Keith Vaughan

Since visiting the excellent retrospective at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath back in February, the life and work of Keith Vaughan has increasingly intrigued me. Caught between the death of the neo-romantic movement and the birth of Pop Art (he was friends with John Minton, and later David Hockney, amongst others); tortured by loneliness and his homosexuality, Vaughan cuts a tragic figure, committing suicide in 1977. Heavily influenced by Sutherland and later de Stael, Vaughan slowly moved away from his early neo-romantic style to the more abstract, yet he could never free himself from the human (mostly male) figure. Deeply atmospheric, usually solitary, and always vulnerable, it is hard not to see Vaughan's figures as self portraits.

However, Vaughan was never the archetypal 'struggling artist', at least financially. Largely self-taught, and always wracked with self-doubt, his work sold well, teaching at the Slade and in the US. However, it is Vaughan's personal life, illustrated through his published journals, that show his inner struggle with both his art and his sexuality.

"During the day, after the normal clerical and domestic chores, I go through the movements of painting, but without much zest or conviction. My mind easily wanders to other things (usually sexual). This distresses me less than it did."

The Journals of Keith Vaughan, 1967-1977

After an operation left him impotent in 1975, the final straw came with the death of his mother in 1976. They had not enjoyed a good relationship, and Vaughan's response to the news was "relief that a useless life has ceased". However, when Vaughan read the letter that accompanied her will, where she wrote "Goodbye darling - you have been the greatest joy to me ", he broke down, feeling "absolutely no desire to be alive".

Sources:

Keith Vaughan: figure and abstract. Victoria Art Gallery, Bath. 2007

Malcolm Yorke, (2001), The Spirit of Place: nine neo-romantic artists and their times. Taurus.