Keith Vaughan
Figure: June 21
Auction Closed
November 15, 03:40 PM GMT
Estimate
6,000 - 8,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Keith Vaughan
1912 - 1977
Figure: June 21
signed Keith Vaughan and indistinctly dated June 21 /61 (lower right)
oil pastel on paper
unframed (sheet): 50 by 36cm.; 19¾ by 14in.
framed: 74.5 by 59.5cm.; 29¼ by 23½in.
Executed in 1961.
We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for his kind assistance with the cataloguing of these works. His two books Awkward Artefacts: ‘The Erotic Fantasies’ of Keith Vaughan and Paradise Found and Lost: Keith Vaughan in Essex have just been re-issued by Pagham Press and may be purchased from the Keith Vaughan Society.
Humphrey Whiteread
John Weston
Private Collection, LA, from whom acquired by the present owner
London, Whitechapel Gallery, Arts Council Exhibition, Keith Vaughan, March - April 1962, no. 53, with tour to National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, City Art Gallery, Bradford and Southampton Art Gallery, Southampton
Vaughan had been using wax crayon as early as the 1940s, but in 1959 he discovered oil pastels while he was teaching at the Iowa State University Art Department. Their density of colour and the immediate manner in which they could be applied instantly inspired him. Furthermore, oil pastels don’t leave a dusty residue nor smudge like traditional artists’ chalks, they him offered new and unforeseen pictorial possibilities. In a letter to his close friend the painter Prunella Clough, Vaughan expounded their virtues explaining that they were ‘waterproof, impervious to everything, can be rolled, stamped on, eaten!’ (see Malcolm Yorke, Keith Vaughan his Life and Work, London 1990, p. 189).
As ever, Vaughan employs an economical and harmonious palette consisting of only a handful of related hues. He builds up an abstract arrangement of forms which interpenetrate and encase the standing figure. The chromatic arrangement of cobalts, indigos and azures are off set by more dominant blacks and earthy hues.
John Weston (1932-2023 ) was an award winning author and LGBTQ advocate in the US.
Gerard Hastings
