In the literary tradition

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.