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

In the Name of Mercy, Give! (Coercive Posters)

Albert Herter
In the Name of Mercy, Give!
(Red Cross Poster)
1917
lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Milton Bancroft
Enlist in the Navy
1917
lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Dmitri Moor
Reds vs Whites
(Russian Revolutionary Propaganda Poster)
1920
lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

El Lissitsky
Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge
(Russian Revolutionary Propaganda Poster)
1920
lithograph
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

William Dodge Stevens
Teamwork Builds Ships
1918
lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Workers

I've seen bees, in the spell of a queen,
mine the clover all afternoon
and ants, those laborers, hauling crumbs
to their elaborate dwellings
and lazy crows waiting
for something to be hit by a car
so the pickings will be easy.
And knowing they have no choice
but to obey the imperatives
of their natures, I've moved on
without judgment to the flies
born to be pests and the purple martins
that eat them, and I've been amazed
by the intelligence behind such work,
what eats what, and how much,
the incredible death-work that is
the life of the universe.

And I've known the human work
that uplifts and cleanses, glassblowers
as miraculous as seeds
which hold the shape of flowers,
ordinary people who rival the ant,
who call forth in emergencies
the cockroach's genius for survival.
And I've seen the crow-people too,
the sloth-people, the hyenas,
have seen the cruelty of nature
and the cruelty of economics
merge and twist into confusion,
and have marvelled at the skunk
and its gorgeous white stripe
and its stink and have wondered
if the outlaw, in the company of outlaws,
planning his next job,
isn't the happiest man alive.

– Stephen Dunn (published in Poetry, 1981)

Anonymous British designer
Bad Form in Dress
1916
letterpress
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Luciano Ramo
Bear Down, Citizen Soldier!
1918
lithograph
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Bernard Partridge
Take up the Sword of Justice
1915
lithograph
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Anonymous British designer
Our Dumb Friends' League
1915
lithograph
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

F.A. Crepaux
Buy More Liberty Bonds
1918
lithograph
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Rockwell Kent
Supplication
(Exhibition of Watercolors by Rockwell Kent)
1926
wood-engraving
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Lucian Bernhard
Advertising Poster for Adler Typewriters
1909-1910
lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

A Fourth Group of Verse, Section 33

Passing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign
     and go on, glad that his own life had to do with books.
Now at night when he saw the grey in his parents' hair and
     heard their talk of that day's worries and the next:
lack of orders, if orders, lack of workers, if workers, lack of
     goods, if there were workers and goods, lack of orders again,
for the tenth time he said, "I'm going in with you: there's more
     money in business."
His father answered, "Since when do you care about money?
     You don't know what kind of a life you're going into –
     but you have always had your own way."

He went out selling: in the morning he read the Arrival of
     Buyers in The Times; he packed half a dozen samples into
     a box and went from office to office.
Others like himself, sometimes a crowd, were waiting to thrust
     their cards through a partition opening.

When he ate, vexations were forgotten for a while.  A quarter
     past eleven was the time to do down the steps to Holz's
     lunch counter.
He would mount one of the stools. The food, steaming
     fragrance, just brought from the kitchen, would be
     dumped into the trays of the steam-table.
Hamburger steak, mashed potatoes, onions and gravy, or a
     knackwurst and sauerkraut; after that, a pudding with a
     square of sugar and butter sliding from the top and red
     fruit juice dripping over the saucer.
He was growing fat.

– Charles Reznikoff (1894-1976)


At the Office Holiday Party

I can now confirm that I am not just fatter
than everyone I work with, but I'm also fatter
than all their spouses. Even the heavily bearded
bear in accounting has a little otter-like boyfriend.

When my co-workers brightly introduce me
as "the funny one in the office," their spouses
give them a look which translates to, Well, duh,
then they both wait for me to say something funny.

A gaggle of models comes shrieking into the bar
to further punctuate why I sometimes hate living
in this city. They glitter, a shiny gang of scissors.
I don't know how to look like I'm not struggling.

Sometimes on the subway back to Queens,
I can tell who's staying on past the Lexington stop
because I have bought their shoes before at Payless.
They are shoes that fool absolutely no one.

Everyone wore their special holiday party outfits.
It wasn't until I arrived at the bar that I realized
my special holiday party outfit was exactly the same
as the outfits worn by the restaurant's busboys.

While I'm standing in line for the bathroom,
another patron asks if I'm there to clean it.

– Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz (from Everything is Everything, 2009)

Maximilian Lenz
Subscribe to the Sixth War Loan
1917
lithograph
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Anonymous British designer
Eat No Eggs In Easter Week
1916
lithograph
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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

Nineteen Fifties in Three Dimensions

Eduardo Paolozzi
Plaster for 'Mr Cruikshank'
1950
plaster
Tate Gallery

Eduardo Paolozzi
Mr Cruikshank
1950
bronze
Tate Gallery

"In 1950 Eduardo Paolozzi discovered an illustration in the National Geographic Magazine of a wooden head in sections made by American scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  It was a model for testing the radiation caused by X-ray beams upon the human skull, which the scientists had randomly named Mr. Cruikshank.  Working from the magazine photograph, Paolozzi made a clay copy of the wooden head and retained all the lines of division visible in the dummy.  The clay head was first cast in plaster, and then in bronze.  Later that year Paolozzi decided to use the plaster original as the basis for Tin Head - Mr Cruikshank.  This sculpture [directly below], made from tin cans salvaged from restaurants, is unique.  Using a process similar to collage, Paolozzi hammered the tin over the plaster head and then soldered the small strips of metal together."

Eduardo Paolozzi
Tin Head - Mr Cruikshank
1950
tin
Tate Gallery

Henry Moore
Helmet Head No. 1
1950 (cast 1960)
bronze
Tate Gallery

"A protective helmet encloses a separate bronze form which includes a nose and mouth, suggesting a face.  Moore made a number of Helmet sculptures, but this one is more angular and mechanistic than others in the series, evoking memories of the Second World War, in which soldiers and civilians alike used protective helmets and masks.  It was made just as the outbreak of hostilities in Korea threatened to escalate into a wider international conflict, and may reflect Moore's anxieties over the threat of nuclear war."

Joseph Beuys
Bed
1950
bronze
Tate Gallery

"Joseph Beuys [stated] that this sculpture was commissioned by Alfred Schmela and was cast from three different elements, all wooden: an old clamp, a stylised female torso (which he had carved himself) and a base plane.  This arrangement was only put together for the casting.  He worked in close collaboration with the caster in the casting workshop throughout the casting process and did the patination himself, deliberately making it stained and uneven.  This cast is the third of an edition of six.  Asked whether he wanted this work to be symbolic of human suffering, he said that he did not have this idea directly in mind and that he was more interested in an effect of levitation and space." 

Antoine Pevsner
Maquette of a Monument Symbolising the Liberation of the Spirit
1952
bronze
Tate Gallery

Lynn Chadwick
Fisheater
1951
iron and copper
Tate Gallery

"Immediately after the Second World War, Lynn Chadwick resumed his job as an architectural draughtsman working mainly on the design of exhibition stands for the architect Rodney Thomas.  At the time Thomas was making various models exploring the possibilities of physical balance as an architectural feature; some were kinetic.  In 1946, apparently ignorant of Alexander Calder's mobiles, Chadwick developed Thomas's idea by suspending thin two-dimensional shapes in equilibrium.  Initially the mobiles were conceived as part of the decoration scheme for exhibition stands, but in 1949 one of Chadwick's mobiles was exhibited as an autonomous artwork at Gimpel fils, London.  Between 1947 and 1952 he made at least sixty mobiles, of which some were suspended and other freestanding.  Fisheater was soon considered by critics to be the most important of these works."

Lynn Chadwick
Winged Figures
1955
bronze
Tate Gallery

William Turnbull
Horse
1954
bronze, rosewood and stone
Tate Gallery

Elizabeth Frink
Dead Hen
1957
bronze
Tate Gallery

"Frink frequently portrayed animals in her work.  Birds, in particular, began to appear in her sculpture shortly after the Second World War.  They were used by her as vehicles for strong feelings such as panic, tension or aggression.  They have also been read as having connotations of military might, particularly air power.  Although many of Frink's bird subjects appear predatory and aggressive, the hen in this work is a victim whose pose evokes the tragic aftermath of conflict.  The sculpture is one of a series, made during the same period, depicting animals in their death throes." 

Kurt Schwitters
The Autumn Crocus
1926-28, reconstructed 1958
painted concrete
Tate Gallery

"In the 1920s when the first version of this sculpture was made, Schwitters was exploring ways of combining geometric forms with more fluid, organic shapes.  The sculpture twists upwards, suggesting the 'half spiral' that he identified as 'the most important of my forms.'   This replica was made to stand as Schwitters' gravestone in Ambleside, in the Lake District, but the local vicar refused to have it erected."

Barbara Hepworth
Figure (Nyanga)
1959-60
elm-wood
Tate Gallery

Lucio Fontana
Nature
1959-60
bronze
Tate Gallery

"Nature is one of a series of works made by cutting a gash across a sphere of terracotta clay, which Fontana subsequently cast in bronze.  He believed that the incision was a 'vital sign' signalling 'a desire to make the inert material live.'  Fontana was concerned with transformation, and the shifting yet indestructible density of matter.  The Nature series was partly inspired by thoughts of the 'atrocious unnerving silence' awaiting man in space, and the need to leave a 'living sign' of the artist's presence."

Christo
Wrapped Cans. Part of Inventory
1959-60
metal, canvas and string
Tate Gallery

"Christo began wrapping and transforming ordinary objects such as these enamel paint tins in Paris in the late 1950s.  The paint tins were bought from a hardware store, or retrieved from discarded rubbish.  As the title suggests, this work was intended as part of a room-sized work called Inventory which included numerous wrapped, painted and stacked bottles, tins, barrels and wooden boxes, reflecting Christo's preoccupation with the twentieth-century phenomenon of packaging."

"The artist writes: Altogether I have probably made between 70 to 100 cans, between 1958 and 1960.  . . .  After a can's content had been used, I had the choice to either wrap it, or to leave it as it was.  I did not paint all of those cans that were not wrapped, often the paint that is on them comes from the dripping while being used, some of the cans even have their own labels or parts of labels still apparent.  . . .  The Lady to whom I gave [these] 6 cans as a present is Vera Grossen (I hope it is the correct spelling?), she had been kind enough to help me in finding people in Geneva who wanted their portraits painted.  Painting portraits was my main source of revenues in addition to washing dishes in Restaurants.  The first person to ever buy, with real money ($50) one of the Wrapped Cans was the artist Lucio Fontana, in 1958."  

– quoted texts based on curator's notes at the Tate Gallery