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This Electronic Thesis Or Dissertation Has Been Downloaded from the King's Research Portal At This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ IMAGE OF A MAN Self-construction in the Journal of Keith Vaughan Belsey, Alex Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 1 IMAGE OF A MAN Self-construction in the Journal of Keith Vaughan ALEX BELSEY King’s College London Thesis submitted to the University of London for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy September 2015 2 Abstract The British painter Keith Vaughan (1912-77) spent his career studying the male figure and its relationship to its environment. Yet Vaughan was not simply a gifted painter; he was an erudite, compelling, compulsive writer. The personal journal written from 1939 until his suicide in 1977 – sixty-one volumes in total – reveals a man whose ambitions as a painter required an ongoing expression in language, a practice that was integral to his creative life. Vaughan's journal-writing established a complex interrelation between his attitudes towards morality, aesthetics, love and sex, and his own insecurities as a man and as an artist. This study – the result of an extensive archive-based research project – examines Vaughan's journal as a continuous literary text in which he constructed his identity by establishing his positions on war, society, autobiography, and art. The critical approach of this study draws on diverse theoretical perspectives and delves into Vaughan’s own reading to reconstruct the reasoning that informed such positions. Beginning with Vaughan's wartime writing on his conscientious objection, this study explores how he situated himself as an outsider, a misunderstood yet superior outcast whose homosexuality and principles distanced him from society. This study traces the evolution of his outsider identity, its role in consolidating his visual subject matter, and its influence on the perspective from which he would paint the male figure. Engaging with his wartime reading, attempts at autobiography, and burgeoning theory on art practice, this study reveals the centrality of journal-writing to Vaughan’s construction of the creative individual as an ideal type of 'the artist' in whose image he could construct himself. Through careful cross-referencing of the original manuscripts with Vaughan's self-edited edition of his first twenty-seven years of journal-writing, this study concludes by analysing Vaughan's attempts through self-editorship to curate his legacy in the form of autobiographical artefact. 3 Contents Image of a Man: an Introduction 4 - OUTSIDER - 1. War and the Objector 25 i. Beginning the Journal 25 ii. Defending the Body 31 iii. Believing in Beauty 42 2. Society and the Observer 56 i. Making Contact 57 ii. Maintaining Distance 64 iii. Looking and Being Looked At 79 - CREATOR - 3. Autobiography and the Intellectual 92 i. An Autobiographical Project 93 ii. A Literary Education 111 iii. An Autobiographical Project (Reprise) 129 4. Art and the Artist 134 i. Search and Struggle 135 ii. Success 156 iii. Sex and Control 163 - CURATOR - 5. Self-editorship and ‘Keith Vaughan’ 187 i. Re-reading the Journal 188 ii. Shaping the Text 197 iii. Placing the Image 214 Self-construction: a Conclusion 224 Bibliography 229 4 Image of a Man: an Introduction The desire to make this journal grew out of my failure to live a life.1 Keith Vaughan’s life-long subject of enquiry was the male figure, and specifically the nude male figure. Across five decades of sketches, gouaches, and oils, he interrogated ideas of identity and isolation by creating compositions infused with the tensions between the individual and the group, the outsider and society. He is perhaps best known for his Assembly of Figures series, the first of which is dated 1952 and the ninth of which was completed in 1976, the year before his death. The Assemblies arrange male figures, usually three or four, in ambiguous landscapes in which their variously posed bodies communicate at once an affinity with one another and yet a profound disconnection. This is Vaughan’s image of a man: at once amongst other men and utterly alone. This is certainly the premise from which Vaughan set out in 1939 to write his journal; believing himself, at the age of twenty- seven, to have already failed to live successfully or happily, he commenced journal- writing to construct his identity in a new image that justified and celebrated his sense of difference and distance. The writing of the journal would prove a life-long project, a way of navigating the past whilst addressing the concerns of the present and projecting into an uncertain future. This study will reinvigorate the currently underdeveloped image of Keith Vaughan by placing the journal at the centre of a new understanding of his life and visual practice. Vaughan believed strongly that art was the arena in which emotional and philosophical ideas were brought together; the writer and editor Alan Ross recalls that ‘when he talked about painting it was as someone who thought long and hard, not only about technical problems but about the relevance of art to every aspect of living’.2 This study will make clear that Vaughan’s thoughts were almost always worked through primarily in his journal-writing, a practice that allowed him to situate his own tastes, opinions, and ambitions within a narrative of his own life and development. It was only by constructing through journal-writing his own image of himself as a man and as an artist that he refined the subject matter and perspective of his visual practice. This study will also present the journal as a 1 Keith Vaughan, 23rd August 1940, Journal, vol.4, p.68. Complete Journal held at Tate Archive, London, catalogue ref: TGA200817/1. Hereafter all references to Vaughan’s journal will be made in parentheses in the format explained in ‘Notes on the Text’. 2 Alan Ross, ‘Introduction’, in Keith Vaughan, Journals, 1939 – 1977 (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), pp.vii-xv; p.viii 5 significant literary text and as an important document of social, political, and cultural currents spanning five decades. In particular the journal offers new insights into the gay male experience in mid-twentieth-century Britain at a time when homosexuality was still illegal. Despite his eventual admission into the society of such luminaries as W. H. Auden, E. M. Forster, Christopher Isherwood, and David Hockney, the self-doubting and self-deprecating nature of Vaughan’s accounts in his journal provides a candid outsider perspective on this milieu from an artist who was forever unsure of his place. This study follows the threads of the social, political, and aesthetic debates that make Vaughan’s journal such a rich and complex text. In the process, as will be discussed later in this introduction, this study puts forward a new image of Vaughan by offering something akin to a critical biography of his life and work. But always the focus remains on the journal as a text that constructs the identity of its subject, who is also its author, through literary means. Ultimately, this study seeks to demonstrate through its analysis of Vaughan’s journal as a case study the fertile ground to be found in the literary study of journals and diaries and how further study can enrich the scholarly field of life-writing. The Life and Work of Keith Vaughan John Keith Vaughan was born on 23rd August 1912 in Selsey, West Sussex. His father Eric (1883-1935) walked out on the family when Vaughan was five years old, also leaving his mother Gladys (1881-1976) and his younger brother Dick (1918-40). As a child Vaughan attended Christ’s Hospital boarding school in Sussex and received special tutelage when his aptitude for drawing was discovered. As a young man he worked as a layout artist at the advertising agency Lintas, a branch of Unilever, until the outbreak of the Second World War. Vaughan acknowledged his homosexuality early in his formative years and had a number of short-lived relationships. In the pre-war years his recreational time was largely spent developing his artistic sensibilities and indulging his interest in ballet and photography. Vaughan commenced the first volume of his personal journal in August 1939 as the outbreak of war loomed. Intending to be a conscientious objector he joined the St John Ambulance service. In September 1940 he was briefly imprisoned in Guildford jail after attempting to paint a trench in the countryside. In 1941 he was conscripted into the Non-Combatant Corps, moving from Ilfracombe to Bulford and 6 then in 1942 to Ashton Gifford near Codford in Wiltshire.
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