Image and Anxiety | Keith Vaughan at Osborne Samuel

Osborne Samuel have named their latest exhibition of the work of Keith Vaughan – their fifth since 2007 – Image and Anxiety.

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977), Nude Against a Green Background, 1953, Oil on board, Signed and dated '53' on the lower right, 84 x 63.5 cm. (33 x 25 in.) Courtesy of Osborne Samuel

 The Mayfair gallery has gathered over 80 works from major private collections, and paintings from their own inventory, including all eight of his lithographs, and the show – which enjoyed a crowded private view on May 10 – is illustrated with two cabinets full of Vaughan’s notebooks, letters, photographs and journals.

 They have also produced a fine catalogue, with an insightful essay by Gerard Hastings on the passion which drove the artist’s creative output – mostly of homoerotic male figures – and the crippling insecurity which inhibited him throughout his thirty-odd-year career. Vaughan was largely self-taught, and openly homosexual during a period in which homosexuality was illegal.

A closer study of the oil-on-board 1953 painting Nude against a Green Background illustrates how aptly chosen title of the show to be. A male figure, naked except for a pair of underpants, fills the frame, head bowed, arms bashfully and protectively crossed in front of his crotch. This is ostensibly a portrait of a sitter – most probably Vaughan’s main model of the time John McGuinness – but is, in reality, more of a psychological self-portrait. The catalogue’s description of the painting, points out its technical merits – ‘an emphatic outline, thickly applied pigment and a palette of ochres, sap green and deep, blue shadowing’ and also quotes Vaughan’s journal from the period it was painted: ‘The continual use of the male figure, no matter how one might develop it in a painting, retains always the stain of a homosexual conception… Perfectly true, but I feel I must hide my head in shame. Inescapable, I suppose, - social guilt of the invert.’

Vaughan suffered terribly from what might be described in today’s jargon as ‘imposter syndrome’, despite a string of successful shows in his lifetime. Since his death in 1977 – by his own hand, after a long illness – his reputation has grown even stronger, particularly since the first Osborne Samuel show in 2007, and subsequent exhibitions at Pallant House Gallery and Brighton & Hove Museums. As Gordon Samuel points out in the catalogue introduction, the past year has seen extraordinary interest in his work, with a number of his paintings making record prices at auction.  

This collection – which includes examples of abstract landscape and a selection of rural scenes, as well as his trademark male figures – provides a comprehensive overview of the artist’s career, and is bound to attract students of modernism as well as Vaughan collectors to the Mayfair gallery. The absolute highlight, which drew huddles of admirers at the PV, is the largest canvas he ever painted, for the Festival of Britain, in 1950. Titled Theseus and The Minotaure, it is a monumental-yet-claustrophobic tour de force, which includes the rarest of elements, a Vaughan female nude, namely of a gracefully lumpy, Matisse-meets-Rubens Ariadne.