Saturday, December 22, 2012

Internalized War

The reputation of near-forgotten English painter Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) began to rise a bit this year, with a modest flowering of fresh attention to mark the centenary of his birth. The abstracted figures – styled after Cezanne and Matisse – tend almost always to be male and half-merged with landscape, their faces and genitals consistently obscured. Vaughan's published journals document a lifelong internalized war between self-expression and self-repression – an inheritance shared by numerous gay artists of his era. 


Leaping Figure, 1951


Harvest Assembly, 1956



Two Standing Figures, c. 1956


Landscape with Figures: Morelos, 1959


 Aegean, 1960


 Seventh Assembly of Figures: Nile Group, 1964



Musicians at Marrakesh, 1966



Illustration for Rimbaud's Illuminations, 1975