An Exhibition at Olympia London
About Keith Vaughan Brief Biography

Head with raised arm (detail). 1947 Oil on Board
Private Collection. © Estate of the Artist


An important re-evaluation of British artist Keith Vaughan (1912 - 1977). This is the first major retrospective in a public space for 40 years and will feature more than 100 masterworks in oil, gouache and pencil. Most are previously unseen and from private collections, and the chronological display will show clearly his progression from 'neo-romantic' to 'existential' artist of the time.

For further information, please contact:
Pippa Roberts
E: pippa.roberts@eco.co.uk
T: 020 7370 8276
M: 07989 404518

The exhibition is supported by AXA Art Insurance Ltd, the leading fine art insurance specialists. This is the third year of sponsorship of the Spring Olympia exhibitions.

  Keith Vaughan’s major paintings are seldom seen. They are divided between the Tate Gallery store, provincial museums and a large number of discriminating private collectors. It is the latter group, the private collectors, who are providing the hundred and more oil, gouache, and watercolour paintings, and the drawings in pencil and charcoal, for the first comprehensive selection of Vaughan’s work to be seen in London for forty years.

“I spent my life looking for myself.” That is how the artist described his career. From his early twenties he portrayed the role of man within his landscape; it was as if his figures were to be at one with an imaginary Garden of Eden. As his first works were somewhat decorative he was designated as a neo-romantic. This label was inappropriate, for his aim, which became startlingly clear as his career progressed, was to be a truly classical artist. His work grew from his understanding of ancient Greek art and its rhythms, forms and jaunty invention; his compositions are satisfying because they observe the subtle and elusive dictates of the golden mean of that time.

Vaughan was constantly looking at man, and man inhabiting the landscape. He saw man as integrated in nature and nature as man’s frame. He also scrutinised the work of other artists, living and dead. He was quick to appreciate what he saw, and what he used is often identifiable. However, what is certain is that the works that carry references from other artists, other times and places, are so recast by Vaughan that they are his. That his vision was unique will only be apparent when a large number of his paintings are seen to create his personal view of the world.

Untaught, though tutored at Christ’s Hospital, Vaughan developed his skill through constant and unremitting practice. During the Second World War he was a conscientious objector conscripted to the Pioneer Corps. This entailed hard physical labour by day, but also provided endless conscripts and prisoners of war for him to use as models. Bivouacking and living in ill-lit huts must have inspired his love of tone against tone. The early works have a haunting intimacy; the first studies are of men who are unselfconscious, and vulnerable, concerned only to survive.

Concurrent with his teaching at the Slade in the fifties, Vaughan’s own work became grander in conception. He began to produce a formality reminiscent of Easter Island figures or the abstracted shapes from the Cycladics. The changes in his style and technique can only be appreciated when his work is displayed in chronological order, as it will be at Olympia. It is easy to associate his name with one of his periods, and not see that in each phase he took his technical expertise and aesthetic sensibility to a new and different plain.

Angus Stewart, Curator