I was recently sent a family photo that unfortunately brought flooding back some memories of a traumatic period in my life. The era was in the early-mid 1980's when I was struggling with paternal repression at the same time as secretly forging a part of my personal and artistic identity without which you would not be reading these words today.
In the family photo, I look frozen, terrified, desperate – as if my soul is not present.
Roughly concurrent with the occasion on which that moment was immortalised, I was making a discovery. A friend of mine from university had recently begun a postgraduate course at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK and, as an escape from the prison of my quotidian life I used to visit her there.
On one such occasion, my friend introduced me to the Sainsbury Centre For The Visual Arts on the UEA campus there https://www.sainsburycentre.ac.uk/, which I featured in an article in this column last Autumn https://www.artfullyabstractedblog.com/post/where-it-all-began
I do not mind repeating what I stated in that article, that my initiation into the riches that the Sainsbury had to offer (and still does) played a seminal role in shaping my identity. I made a pilgrimage back to the Sainsbury last October and, enthralled, discovered there a painting that was not present in the centre's collection when I first encountered it.
The painting is Keith Vaughan's ASSEMBLY OF FIGURES 1 (1952)
I find this painting mesmerically beautiful, yielding increasingly subtle nuances the more one studies it. The composition intrigues the viewer, with the rear figure all but hidden by the one who bends forward, head bowed, his body given a peculiarly conflicting light-and-shade treatment. Then there is the man on the right whose raised leg echoes the similar gesture of his arm; and there is the curious object on the ground in front, which seems to fall out of the frame. The sole figure to confront the viewer is also the only one to cover himself with a pouch. The central guy does not cover his penis but looks away, perhaps artificially, with a three-quarter glance - “Check me out - I dare you!”
All this results in a compelling and delightfully natural erotic braggadocio in the two right hand figures, mixed with a not insignificant bashfulness exhibited by the two left hand ones.
And what of artistic genre? The raised elbow, strongly modelled limbs and quasi-tribal, mask-like faces put me peripherally in mind of Picasso's LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON. While Picasso's demoiselles are all pointed elbows and proto-cubist angles however, Vaughan presents an altogether more sensual moment; but the confrontational aspect seems to bear a similarity.
Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) who was homosexual, and artistically active mainly at a time when it was illegal to be so, described himself as as 'a member of the criminal classes'. His paintings as well as his earlier erotic male nude photography convey the male body with admirable freedom and candour, celebrating his subjects' beauty and potency. All that work is unambiguously figurative. As we shall see in a moment however, Vaughan was not averse to making more than a nod towards abstraction.
Though I am an abstract artist, I derive strong inspiration and artistic enrichment from drawing the nude human body, and from photographing it – though I do all this for myself alone and not for sale. There is plenty about the human body that leads one towards abstraction if one concentrates on lines, planes and curves; something that has often been remarked upon in my own nude 'bodyscape' photography. One friend has described my semi-abstract nude photography thus: “it is as if you present their bodies as something mysterious, even alien yet, at the same time, you obviously adore them”.
It is not unexpected to discover that Keith Vaughan held a strong abstractionist streak within him.
Vaughan painted this marvellous piece twenty-four days before I was born, in August 1961. It is full of August air, the scent of ozone, fresh summer bodies and sparkling water, and is exquisite. The artist considered it his best painting, because it combined the abstract and the figurative, whereas his work had otherwise tended to bounce between those two apparently disparate poles.
Contemplating this stylistic dichotomy in Vaughan's work set me reflecting on someone whom a colleague once described to me as a 'pure abstractionist', but about whom I never thought anything of the sort! That artist is Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993)
Diebenkorn's abstract landscapes bring to us the breezy sun and palms of California, all open space and sandy winds.
Keith Vaughan offers us dark conifers, a church steeple and the prevailing westerly winds of his artistic palette blow us an altogether more temperate climate, but I can't help but see the kinship.
MALE ESSENCE - ONE ARTIST'S VIEW Copyright Haydn Dickenson 2025
Thanks Haydn. I’ve found a new artist to love! Keith Vaughan. Beautiful work.
I am enthralled by the concept of finding the abstract in the nude. Maybe I’ll play with that idea myself?