$27,000
Estimate: $20,000 - $30,000
Auction: May 8, 2019 1:00:00 PM EDT
Signed and dated 65 bottom right, India ink, gouache and oil pastel on tissue-thin paper.
19 5/8 x 15 5/8 in. (49.8 x 39.7cm)
Provenance: The Artist.
George Dix, New York, New York (acquired directly from the above).
By family descent.
Private Collection, Charlottesville, Virginia.
note:
We are grateful to Gerard Hastings, whose latest book Keith Vaughan: The Graphic Art, will be published by Pagham Press in association with the Keith Vaughan Society later in the year, for his assistance cataloguing this work.
"I believe the whole problem of the painter is to deal, in some way or other, with the human situation…as far as I'm concerned the figure is the subject with which I am constantly, obsessively occupied…I believe a painter has only one basic idea, which probably lasts him a lifetime. mine is the human figure."
The human figure - and most particularly the male nude - is the enduring and iconic thread woven throughout the fabric of the remarkable career of British Modernist Keith Vaughan. Through his exploration of this subject, Vaughan confronted challenges both compositional and psychological, synthesizing formal and emotional elements in service of one another and creating works of art that examine all at once the "human situation", his own personal biography and his uniquely modern artistic sensibilities. Vaughan completed "Departure" in 1965, an especially important and productive year in the artist's output of gouaches. As he remarked in a journal entry from July of that year, "I start the day with gouache…I have been doing it since last November. Like everything else -compulsive…I have done more gouaches than ever can be shown or sold. Yet I continue to do them because there is nothing else I can do." Vaughan's particular talent for the medium is evident in the present work, in which he utilized his characteristic "frothing" technique, agitating his pigments with soap residue from his brush, which allowed him to create a bubbling effect on the surface of the paper. The resulting dynamic surface activates his work and is a method Vaughan would continue to use throughout his career.
Not only does "Departure" exemplify Vaughan's ingenuity in the medium of gouache, but it is also a fine example of his favored subject. Featuring an assemblage of nudes in a landscape, the present work depicts a compelling and enigmatic narrative. The two figures in the foreground are saying some sort of farewell. Just beyond them, one figure kneels on all fours, a reference to a depiction of Narcissus in a past painting by the artist. To Narcissus's side stands alone man, looking upward toward a darkened sky. It is unclear if all the men are sharing in one narrative or if multiple stories are taking place simultaneously. Vaughan has constructed a flattened, abstract space of rhythmic planes, and one cannot be certain how the landscape and the figures populating it relate to one another. Yet, a certain intimacy prevails, the painting and its inhabitants tied together by the artist's use of color and form. Blues and grays dominate the composition, and the figures - whether directly interacting or not - share similar formal qualities, their bodies rendered in flattened geometries, their faces either blocked by one another or rendered anonymous by a spectral lack of features. Questions are asked and left unanswered, and yet "Departure" presents us with a quietly lovely and poetic rumination on the "human situation" which Vaughan sought to examine.
1. The Artist as quoted in: Noel Barber, "Conversation with Keith Vaughan," The Keith Vaughan Society.
2. Keith Vaughan, Journal: July 26, 1965.