KEITH VAUGHAN (BRITISH, 1912-1977)
Reclining Male Nude
pencil
stamped with estate stamp 'K.V.' (verso)
20 x 28 cm. (8 x 11 in.)
Executed circa 1962

Provenance
Sale; Bonhams, London, 18 Nov 2014, lot 139

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings and Anthony Hepworth for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.

Vaughan’s ‘Grafitti [sic] Drawings’ provide a unique insight into his psychosexual core, so important in feeding his wider creative abilities; they represent the culmination of decades of continual draughtsmanship. We see him chasing the fleeting thought and keeping his mental fantasies animated whilst giving them visual form. By now he understood enough of anatomy to draw without recourse to models, but it is evident that he returned to his photographs of male nudes, some taken as early as the 1930s, since these can be linked to certain poses and attitudes in his late drawings. They give voice to what Professor John Ball described as

"Keith’s complex sexuality and his refined artistic vision. They are wonderfully evocative and masterfully concise. For me they’re some of the finest things that Keith produced - distilled rather like Beethoven’s late quartets or Eliot’s best poems - seemingly effortless yet packed with significance. There’s such an economy of means – a few lines express an entire biography or a complex persona. Keith drew to work out his passions and make his emotional requirements concrete. Most are terribly personal and so very moving in their honesty; they’re concerned with basic and often brutal human truths and examine complicated inter-relationships – what more can one ask of an artist?" (Professor John Ball, correspondence with Gerard Hastings, 2009)

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings for compiling this catalogue entry.