KEITH VAUGHAN (1912-1977)

Although not a religious man, Worship of the Golden Calf is one of several that Vaughan painted exploring Biblical and Christian themes. These include at least five versions of Lazarus, painted over the course of the 1950s, three depictions of the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (1958) and, in the mid-1960s, a series of gouaches loosely based on subjects as various as Cain and Abel, Tobias and the Angel, The Story of Jacob, and The History of Joseph. He was struck by how such narratives afforded him the opportunity to create male figure groupings, psychological tension between figures, interesting settings and emotionally charged subjects. The subject of a gathering group of figures always had an attraction for Vaughan (see the series of nine Assemblies of Figures 1952-1976, Crowd Assembling I and II, 1967/1968) and he invariably represented it as a morass of intermingling and interpenetrating figures – an amorphous congregation of humanity.

Worship of the Golden Calf is one of Vaughan’s most virtuosic gouaches, painted in 1965 – one of his finest gouache years. Velvety Indian ink is mixed variously with coloured gouache pigments and there are vibrant and resonant accents of cobalts and ultramarines added in oil pastel. The overall effect is an image of jewel-like richness made with the freshness of an improvisation.

‘1965 was truly a gouache year and Vaughan produced an avalanche of paintings, the process having become a kind of neurotic compulsion. In his journals he referred to his creative outbursts as ‘gouache marathons’ and recorded his progress with ever-increasing manic intensity. In mid-January he noted: ‘Not much to say. Seven gouaches completed since the beginning of the year.’ By the end of February he had finished around 35, and by the summer the number had grown considerably as he counted ‘61 large gouaches, 15 small, completed since last November.’ Towards the end of July, Vaughan confided just how obsessive and time-consuming his gouache process was. He wrote:

'The routine continues. I start the day with gouache. I have no particular idea
in mind, but there is nothing else to do. After breakfast, I get out the pots
and jars and rags and paper. It is quite systematised now. I have been doing
it since last November. Like everything else – compulsive. And it adds up to
agonised futility. Yet the effect of it is no more futile than other people’s routine.
But mine is solitary. It involves no one else. I have done more gouaches
that ever can be shown or sold. Yet I continue to do them because there is
nothing else I can do.' (Gerard Hastings, Keith Vaughan, 2012, p. 170)

We are grateful to Gerard Hastings, whose new book Awkward Artefacts: The ‘Erotic Fantasies’ of Keith Vaughan is published by Pagham Press in association with the Keith Vaughan Society, for preparing this catalogue entry.