Keith VAUGHAN

A deep, rich blue tonality is a particular characteristic of Keith Vaughan’s works of the 1960s and 1970s. As Andrew Lambirth has pointed out, ‘The emphasis on outline and flat pattern began to change as he developed more of an interest in the plastic properties of oil paint and its formal possibilities. This led in the 1960s to a new fluidity of paint handling and brighter colour. Increasing lucidity was matched by a new excitement frequently bordering on lyricism. Brushwork, rather than drawing, was now the driving force. Colour was used more abstractly, in a seemingly casual way but actually instinctively and with flair, and there was movement apparent.’

Drawn on 21 June 1961, the present sheet is executed in what was, for Vaughan, the relatively new medium of oil pastel. The artist here builds an abstract arrangement of rectangular, tessellated blocks – in shades of cobalt blue, indigo and azure, alongside blacks, browns and greys – around and over the outlines of a standing figure. As has been noted, ‘especially in the later gouaches, Vaughan introduced geometric features such as rectangles and rhomboids, seemingly floating about in space. These characteristic squared-off coloured slabs are woven into the compositional fabric of his gouaches to strengthen their formal construction; it was a fine-tuning formula that helped him achieve pictorial resolution. His precisely calibrated block forms, made with opaque gouache or later with dense coats of oil pastel, supplied flat areas of colour that contrasted with meandering lines and textured surfaces. They also provided Vaughan with an innovative way to suggest pictorial space.’

It was in 1959, during his period of teaching in Iowa, that Vaughan first discovered oil pastels, and he continued to use them for the remainder of his career. He appreciated the density of colour that he could achieve with oil pastels, which could be applied quickly and, unlike chalks or wax crayons, were not fugitive and did not smudge. (‘As they were rare in England, he explained to [friend and fellow artist] Prunella Clough that they were ‘waterproof, impervious to everything, can be rolled, stamped on, eaten.’’) As the Vaughan scholar Gerard Hastings has noted, oil pastels ‘came in a rainbow range of colours, and were subtler and more succulent than their semi-transparent waxy cousins; [Vaughan] found them to be a highly obliging medium. He eagerly exploited their pictorial value…Oil pastels could create broad slabs of colour with little effort or, after using a pencil sharpener on them, could tease out fine contours and other delicate details…Vaughan could significantly enhance the impact of a gouache by the application of a shrewdly placed block of vibrant colour or a pulsating hue that would sing out from the painted surface.’ When Vaughan exhibited his oil pastels in London, after his return from America, they were offered for sale at prices between £30 and £40 apiece.

Lent by the artist, the present sheet was one of eighteen oil pastels selected by Vaughan for inclusion in the major retrospective of his work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1962. However, due to the limitations of space, many of the works he had chosen could not be hung, and were instead shown at the Matthiesen Gallery in London later the same year. A stylistically comparable figure drawing in oil pastel, dated 23 April 1961, appeared at auction in London in 2011, while another oil pastel of a Standing Figure in a Landscape of 1962 was formerly in the noted collection of the artist’s friend and patron John Ball and appeared on the art market in 2012.

As the poet and writer Stephen Spender has opined, ‘the real drama of Vaughan’s paintings is (to me at all events) in his human figures. Alone of modern painters he has taken up and developed the themes of nudes in Cezanne’s studies of bathers. These human beings remind us that we call branches ‘limbs’, and in the sunlight out of doors they often have the quality of displaced trees with the bark stripped off. Whereas in Cézanne the flesh seems far less sensual than, say, in a painting of an apple, in Vaughan’s paintings it has an almost magnetic – certainly metallic – attraction. At the same time it is colour and form that is beautiful in his figures, never the human subject itself. The flesh is sad and grey and greeny-bluish but through a metamorphosis of colour and form it attains to beauty beyond its fleshiness.’

The first owner of the present sheet was Humphrey Whitbread (1912-2000), of the Whitbread brewing family, who assembled a number of works by Keith Vaughan alongside a fine collection of Georgian and Regency furniture, much of which was kept at his home, Howard’s House in the village of Cardington in Bedfordshire, near the Whitbread family estate at Southill. This drawing was later acquired by another collector of Vaughan’s works, the American author, poet and English professor John Weston (1932-2023).