Like many artists, Keith Vaughan often turned to Ancient Greece as a source of inspiration, as a way to position himself within a respected art-historical canon, and to licence subversive material in his artworks. Vaughan’s ambition was to constructing a notion of universal humanity in his works. As the classical world has long been considered the birthplace of Western civilisation, and Greek mythology contains many foundational narratives, antiquity can act as a means of representing some sort of common human experience. Simultaneously, Vaughan, under the notion of “Greek Love” used the Greek landscape and mythological scenes to express his desires, as a gay man. Vaughan struggled throughout his life with reconciling his personal impulses with the monumental aims of his work and used the ancient world to express this duality.
Mythological narratives are also often found in his works. In Study for Laocoon Group VIII, Vaughan references the myth of Laocoön, a Trojan priest who was killed alongside his two sons by a giant serpent as divine punishment, most famously depicted in the ancient statue Laocoon and His Sons, produced between 27 BC and AD 68. The statue’s art-historical significance, often considered ‘the prototypical icon of human agony’ in Western art, would have appealed to Vaughan’s desire to represent universal experiences and emotions in his work. However, the artist himself also wrote that ‘for him… [the idea behind the Laocoon myth] is that it represents… man’s conflict with his environment… with himself’ and the evils of temptation. Therefore, Vaughan’s reimagining of the Laocoön Group could also be an exploration of his personal struggle with experiencing homosexual desire in the era in which he lived.

Sir Misha Black
Private Collection
Offer Waterman and Co., London
Private Collection
Osborne Samuel, London

A. Hepworth and I. Massey, Keith Vaughan – The Mature Oils, 1846-1977, Samson & Company, 2014, cat. no. AH456, p. 161 (ill.)

London, Marlborough New London Gallery, Keith Vaughan New Paintings, no. 23