Keith Vaughan

Malcolm Yorke has written the first full and an authorized biography of Keith Vaughan, leading member of the Neo-Romantic movement and one of the greatest of post-war British landscape and figure artists. Behind the public figure of an admired painter and teacher was a man of tortured complexity. His 61 volumes of private journals reveal a man who was obsessively self-analytical about his own sexuality and his creativity, and the links between them. Vaughan was an accomplished writer as well as a fine artist and as far as possible Malcolm Yorke has allowed the artist to tell his own story in his own words. The extensive quotations from the journals reveal not only Vaughan's emotional and artistic development but his often acerbic views on the leading painters, critics and literary figures of his time. Vaughan committed suicide in 1977 when he was 65. At the very moment of his death he was still writing his journal.