Vaughan, Keith
Keith Vaughan was born in Sussex near London in 1912 but shortly after his family moved to North London where the artist was to live for the rest of his life. He was sent to Christ’s Hospital boarding school from an early age which apart from bad memories about bullying taught him self-discipline and developed his interest in Italian Renaissance paintings. Keith was copying Giotto among the others and also saw and admired sixteen large mural panels by Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) in the school chapel which made an everlasting impression on the young boy.
In 1929 Vaughan saw his first ballet performance, became an ardent ballet lover and developed a fascination with the human body and a rising passion for photography taking pictures of ballets and ballets dancers extensively throughout the 1930s. This interest never ceased and his mature paintings have their roots in his photographic experiments. From 1931 to 1938 Vaughan worked as an advertisement artist at Lever International Advertising Services (Lintas) while living in a small bedroom at his mother’s flat in Hampstead.
During the war years, Keith served in the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) and continued painting mainly with ink, gouache and mixed media on paper influenced by landscapes and metamorphic organic forms by Graham Sutherland (1903-1980) whom he met through an introduction effected by Peter Watson (1908-1956), a wealthy art patron, in the war years. Vaughan and Sutherland met frequently and shared their mutual fascination with William Blake (1757-1827) whom they admired for uniting the curves of human figures, trees and line of hills and Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) who infused his English landscapes with visionary intensity.
Keith had his first solo show at the Alex Reid and Lefevre Gallery just before the end of the war and started teaching at Camberwell School of Art soon after the war finished. He continued to have frequent personal exhibitions collaborating with the most prestigious galleries like the Leicester and Waddington Galleries in London and Durlacher Bros and Marlborough in New York throughout his entire artistic career.
The 1950s were marked by the artist’s rising fame with critics like John Berger comparing the vulnerability and nakedness of Vaughan’s figures to trees stripped of their bark which made his paintings poetically compelling. Keith saw an exhibition of Nicolas de Stael (1914-1955) in London in 1952 whose impasto and vibrant colour made a deep impression on him and had his first retrospective organised by the Arts Council in 1957.
He became a resident artist at Iowa State University in 1959 and travelled and exhibited in the USA and Mexico extensively. In 1962 Vaughan‘s art triumphed in his major retrospective exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery in London.
In 1960-70ss he expanded the geography on his travels visiting Morocco, Greece and Mediterranean and producing exceptional gouaches and oils and taught at the Central School of Art and later at the Slade School. He had several major retrospectives in Manchester in 1967, Sheffield in 1969, York in 1970, Geffrye Museum in London and Birmingham City Museum and Art Gallery in 1981 and London again in 2002.
Keith Vaughan works are present in the major public collections in the UK (Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery, Courtauld Gallery, British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum), USA ( Art Institute of Chicago, Phillips Collection, New York), Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and National Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand.
