British
The Purpose of Art
1        To reveal the possibility of order in areas hitherto seen as chaotic.
2        To create order by novel methods.
3        To reveal new aspects of human experience and force a rethinking of accepted beliefs.
The Purpose of the Artist
To produce work which is a true expression of his individual experience.
To produce work of the highest quality and standard possible. Quality and standard being understood as purely subjective valuation. That is to say he is under an obligation to ensure that the work conforms to his own standards of quality, even though these standards may not be widely accepted.
Art produced in conformity with some theory or system is valid only if the theory or system is genuinely experienced by the artist as part of his world or life-style. It is invalid if the theory or system is followed simply because it is novel and trendy and fashionable at the moment. The work of good artists is sometimes marred by too close adherence to unsuitable theories (Millais).
Keith Vaughan, 1972
1912:        Born at Selsey Bill, Sussex, as a very young child Vaughan moved with his family to North London, where he lived for the rest of his life.
1921-30:        A boarder at Christ’s Hospital, Horsham, where an enlightened art master (H. A. Rigby) provided the only formal art training that he ever received. Rigby encouraged Vaughan to discipline and stretch his talents and particularly fostered his interest in Frank Brangwyn, whose murals adorned the school chapel.
1931-8:        Working at a routine job in an advertising agency (Lintas), he found some compensation in contact with artist colleagues such as Felix Kelly and the Australian painter, John Passmore. Passmore said of Vaughan: ‘I owe him a lot - in a paradise of fools one ray of merit is something to thank God about.’ Vaughan’s leisure hours were intensively occupied with music and visits to the ballet; Passmore commented on his vivacity, his love of music and his mobility while dancing: ‘It was such a brilliant thing. He was very close to a Diaghilev dancer.’ Vaughan was already painting in his spare time. He began to discover modern art, most importantly C é zanne, Picasso and the French Impressionists. Towards the end of the 1930s he spent many weekends at Pagham with friends, sunbathing, swimming and playing on the beach. He took many photographs in which his friends often seem frozen in movement, in striking gestural poses which subsequently appear in his mature paintings. He made his first direct acquaintance with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings during a visit to Paris in 1937.
1939:        After leaving Lintas, he spent a year painting in the country. This was his first prolonged involvement with oil paint.
1941-6:        A non-combatant in the army, Vaughan was stationed at first in Wiltshire but spent most of the War near Malton in Yorkshire, mainly working as a clerk and German interpreter, and producing many highly charged gouaches and ink drawings. As a result of contributing to the Penguin New Writing he was invited to show drawings in a war art exhibition at the National Gallery. Met Graham Sutherland and other Neo-Romantic artists such as John Minton and John Craxton. His first one-man show took place at Reid & Lefevre, London in 1944.
Much art seems to me similar to practices in sympathetic magic. You make little effigies of certain states of mind, certain irreconcilabilities and you bring the effigies into harmonious relationship, and it seems that the harmony echoes back into one’s spirit. All romantic art is of this dialectic nature. Classical sonata form. C é zanne’s organisations, all an attempt to make once more a ‘full close’ with life.Keith Vaughan, 1943
1946-8:        The Picasso/Matisse show at the Victoria and Albert Museum suggested ways forward from his Neo-Romantic allegiances. Taught at Camberwell School of Art and initiated notable technical and conceptual developments as he worked consistently with oil paint for the first time.
1948-52:        Shared a house with John Minton, and went to teach at the Central School of Art. Spent holidays in France and Italy. Commissioned to paint the central mural in the Dome of Discovery at the 1951 Festival of Britain.
I don’t think great painting ever has or ever will dispense with the subject. The starting point, in the natural world, must be recognisable in order to gauge the extent of the artist’s creative flight, like a key in music. One has an infinite series of harmonic and melodic progressions, modulations away from the key, away from the longed-for resolution, but their value depends on our recognition of their relation to the dominant, the common chord, the world of nature.Keith Vaughan, 1949
Nature provides the living material which is the starting point of art. My business as an artist is to use this material for the purpose of giving clarity and expression to these sensations which each person carries within him or her from birth and which cannot be expressed in other ways. 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 do not use the purely abstract forms because I feel that these have not the same validity as language or communicative power as they have, for instance, in the world of music. Rather, 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. For without this unity the separate forms cannot illuminate each other and create that new reality which is the work of art. And without that sense of origin, of the point of departure in nature, form becomes abstract, decorative shapes.Keith Vaughan, 1950
1952:        Moved to the Hampstead flat where he lived until his death. Developing awareness of paint surface as an important element in itself. First Assembly paintings. First sight of work by Nicolas de Staël (Matthiesen Gallery, London), which pointed the way both towards a reconciliation between figuration and abstraction and towards eloquence and sensuality in handling oil paint.
1952-9:        Spent holidays in Ireland, Northern England, Cornwall, France and Spain, all of which contributed to a growing interest and productivity in landscape painting. The four Lazarus paintings (1956-9), and his first contact with Abstract Expressionism, which he found conceptually disturbing but which proved to be an important technical influence.
Worked today on the second 30 x 25 canvas in which I seem to be purposefully trying to make a composition of mutual contradictions. Figures which aren’t figures, landscape space which is something else, shapes which are neither abstract not figurative. A little of this makes me very tired and I try to reason the thing out. What am I doing and why. But that line of enquiry leads nowhere. Certainly I am following a scent, but it is very buried and extremely irrational.Keith Vaughan, 1957
1959:        Travelled to the USA, visiting Iowa, Chicago and Mexico. Resident painter at Iowa State University. Great stimulation from colleagues, students and winter landscape. The opportunity for direct contact with modern American art and American optimism probably helped to promote the notable gain in freedom of his subsequent painting. Back in London he joined the staff of the Slade School.
1960:        Important exhibition at the Matthiesen Gallery. Made visits to Venice and Greece. His painting became looser and more abstract with a gain in textural variety.
1961:        First large painting in which several figures are fused as ambiguous entities, increasing the tendency to blend figure and background.
1962:        Retrospective exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, curated by Bryan Robertson.
1963:        Mural for Aboyne Estate Clubroom, Wandsworth, a commission from the London County Council. Exhibited drawings at Bienal de S ã o Paulo.
Oil painting is a totally inert medium which will do nothing of its own accord, except get you messed up. You have to find out what you want it to do and then how to make it do it, consequently it is infinitely more subtle than gouache in expressive possibilities. Personally I think oil paint should ‘sing’, have a musical, sensual quality. I can’t stand muddy inert paintings which have passionate convictions behind them but are so obnoxious to look at. I do like a painting that will make you draw in your breath from a sheer sense of beauty like a Bonnard or a C é zanne.Is the function of art to create order on top of chaos? I comfort myself with clich é s like that. The chaos being the relation of the painter to the world about him. Not so much chaos as conflict. Most people are living in a world of conflicting values. Their demands on society conflict with society’s requirements from them. What one wants to make is a non-destructive and a completely static solution to this thing. In fact, a painting that has all the tensions of conflict in it, but is not destructive, not chaotic, but is fundamentally orderly. Because I do believe that the real value of all the art that I like most is that it is orderly.Keith Vaughan, 1963
1964:        Honorary Fellowship, Royal College of Art.
Expression of emotion is different from the discharge of emotion. A man in a violent temper is not himself expressing rage - he is just raging. Expression is the purposeful control of an emotion for a determined end. Expression utilizes and incorporates into itself the medium of expression. Both are changed in the process of creating the stable expressive image. Discharge of emotion, although it occurs through some channel, does not incorporate the medium and issues in an unstable state. It vanishes like a cry.Keith Vaughan, 1964
A critic once wrote that I seem to be obsessed with what it feels like to have a body. He was right. Find it a constant baffling mystery - the duality of I and myself. ‘Je est un autre’ (Rimbaud). When we hit it off for a time the going is good. At other times it is a constant bickering warfare. It is a commonplace that one’s body belongs more to the environment than to oneself. Hence the need so many people have for rigorous disciplines and self-mortifications.Keith Vaughan, 1964
In art, as in life, one aims at achieving reconciliations - equilibrium. The mistake is to imagine this can be done by eliminating the hostile forces. Equilibrium is the balancing of antagonistic forces and is always a precarious state of tension, as in a pair of scales correctly measuring weight.Keith Vaughan, 1964
1965:        Holiday in North Africa, with major effects on subsequent work, especially gouaches. Awarded the CBE.
1965-77:        Continued living and working in London, and teaching part-time at the Slade, spending weekends and longer periods at his cottage in Essex. The Essex landscape became increasingly important in paintings from about 1968 onwards. Journal and Drawings published in 1966.
I do not think there is any important distinction between figurative and non-figurative painting, but rather between painting which is the outcome or expression of the living experience of the individual artist and painting which is concerned with investigating some optical or geometrical concept. In the former case the work may appear abstract or figurative or somewhere between the two. So far as I am concerned the human figure in some sort of situation has always been the starting point of my work, because that is the situation in which I place the highest emotional investment. I do not find I can get personally involved in the progression of geometrical shapes or the relationships between fields of colour.Keith Vaughan, 1968
My problem at the moment is to find an image which renders the tactile physical presence of a human being without resorting to the classical techniques of anatomical paraphrase. To make something at once very real and very abstract. To create an image without any special identity, either of gender or number, which is unmistakably human; unimaginative without being imaginary, the human figure as an abstract element, like a musical chord.Keith Vaughan, 1968
I am still trying to pare away the inessentials until the subject matter becomes irrelevant.Keith Vaughan 1976
1977:        Died, 4 November, in his studio, to the very end writing the journal which he had started in 1939.
Compiled by John Ball
1944        Keith Vaughan: Foreword in catalogue of first exhibition at Reid & Lefevre, London
1947        Keith Vaughan: ‘A View of English Painting’, Penguin New Writing, No.31
1949        Arthur Rimbaud: A Season in Hell / Une Saison en Enfer, John Lehmann, London
1955        Patrick Heron: The Changing Forms of Art, Routledge, London
1958        ‘Painter’s Progress’, The Studio 156 (758), August 1958, pp 52-3
1960        Benedict Nicolson: ‘Keith Vaughan’, The Observer, 28 February 1960
1961        J. Wood-Palmer: Keith Vaughan: Artist and Sculptor, publisher unknown
1962        Bryan Robertson: Preface to 1962 Whitechapel Art Gallery catalogue
David Thompson: Introduction of 1962 Whitechapel Art catalogue
1964        Keith Vaughan: ‘Notes on Painting’, London Magazine 4 (7), October 1964
David Thompson: ‘Four Drawings by Keith Vaughan’, Connoisseur, August 1964
Noel Barber: Conversations with Painters, Collins, London, pp 71-82
Bryan Robertson: ‘Keith Vaughan’, Studio International, November 1964
1965        Bryan Robertson: untitled piece in Private View (Bryan Robertson, John Russell, Lord Snowdon), Thomas Nelson and Sons, London, pp 106-7
1966        Keith Vaughan: Journals and Drawings 1939-1965, Alan Ross, London
1969        Anthony Carter: ‘Keith Vaughan’, Studio International, January 1969
1970        William Feaver: ‘Stranded Dinosaurs’, London Magazine, 10 (4), July/August 1970
1972        William Feaver: ‘Rogue Males’, London Magazine, 12 (2), June/July 1972
1978        Alan Ross: ‘Keith Vaughan’, London Magazine, 12 (8), February 1978
1988        Malcolm Yorke: The Spirit of the Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and Their Times, Constable, London
1989        Keith Vaughan, ed. Alan Ross: Journals 1939-1977, John Murray, London
1990        Malcolm Yorke: Keith Vaughan: His Life and Work, Constable, London
1944        Reid & Lefevre, London - Gouaches and Drawings
1946        Reid & Lefevre, London - Paintings and Gouaches
1948        George Dix Gallery, New York - Paintings and Gouaches
Reid & Lefevre, London - Paintings and Gouaches
1950        Instituto de Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires - Paintings
Redfern Gallery, London - Gouaches
1951        Lefevre Gallery, London - Paintings and Gouaches
1952        Redfern Gallery, London - Retrospective
Hanover Gallery, London - Drawings
Durlacher Bros, New York - Paintings and Gouaches
1953        Leicester Galleries, London - Paintings
1955        Leicester Galleries, London - Gouaches
Durlacher Bros, New York - Paintings and Gouaches
1956        Leicester Galleries, London - New Paintings
Hatton Gallery, University of Durham (Newcastle) - Retrospective
1957        Arts Council - Travelling Retrospective based on the 1956 Hatton Gallery exhibition
Durlacher Bros, New York - Paintings and Gouaches
1958        Royal West of England Academy, Bristol - Retrospective, Paintings
Leicester Galleries, London - Paintings
1959        State University of Iowa, USA - Paintings and Gouaches
Leicester Galleries, London - Gouaches
1960        Matthiesen Gallery, London - Paintings and Gouaches
1962        Whitechapel Art Gallery, London - Retrospective
1963        Bienal de S ã o Paulo, Brazil - Drawings
1964        Marlborough New London Gallery - New Gouaches
1965        Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford - Gouaches
Marlborough Fine Art - New Paintings
Durlacher Bros, New York - Paintings
1967        Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester - Retrospective, Drawings
1968        Rex Evans Gallery, Los Angeles - Gouaches
Marlborough Fine Art, London - New Paintings
Hamet Gallery, London - Gouaches and Drawings 1942-1946
1969        Mappin Gallery, Sheffield - Retrospective
Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester - Drawings
1970        Bear Lane Gallery, Oxford - Paintings and Gouaches
Hamet Gallery, London - Gouaches and Drawings
University of York - Retrospective
1973        Waddington Galleries, London - New Paintings
1974        Victor Waddington Gallery, London - New Gouaches
1976        Waddington Galleries, London - New Paintings and Gouaches
Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester - Paintings, Gouaches and Drawings
Compass Gallery, Glasgow - Paintings and Gouaches
1977        Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield - Memorial Exhibition
1981        Geffrye Museum, London and City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham - Keith Vaughan: Images of Man
1985        New Grafton Gallery, London - Keith Vaughan: Drawings and Paintings
Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd, London - Keith Vaughan: Early Drawings and Gouaches
1987        New Grafton Gallery, London - Keith Vaughan: Drawings and PaintingsAustin/Desmond, Sunning Hill - Keith Vaughan: Paintings, Gouaches, Watercolours and Drawings 1936 - 1976
1988        Austin/Desmond, London - Keith Vaughan
1990        Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd, London - Keith Vaughan: Retrospective
2002        Olympia, London - Retrospective within the Winter Fine Art and Antiques Fair
2007        Victoria Art Gallery, Bath - Keith Vaughan: Figures and Landscape