John
Keith Vaughan (23 August 1912 – 4 November 1977), generally known as Keith
Vaughan, was a British painter. Queer Places:
Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, Gower St, Kings Cross, London WC1E 6BT, UK
9 Belsize Park, London NW3 4ES, UK
John
Keith Vaughan (23 August 1912 – 4 November 1977), generally known as Keith
Vaughan, was a British painter.
Born in Selsey, Vaughan attended Christ's Hospital school. He worked in an advertising agency until the war, when as an intending conscientious objector he joined the St John Ambulance; in 1941 he was conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps. Vaughan was self-taught as an artist. His first exhibitions took place during the war. In 1942 he was stationed at Ashton Gifford near Codford in Wiltshire, and paintings from this time include The Wall at Ashton Gifford (Manchester Art Gallery).
Also during the war Vaughan formed friendships with the painters Graham Sutherland and John Minton, with whom after demobilization in 1946 he shared premises. Through these contacts he formed part of the neo-romantic circle of the immediate post-war period. However, Vaughan rapidly developed an idiosyncratic style which moved him away from the Neo-Romantics. Concentrating on studies of male figures, his works became increasingly abstract.
Vaughan worked as an art teacher at the Camberwell College of Arts, the Central School of Art and later at the Slade School.
Vaughan is also known for his journals, selections from which were published in 1966 and more extensively in 1989, after his death. A gay man troubled by his sexuality, he is known largely through those journals. He was diagnosed with cancer in 1975 and committed suicide in 1977 in London, recording his last moments in his diary as the drugs overdose took effect.
KEITH VAUGHAN 1912 - 1977
The Woodman (Blue Boy).
Color lithograph. 463x315 mm; 18 1/4x12 3/8 inches, wide margins. Signed and titled in pencil, lower margin. 1949.
A very good impression.
Vaughan was a British artist and writer known for his abstracted male nudes set against landscapes. Here the sitter is John McGuinness, a frequent model for the artist, who he met a year before this print was made.
keith vaughan drawing of two men kissing 1958-73
The centenary of Keith Vaughan's birth was celebrated with an exhibition at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, 'Keith Vaughan: Romanticism to Abstraction' (10 March to 10 June 2012).
His auction record of £313,250 was set at Sotheby's, London, on 11 November 2009, for the oil on canvas Theseus and the Minotaur, previously in the collection of Richard Attenborough[1] (who bought it in 1967).
Nottingham Castle
Somerset House, London
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