In recent years there have been a number of exhibitions of Keith Vaughan’s work in commercial galleries, and his prices at auction have climbed steadily, but no major show in the nation’s museums. Yet interest in his life keeps pace with the revival in his art (the standard biography of Vaughan, by Malcolm Yorke, is long out of print and avidly sought after), and 2012 as the centenary of his birth will see the publication of a new monograph, a catalogue raisonné of his paintings and an annotated volume of his final journals. Vaughan was a good writer, and although selections from his journals have been published before (in 1966 and 1989), the harrowing writings from his last two years have never before been published in unabridged form (Drawing to a Close, edited by Gerard Hastings, £29.95). That they should appear now is a measure of the interest in this remarkable artist.
Although Vaughan (1912–77) became a master of the semi-abstracted male figure, his beginnings were tentative. Born in the Sussex village of Selsey (appropriately near Chichester), as a painter he was largely self-taught and began his career working in advertising. His early work is very much in the literary and romantic tradition of British art, and he soon came to be associated with the wartime neo-romantic painters such as Graham Sutherland, John Minton and John Piper. His work of this period is small-scale, linear and lyrical. Only later did he become more painterly in approach, moving towards a classical understanding of form, under the influence of Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso and de Staël. His later work was increasingly abstract, though landscape and the male nude remained his principal inspirations.
The suite of three first-floor galleries designed for temporary exhibitions in the new wing of Pallant House is given over to Vaughan, with a prelude in the approach corridor. The middle room is the heart of the show, literally and figuratively, containing some of his best large figure paintings hung on dark greeny-blue walls. Here is the great ‘Assembly of Figures VII’ from 1964 and ‘Musicians at Marrakesh’ (1966–70). The first room concentrates on the early work, and is very engaging, including much of his book illustration and such memorable images as ‘Ulysses II’ (c.1938), a lovely figure group in browns and creams, ‘The Singer’ (1947) and ‘Old Seaweed Hoist’, a lithograph of 1953 based on an earlier oil. (A shame the oil was not available for loan.)
Unfortunately, the third room is rather a hotchpotch and makes no clear statement, bringing in some really rather poor images such as the Sutherland-esque ‘Road out of a Village’ (1946) and ‘Cenarth Farm’ (1962–3). There are one or two better things here, including ‘Coastal Defences (Seaford, East Sussex), from 1959-62, and the Cubist-y ‘Village in Ireland’ (1954), but the room is not a success. The first two rooms on their own would have made a much stronger show.
The first major Vaughan exhibition I saw was at the Geffrye Museum in 1981, called Images of Man. I still have the catalogue and I remember how moved I was by the selection of the paintings and the power of the work. If the Pallant House exhibition cannot match the impact of that most impressive display, it nevertheless serves to remind a larger public of just how interesting a painter Vaughan could be.
In 1952, Vaughan shared an exhibition at Durlacher Bros in New York with Robin Ironside (1912–65), the painter and writer who first applied the term neo-romanticism to young British artists, and whose own hallucinatory and finely drawn pictures have largely disappeared from view, while Vaughan has gone from strength to strength. (Interestingly, Ironside also shared a London show in 1949 with Francis Bacon, at the Hanover Gallery. Bacon exhibited paintings, Ironside coloured drawings, and it was evidently felt that the disparity between the artists was not too great to make a nonsense of the shared venue.) It is much to the credit of Pallant House that they now bring Ironside once more to our attention: despite a significant presence in a Tate show six years ago chronicling the influence of William Blake on 20th-century British artists, Ironside has been in danger of being forgotten entirely.
Ironside is given the intimate in-focus treatment with a display in the De’Longhi Print Room on the ground floor of the gallery. Here his enormously complex though small-scale fantasy paintings can be examined with due care and attention. It’s a rather lovely little show, perfectly suited to the space, a feast of intricate detail finely presented, a celebration of the bizarre and recherché. I particularly enjoyed ‘Rose Offered in a Coniferous Wood’ which features a pair of disembodied hands (offering the rose) and a row of sculpted torsos above a nest of eggs, and ‘Break for Music’. If the coniferous wood has run rampant, the blue music room contains an exhausted troupe of resting theatrical artistes engaged on spring-cleaning. Ironside seems to have initiated a whole new genre of what might be called Thespian Surreal.
As a man he was prey to ‘cosmic gloom’, and his figures certainly appear haunted (somewhat in the manner of Fuseli, but more attenuated), sunk in various degrees of Gothic horror and perturbation. Crumpled clothes do little to suggest the bodies inside them, for Ironside’s imagery is much more concerned with external appearances than with the inner being. Or is the dramatically crumpled look so prevalent in his work a comment on psychological states? He was a skilled decorative artist and theatre designer, and it certainly looks as if he paid most attention to surfaces and moods, rather than form and content.
A very handsome publication accompanies the exhibition (£19.95 in softback), containing essays by Simon Martin of Pallant House, the well-known writer and novelist Virginia Ironside (Robin’s niece) and Peter Boughton, Keeper of Art at the Grosvenor Museum in Chester. An expanded version of the Chichester show will travel to Chester, where it will be on display at the Grosvenor Museum from 15 September 2012 to 6 January 2013. If you’re not able to catch the show in Chichester, Robin Ironside’s quirky and original art reassessed in what is also his centenary year will make the journey to Chester well worth the effort.
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