Keith Vaughan: Figure and Ground: Drawings, Prints and Photographs 1935 - 1962

Keith Vaughan (1912-1977) was one of the most celebrated British artists of his generation. A friend of Graham Sutherland in the 1940s he was associated during the war with the rising Neo-Romantic movement along with artists such as John Minton and John Craxton. A contemporary of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, Vaughan became, with them, representative of powerful figure-based painting in the Britain of the 1950s and ’60s.

Figure and Ground, both as exhibition and book, brings together two themes that preoccupied Vaughan – the human figure and landscape. It contains three essays based on new research on Vaughan and his times: on drawing and illustration by Colin Cruise, on photography by Simon Pierse and on prints by Robert Meyrick and Harry Heuser. The exhibition has been selected by Colin Cruise from the Vaughan archive in the School of Art Museum and Gallery at Aberystwyth University.

The Aberystwyth collection contains nearly 500 separate items relating to Keith Vaughan including significant holdings of his early photographs, some of which formed his own selection collected in Dick’s Book of Photographs assembled around 1940-41, as well as drawings for illustrations and original lithographs. The Vaughan collection has not been the focus of critical attention before and many of the items have never been shown in public.