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拍品专文
Over the course of twenty-five years, Vaughan created nine major paintings on the theme of assembling figures. The first was painted in 1952, while the last was completed just one year before his death in 1976. In addition, he also produced a series of related works. These include Small Assembly of Figures (1951-53), Small Assembly of Figures (1962), Small Red Assembly (1963), Group of Figures – Blue and Red Assembly (1963), Blue Assembly of Figures (1964), Dark Assembly (1964) and Red Assembly (1964). Two large canvases, Crowd Assembling I and II (1967 and 1968) may also be included in this body of work. All of these are painted in oil, primarily on canvas, though Vaughan occasionally used other supports such as cardboard and soft board. Several related gouaches and drawings further expand the Assembly theme.
The Assembly paintings share several notable pictorial characteristics. Most importantly, the protagonists are invariably male, depicted nude or semi-nude. This makes it impossible to identify specific individuals, their social class, or profession. They are set against beachscapes or semi-abstracted landscapes, with the boundaries between figure and environment deliberately blurred, creating a unified, plastic vision. A lack of specific, visual clues prevents the viewer from determining any precise location. Additionally, Vaughan leaves the figures’ activities or, indeed, the purpose of their gathering ambiguous, refusing to provide clear narrative direction. He deliberately minimizes facial features and obscures genitalia, as he believed such anatomical details were “attention grabbers” which distracted the viewer’s gaze away from the larger composition.
Gestures tend to be understated and anti-dramatic, with psychological expressions virtually non-existent. The avoidance of explicit narrative clarity serves to heighten the sense of pictorial ambiguity, adding to the paintings’ enigmatic quality. One could interpret these gatherings of nameless, vulnerable individuals as symbolic representations of humanity in general – naked, awkward and struggling to forge meaningful connections in both personal and social spheres. Vaughan’s confessional journals indicates that his Assemblies are quasi-self-portraits and investigations concerning his own position in and relationship to, the world. Moreover, with the figures so close to the picture plane and proximate to the viewer, we might imagine ourselves to be a member of one of these groupings, gathered only a step or two away from us.
The Assembly paintings also served as periodic summations of Vaughan’s technical development. It appears each new work in the series represented a more complex attempt to compose a pictorial essay, building upon the progress he had made during earlier periods. In the initial versions, he frequently borrowed poses and gestures from his previous works, using them as a foundation upon which to expand his compositions. He approached them with great care, often creating highly finished gouache studies on paper before tackling the full-scale oil paintings. In 1958, Vaughan discussed his Assembly paintings in an interview:
'These compositions rely on the assumption (hard to justify perhaps, but none the less real to me) that the human figure, the nude, is still a valid symbol for the expression of man’s aspirations and reactions to the life of his time. No longer incorporated in the church or any codified system of belief, the Assemblies are deprived of literary significance or illustrative meaning. The participants have not assembled for any particular purpose such as a virgin birth, martyrdom, or inauguration of a new power station. In so far as their activity is aimless and their assembly pointless they might be said to symbolize an age of doubt against an age of faith. But that is not the point. Although the elements are recognisably human, their meaning is plastic. They attempt a summary and condensed statement of the relationship between things, expressed through a morphology common to all organic and inorganic matter' (Keith Vaughan: ‘Painter’s Progress’, Studio, August 1958).
We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings for preparing this catalogue entry. His books Paradise Found & Lost: Keith Vaughan in Essex and Awkward Artefacts: The Erotic Fantasies of Keith Vaughan have recently been republished by Pagham Press and are available through the Keith Vaughan Society.
The Assembly paintings share several notable pictorial characteristics. Most importantly, the protagonists are invariably male, depicted nude or semi-nude. This makes it impossible to identify specific individuals, their social class, or profession. They are set against beachscapes or semi-abstracted landscapes, with the boundaries between figure and environment deliberately blurred, creating a unified, plastic vision. A lack of specific, visual clues prevents the viewer from determining any precise location. Additionally, Vaughan leaves the figures’ activities or, indeed, the purpose of their gathering ambiguous, refusing to provide clear narrative direction. He deliberately minimizes facial features and obscures genitalia, as he believed such anatomical details were “attention grabbers” which distracted the viewer’s gaze away from the larger composition.
Gestures tend to be understated and anti-dramatic, with psychological expressions virtually non-existent. The avoidance of explicit narrative clarity serves to heighten the sense of pictorial ambiguity, adding to the paintings’ enigmatic quality. One could interpret these gatherings of nameless, vulnerable individuals as symbolic representations of humanity in general – naked, awkward and struggling to forge meaningful connections in both personal and social spheres. Vaughan’s confessional journals indicates that his Assemblies are quasi-self-portraits and investigations concerning his own position in and relationship to, the world. Moreover, with the figures so close to the picture plane and proximate to the viewer, we might imagine ourselves to be a member of one of these groupings, gathered only a step or two away from us.
The Assembly paintings also served as periodic summations of Vaughan’s technical development. It appears each new work in the series represented a more complex attempt to compose a pictorial essay, building upon the progress he had made during earlier periods. In the initial versions, he frequently borrowed poses and gestures from his previous works, using them as a foundation upon which to expand his compositions. He approached them with great care, often creating highly finished gouache studies on paper before tackling the full-scale oil paintings. In 1958, Vaughan discussed his Assembly paintings in an interview:
'These compositions rely on the assumption (hard to justify perhaps, but none the less real to me) that the human figure, the nude, is still a valid symbol for the expression of man’s aspirations and reactions to the life of his time. No longer incorporated in the church or any codified system of belief, the Assemblies are deprived of literary significance or illustrative meaning. The participants have not assembled for any particular purpose such as a virgin birth, martyrdom, or inauguration of a new power station. In so far as their activity is aimless and their assembly pointless they might be said to symbolize an age of doubt against an age of faith. But that is not the point. Although the elements are recognisably human, their meaning is plastic. They attempt a summary and condensed statement of the relationship between things, expressed through a morphology common to all organic and inorganic matter' (Keith Vaughan: ‘Painter’s Progress’, Studio, August 1958).
We are very grateful to Gerard Hastings for preparing this catalogue entry. His books Paradise Found & Lost: Keith Vaughan in Essex and Awkward Artefacts: The Erotic Fantasies of Keith Vaughan have recently been republished by Pagham Press and are available through the Keith Vaughan Society.