The relationship between the figure and their environment is key to Keith Vaughan’s work. His sitters are overwhelmingly male nudes rendered in pale silhouette, their features intentionally anonymised so that little betrays their psyche, identity or profession.
Instead, it is their spatial context that conveys the picture’s emotional significance. Shards of line and form suggest interiors or landscapes rendered with a haunting post- war pallor of greens, browns, blues and blacks.
During the latter part of the Second World War, Vaughan worked as a German translator at Eden Prisoner of War Camp in Malton, Yorkshire. Whenever off-duty he documented camp life by drawing or painting gouaches on small pieces of paper to generate studies, which he might later ‘work up’ once he regained access to oil paints and a studio.
Vaughan was a prolific diarist, and despite enjoying professional success from the mid-1940s, his journals from this period lament about foundering stylistically. He continued to create works on paper on a modest scale and implement a restrained palette, possibly induced by wartime supply limitations. Despite having fallen in with Graham Sutherland and John Minton, Vaughan began to look more critically upon the verdant intensity of Neo-Romantic painting, and turned instead to the spare clarity of the Abstract Expressionists. He was seriously impressed by Nicolas de Staël’s posthumous 1956 retrospective at the Matthiesen Gallery in London.
1959 was a pivotal year in Vaughan’s career. A painting residency at Iowa State University allowed him to travel throughout Iowa, Illinois and Mexico, and the dramatic topography encouraged him to concentrate increasingly on painting landscapes. He was also deeply moved by the Iowan’s friendliness and strong sense of community.
Vaughan arrived in January when Iowa was covered in shimmering snow, and the brilliant light and sculptural forms he observed reinvigorated his creativity. Upon his return to Britain, he took up a lectureship at the Slade School of Fine Art, a position he would maintain until his tragic death by
suicide in 1977.
Today, Keith Vaughan is celebrated as one of the most important British artists of the twentieth century. He is represented in important collections including the Government Art Collection, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum, and the National Galleries of Scotland
