Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) - Figures (Nineteen Forties)

Keith Vaughan
The Garden at Ashton Gifford
1942
ink, crayon and gouache on paper
Ingram Collection, London

Keith Vaughan
Climbing Figures
1946
oil on panel
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (England)

Keith Vaughan
Seated Bathers on the Shore
1945
ink, charcoal, crayon and gouache on paper
private collection

Keith Vaughan
Two Figures
1946-47
ink and wash on paper
Jerwood Collection, London

A Momentary Longing to Hear Sad Advice from One Long Dead

Who was my teacher at Harvard. Did not wear overcoat
Saying to me as we walked across the Yard
Cold brittle autumn is you should be wearing overcoat. I said
You are not wearing overcoat. He said,
You should do as I say not do as I do.
Just how American it was and how late Forties it was
Delmore, but not I, was probably aware. He quoted Finnegans Wake to me
In his New York apartment sitting on chair
Table directly in front of him. There did he write? I am wondering.
Look at this photograph said of his mother and father.
Coney Island. Do they look happy? He couldn't figure it out.
Believed Pogo to be at the limits of our culture.
Pogo. Walt Kelly must have read Joyce Delmore said.
Why don't you ask him?
Why don't you ask Walt Kelly if he read Finnegans Wake or not.
Your parents don't look happy but it is just a photograph.
Maybe they felt awkward posting for photographs.
Maybe it is just a bad photograph. Delmore is not listening.
I want to hear him tell me something sad but however true.
Delmore in his tomb is sitting. People say yes everyone is dying
But here read this happy book on the subject. Not Delmore. Not that rueful man.

– Kenneth Koch (2002)

Keith Vaughan
Cain and Abel
1946
ink, crayon, charcoal, watercolor and gouache on paper, mounted on panel
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Quarrymen by an Entrenchment
1947
oil on panel
Queen's College, University of Cambridge

Keith Vaughan
Grecian Face in Profile against a Landscape
1947
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Head of a Young Man
1947
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Figure Undressing
ca. 1947
oil on canvas
Leeds Art Gallery (Yorkshire)

Keith Vaughan
Figure with Raised Arms
1948
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Four Studies of Figures and Trees
1948
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Four Studies of Figures and Interiors
ca. 1948-49
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Six Studies of Figures
ca. 1948-49
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Seated Figure
1949
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) - Drawings from the War Years

Keith Vaughan
Three Figures in a Group at Night
ca. 1939-45
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Group of Figures and Shading Studies
ca. 1939-45
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Four Studies of Figures and Study of a Beach
ca. 1939-45
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Two Men washing
ca. 1939-45
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
A Barrack Room
1942
drawing
Imperial War Museum, London

The Circus Animals' Desertion

I

I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.

II

What can I but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?

And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.

And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

III

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.

– William Butler Yeats (1939)

Keith Vaughan
Figure draping a Cloth over a Frame
ca. 1941-42
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Cook
1941
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Group with Ball on Beach
ca. 1941-44
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Two Men felling a Tree
1941
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Two Men working with Axes
1941
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Four Studies of Figures
ca. 1943-46
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Phallic Shapes
ca. 1943-46
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Eight Studies of Figures
ca. 1943-46
drawing
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Communication of Hate
ca. 1943-46
ink, graphite, pastel and watercolor on paper
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) - Illustrations, Prints, Textiles

Keith Vaughan
I wedged myself into a fork and waited
(book illustration)
1947
ink and gouache on paper
Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries (Wales)

Keith Vaughan
A Youth
(book illustration)
1947
ink and gouache on paper
Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum and Galleries (Wales)

"Keith Vaughan was born in 1912 at Selsey Bill in Sussex, and attended Christ's Hospital, where he was badly bullied.  He received no formal instruction in art, but was apprenticed at the Lintas advertising agency, which gave him some understanding of form and composition.  During this period he painted small artworks, leaving Lintas in 1939 to paint full time, a career that was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II.  Vaughan registered as a Conscientious Objector, eventually ending up as an assistant and interpreter at a German POW camp.  After the war, he returned to painting, and took up a part time role teaching illustration at Camberwell School of Art.  Also around this period he started illustrating for The Hogarth Press, John Lehmann, and Paul Elek, amongst others."  

– from biographical notes published by the Redfern Gallery, London

Keith Vaughan
Figure in a Churchyard
1948
monotype
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
Landscape
1949
lithograph
Victoria & Albert Museum

Keith Vaughan
The Woodman
1949
lithograph
Victoria & Albert Museum

Keith Vaughan
Figure with a Boat
1950
lithograph
Tate Gallery

Keith Vaughan
The Walled Garden
1951
lithograph
private collection

Keith Vaughan
Fisherman
(fabric design for Edinburgh Weavers, Carlisle)
1956
screen-printed cotton
Victoria & Albert Museum

Keith Vaughan
Suffolk
(fabric design for Edinburgh Weavers, Carlisle)
ca. 1950-60
screen-printed cotton
Victoria & Albert Museum

Keith Vaughan
The Bough
(fabric design for Edinburgh Weavers, Carlisle)
ca. 1950-60
screen-printed cotton
Victoria & Albert Museum

Keith Vaughan
Loam
(fabric design for Edinburgh Weavers, Carlisle)
1958
screen-printed cotton
Victoria & Albert Museum

Keith Vaughan
Adam
(fabric design for Edinburgh Weavers, Carlisle)
1958
brocaded cotton and rayon
Victoria & Albert Museum

Keith Vaughan
Self-portrait
ca. 1941-42
drawing
Tate Gallery

Felix H. Man
Keith Vaughan in his studio, Hamilton Terrace, London
1948
photograph
National Portrait Gallery, London

Keith Vaughan
Self-portrait
1950
ink, crayon and gouache on paper
National Portrait Gallery, London

Mid-Century Artists at Work (War Years and After)

Peter Peri
Mr. Collins from the A.R.P.
1940
concrete
Tate Gallery

Peter Peri
Stalin I
1942
concrete
Tate Gallery

Kurt Schwitters
Peg Sculpture
ca. 1945-47
painted plaster
Tate Gallery

from The Question – what is your hope

this sculpture will not be the mystical abode
of power of wealth of religion
Its existence will be its statement
It will not be a scorned ornament on a money changer's temple
or a house of fear
It will not be a tower of elevators and plumbing with every
room rented, deductions, taxes, allowing for depreciation
amortization yielding a percentage of dividends
It will say that in peace we have time
that a man has vision, has been fed, has worked
it will not incite greed or war
That hands and minds and tools and material made a symbol
to the elevation of vision
It will not be a pyramid to hide a royal corpse from pillage
It has no roof to be supported by burdened maidens
It has no bells to beat the heads of sinners
or clap the traps of hypocrites, no benediction
falls from its lights, no fears from its shadow

– David Smith, composed ca. 1946-47, from David Smith by David Smith (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1968)

John Wells
Relief Construction
1941
gouache, graphite, string, cardboard and plastic on board
Tate Gallery

Barbara Hepworth
Tides I
1946
carved and painted holly wood
Tate Gallery

Henry Moore
Figures in Settings
1949-51
lithograph
Tate Gallery

Eduardo Paolozzi
Paris Bird
1948-49
bronze
Tate Gallery

Germaine Richier
The Bat
1946
bronze
Tate Gallery

Elisabeth Collins
The Prophecy
ca. 1940
ink on paper
Tate Gallery

from The Role of Nature in Modern Painting

"As the poem, play, or novel depends for its final principle of form on the prevailing conception of the essential structure that integrates an event or cluster of events in actuality, so the form of a picture depends always on a similar conception of the structure that integrates visual experience "in nature."  The spontaneous integrity and completeness of the event or thing seen guides the artist in forming the invented event or object that is the work of art." 

– Clement Greenberg, published in Partisan Review, January 1949

Victor Pasmore
Abstract in White, Grey and Ochre
1949
graphite and paper collage on canvas
Tate Gallery

Kurt Schwitters
The Proposal
1942
printed paper collage over 19th-century lithograph
Tate Gallery

Kurt Schwitters
Magic
ca. 1936-40
printed paper collage
Tate Gallery

Kurt Schwitters
Untitled (Ochre)
ca. 1945-47
painted plaster and stone
Tate Gallery

from A Painter Obsessed By Blue

No color isolates itself like blue.
If the lamp's blue shadow equals the yellow
Shadow of the sky, in what way is one
Different from the other? Was he on the verge of a discovery
When he fell into a tulip's bottomless red?
Who is the mysterious and difficult adversary?

If he were clever enough for the adversary
He should not have to substitute for blue,
For a blue flower radiates as only red
Does, and red is bottomless like blue. Who loves yellow
Will certainly make in his life some discovery
Say about the color of the sky, or another one.

That the last color is the difficult one
Proves the subtlety of the adversary.
Will he ever make the difficult discovery
Of how to gain the confidence of blue?
Blue is for children; so is the last yellow
Between the twigs at evening, with more poignancy than red.

– Fairfield Porter (1907-1975)

Kurt Schwitters
Lofty
ca. 1945-47
painted plaster
Tate Gallery