Keith Vaughan: Romanticism to Abstraction

Self-taught as an artist, Vaughan studied at Christ’s Hospital School in Horsham before working as a designer for Lintas, the advertising arm of Lever Brothers. This role informed his strong sense of composition that he displays in his art. Although grouped with the ‘Neo-Romantic’ artists during the 1940s, Vaughan was an independent figure in the British art world and an influential tutor at Camberwell School of Art, the Central School of Art and Design and the Slade.

European art and literature had a powerful effect on him, particularly the work of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse and Nicholas de Staël. We know much of this from his moving journal, in which he frankly recorded his thoughts. His writings discuss art, his homosexuality and his struggles with depression, which tragically led to suicide.

The exhibition included loans from public collections including the Arts Council Collection, Bradford Museums and Galleries, the Ferens Art Gallery in Hull, the Government Art Collection, Leicestershire Council Art Collection, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Southampton City Art Gallery, and Worthing Museum and Art Gallery, as well as many private collections to whom we are indebted. The exhibition was curated by Simon Martin, Director of Pallant House Gallery.

Here is a fine painter at his finest – whose pictures, despite their bulk, show humanity at its frailest

Claudia Pritchard, The Independent

If Vaughan never reached the stature of the modern masters he so admired, he certainly took their lessons and made them his own.

Adrian Hamilton, The Independent

Intense and absorbing, this is a fitting retrospective of a formidable English painter.

Richard Moss, Culture24