiting Iowa, Chicago and Mexico in 1959 before accepting the post of Resident painter at Iowa State University and journeying to North Africa in 1965, the year he was awarded the CBE. From then until his death in 1977 he continued to live and work in London, teaching part-time at the Slade and spending weekends and extended periods of time at his cottage in Essex.
Retrospective exhibitions of Vaughan’s work were held at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1962, the University of York in 1970 and the Arts Council arranged a touring retrospective in 1957. Suffering with cancer, Vaughan committed suicide by overdose in 1977 in his studio, recording his last moments in the journal he had started in 1939. Extensive selections from this diary were published in 1989 and a Memorial exhibition was held after his death at Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield. His work is held in many distinguished Public Collections including the Tate Gallery, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Arts Council of Great Britain, National Gallery of Scotland, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney and Yale University Art Gallery, USA.
Price
gbp 6000.00 (Pound Sterling)
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