Bamboo

by William Boyd

  Like many middle-class homosexuals of that era most of Vaughan’s sexual partners were working class, but in Vaughan’s case this arose out of expediency rather than from some Forsterian fantasy. Throughout his life Vaughan yearned—vainly as it turned out—for a romantic lover who would be his social and intellectual equal. Less orthodox, however, were the refinements of his masochistic auto-eroticism. He tried to construct a primitive machine that would deliver electric shocks to his genitalia; he pushed a needle through his foreskin, and when his mother left the family home at weekends he would endeavour to bind himself to the upturned legs of the kitchen table.

  It was the war which changed everything. It removed him from the cosy world of Lintas and his family, and thrust him into an entirely new set of social encounters and environments. A committed pacifist, he registered as a non-combatant and was drafted into the pioneer corps. The manual work the corps carried out was routine and mindlessly laborious. It took him to parts of England he had never visited; it reintroduced him to communal life, but without the terrors of boarding school. Moreover, it initiated his development as a serious artist, forcing him out of the “years of dilettantism” of the Lintas period, and gaining him access to literary and artistic circles in London, that hitherto had been unapproachable, where he began to meet and be influenced by other contemporary artists—most notably Graham Sutherland.

  The year 1939 also saw the start of his celebrated sequence of journals which he was to continue, almost without interruption, until the end of his life. The journals form an astonishing document. With complete candour Vaughan describes every aspect of his personality on the page. It is no exaggeration to say that they represent one of the most extraordinary, and greatest, pieces of confessional writing of the century.

  From the outside, friends and colleagues variously described Vaughan as intelligent, charming, diffident, somewhat aloof, critically acute and astringently witty and generally good company. The self-portrait that emerges from the journals is considerably at odds with this, at once fierce, cold and anguished. They are excellently and lucidly written but what is so striking is the unsparing honesty, the brutal objectivity. The self-analysis is relentless. Full of self-doubt, seeded with contempt and rare exhilaration, Vaughan probes and reiterates his dilemmas and anxieties—both artistic and personal—with a determination and dedication that are prodigious. So far as his development as an artist is concerned it is as if Vaughan had realized that for him the route to success was through sheer persistence and hard work rather than inspiration and imagination. True, Vaughan had Sutherland’s own huge discipline and effort as an early model, but this tenacious and unceasing toil in the older artist must have chimed with elements that already existed in his own personality. A working practice was established that he was not to deviate from. Vaughan was not, it seems to me, a naturally gifted draughtsman in the way that, say, Augustus John was. The line in a Vaughan drawing is not fluid and suggestive but firm and heavily scored. Sketchbooks are filled with dense dark pencil drawings, fretted with cross-hatching, which are worked up in the studio into sombre, muted gouaches or oils in which form and composition dominate. The whole artistic achievement of Keith Vaughan from World War Two onwards is a strenuous, laborious one; its nature is obstinate, striven-for, built up slowly and steadily, relying on constant effort and patience to see the work through to a successful culmination, rather than afflatus or spontaneous invention.

  After the war, during the forties and fifties this dedication began to pay off. Vaughan’s reputation grew and he began to move in established metropolitan artistic and literary circles. He taught at Camberwell, Central and the Slade. He was friend and associate with many of the artists that make up the neo-romantic movement, notably Robert Colquhoun, Robert MacBryde and John Minton. By 1950 his career was firmly established. On a personal level it seemed that he had found some measure of happiness too. He set up house with one of his painting students, Ramsay McLure, but although they remained together for the rest of Vaughan’s life the passion swiftly dimmed and Vaughan returned to his old methods of obtaining sexual satisfaction. At some time in the fifties he bought a machine from Gamages department store which he adapted to pass electric current through his genitals. For the rest of his life it was to the machine he turned when he was in need of sensual excitement or consolation.

  Biographically, the last thirty years of Vaughan’s life were uneventful. His subject matter remained remarkably constant—more often than not the male nude in a landscape—as his style became more abstract. He showed regularly and the prices he commanded rose steadily. He and McLure moved to a flat in Belsize Park, and increasing prosperity soon allowed him to buy a cottage in Essex. McLure lived there while Vaughan led a solitary life in London during the week, returning to the country at weekends. Vaughan’s working routine was quickly established and rarely varied. He would paint in the mornings and break for lunch at 12.30. After lunch there would be a siesta followed by a shorter period of work until seven when he had his first whisky. He took great care over his solitary dinner and made sure to drink a bottle of good wine. After dinner he might watch TV, listen to music, or write in his journal.

  Sexually he resorted more and more to the machine. He went on occasional “lust sleuthing” forays in Soho looking for rough trade but he came to rely on masturbation for sexual release, perfecting the operating procedures of his machine and employing other flagellatory or masochistic props—metal-tipped canes, needle and thread, mustard and red pepper.

  The last ten years of Vaughan’s life as evidenced by the journals represent, as their editor Alan Ross describes, “a descent into hell … redeemed by … frankness, spleen and dry humour.” Self-analysis, nostalgia and misanthropy are mingled with despair and meticulous chronicling of his experiments with the machine (which, in a display of typical Vaughan candour, he kept on open show in his studio). Yet to the outside world, until the onset of his final illness, he appeared little changed; still teaching, still painting successfully, still reluctant for company, yet, when he was persuaded to go out, apparently enjoying himself. In 1975 he developed a malignant cancer of the bowel and underwent a colostomy. Radiation treatment followed and Vaughan became a semi-invalid, becoming progressively iller as the cancer advanced and complications set in. On the morning of 4 November 1977 he decided to commit suicide. He swallowed the pills with some whisky and sat down to record his final thoughts in his diary before he died. “Oblivion holds no terrors for me,” he wrote. These last pages of this extraordinary document are very moving, full of stoic resignation and dignity. The final lines read: “65 was long enough for me. It wasn’t a complete failure, I did some …” And then nothing.

  He did some good work. Vaughan’s posthumous artistic reputation continues to grow as indeed does his personal fame, owing to the publication of the journals last year. Malcolm Yorke’s fine biography is a valuable and diligent adjunct to them, filling in many of the gaps and also setting Vaughan’s work firmly in its artistic and historical context. Inevitably, though, the journals form the best and unique access to Vaughan’s strange and complex personality. Any biography would suffer by comparison in this regard but one senses here and there that, however well-equipped Yorke is to talk about the work, the life of Keith Vaughan—or rather the life in Keith Vaughan—remains something of a mystery to him.

  1990

  Stanley Spencer

  Stanley Spencer is an odd fish. The responses to his work are both complex and contradictory—they always have been, and the new exhibition at the Barbican, “Stanley Spencer: The Apotheosis of Love,” will prolong the debate. In my own case, one of the most nagging of the many dilemmas his art provokes is this: for someone who could clearly paint so well, why did Spencer often paint so badly? It is not simply a matter of indolence or easy nonchalance on his part: there is nothing slipshod about his bad paintings, indeed in places they are rendered with fanatical, pedantic diligence, but for me the great problem at the centre of hi
s achievement remains this schism, this schizophrenia of technique. It is rather as if a chess grandmaster voluntarily switched to draughts, or Chopin confined himself to ragtime.

  When you look closely at, for example, the extraordinary deftness and skill with which Spencer has painted the shadow of Patricia Preece’s lace negligée as it falls on her thigh (in the remarkable Patricia Preece, 1936), or the way, in the great self-portrait of 1959, the cropped grey fringe falls over the seamed brow, you wonder how the same man could have produced the simplicities and inept distortions of Villagers and Saints or The Lovers. It is like setting a Lucian Freud beside a Beryl Cook. In the end such a wilful abdication of talent—if there is no obvious reason: sloth, drink, drugs, penury or mental collapse—remains baffling.

  Perhaps this sort of deliberate shift—from the refined to the unrefined, from the subtle to the crude—occurs when innocence is over-venerated, and in Spencer’s case this notion may be particularly apt. Broadly speaking, what we value in the native or the primitive—the pleasure prompted, say, by a Grandma Moses or an African carving—is the delight we take in seeing aspects of our world depicted in a manner un-mediated by sophistication, by familiar cultural reference, by centuries of tradition and so on: all the rules and regulations, expectations and assumptions of a mature art form. I suppose that motives of this sort may inspire the highly accomplished artist to attempt to reproduce these effects, to scour away the gunge and clutter of too much skill and civilization, too much thought and reflection. By fashioning a false innocence we may borrow some of the properties of the real thing: fool’s gold has duped many a gnarled prospector.

  Certainly Spencer in his early work followed the example of the quattrocento with genuine success, but no pictures in this exhibition date from before 1933, and their naivety, their distortions and simplifications have moved on from emulation or the influence of classical traditions. Spencer’s faux-naïf style is from this time onwards sui generis—it stands or falls on its own.

  And its putative success would have been far easier to establish or defend if it were not counterposed—and undermined—by examples of a technical skill and artistry unshakeable in its self-assurance and triumphant in its exceptional ability. For example, Nude Portrait of Patricia Preece is one of the great disturbing portraits of the twentieth century. Initially, it is the arrant candour of the image that unsettles and disquiets. The almost palpable weight of the large, pendulous, blue-veined breasts, the folds and creases of slack flesh, all the flaws and discrepancies of a particular body that give an individual her, or his, physical quiddity. Then almost unconsciously you grow aware of the variety of skin tone—the chicken-fat yellows, the tarnished greens and licheny blues, the raw pinks and dirty browns, the blurry roses and clotted creams. Patricia Preece’s body seems extraordinarily lit, as if by some sublime cinematographer, until you realize that this is in fact what we are actually like, that human skin, closely observed, looks like this, that this improbable assemblage of pigments on a canvas is the product of an artist’s eye scrutinizing what he sees in front of him. Steadily, other aspects of the portrait emerge: the unusual intensity of Patricia Preece’s big-eyed stare, the troubling ambiguity of her expression—a tension? or a superb confidence? Then, inevitably, ideas of artist and model intrude on the reverie of portrait and spectator. This model is the artist’s wife. Even if you knew nothing of Spencer’s fraught relationship with Preece you would concede the astonishing intimacy of the portrait, acknowledge what it offers up and exposes to the viewer’s gaze, what emotions and potential history are implicit in it. The unequivocal power of this and other portraits set the standards by which the rest of Spencer’s work is to be judged, and, as with all great artists, the criteria are established by the artist himself.

  The physical layout of the exhibition is constructed roughly along lines that Spencer envisaged. It was an idea that originated in the early 1930s after the completion of the Burghclere chapel (and was probably inspired by it). Spencer conceived of a notion of displaying his work which he referred to as the Church-House project, or a “church of me” as he sometimes described it, a collection of pictures that would represent a conspectus of his unique imagination, in both its sacred and secular dimensions. The architecture of this building was vague but was approximately churchy in configuration—a long nave, with side chapels, a transept, an altar and altarpiece. He made rough sketches of this scheme over the years and it is fair to say that almost anything he painted after its conception had its place somewhere in the rambling aggregate of buildings, small rooms, alcoves and corridors that the Church-House design had now become. He was, to put it another way, painting to equip and fit out his own private gallery which, when completed, would be a summation of his life’s vision. Clearly, it was always going to be impossible to reproduce this ambitious plan in its entirety, but the Barbican has made a good stab at it, first by assembling a large and significant proportion of those pictures, and second by physically recreating something of the church effect. In the “nave” of the gallery pictures are grouped under generic titles, set in alcoves, and on either side are a couple of “rooms,” or “chapels,” one containing the magnificent portraits of his formidable second wife Patricia Preece, the other for the “Christ in the Wilderness” series, the small square paintings set high up on the wall, like a frieze. A large and bizarre crucifixion (of 1959), a kind of horrific cartoon, acts as the altarpiece, and to the left the gallery continues, as one arm of an extended transept into rooms containing the Port Glasgow Resurrection, and the Hilda Chapel, a homage to Spencer’s long-suffering first wife, containing the enormous, unfinished Apotheosis of Hilda.

  It was worth the effort: the arrangement conveys a vivid sense of Spencer’s idiosyncratic personality and obsessions, and you gain some sense—however stylistically distinct the work is—of its unifying factor, that joyous celebration of life’s diversity. The Patricia Chapel is the most effective. There is an almost visceral shock experienced as you walk in, with four of the big pictures hung virtually frame to frame: the two double portraits and two nudes, and, to each side, two portraits. The viewer stands there, faced with this vision of flesh, pinned in a crossfire of Patricia Preece’s unflinching stares, nervously privy to Spencer’s candid exultation in his wife’s—and his own—nakedness.

  But here lies the problem. To move from the profound and disturbing power of the Patricia Chapel back to the “nave” of the gallery is to experience a marked diminution of effect, a diminution brought about by a number of factors that we will come to see are typically Spencerian. To put the contrast very simply, you move from refulgent, life-sized, superbly painted portraits to large long rectangles of canvas crowded with small figures. The juxtaposition is disquieting. But this shape of canvas crowded with its clustering figures was highly popular with Spencer. It embodies what might be termed the predella effect. A predella is part of an altar-piece, a horizontal strip, or separate painting below the main painting, often used, so my Pevsner informs me, “for a number of representations in a row.” Its effect was deliberately designed to be subsidiary. The votary would approach the altar, overwhelmed and awestruck by the vast crucifixion, or transfiguration, or whatever, above it, then kneel, and then his eye would be caught by the predella. The same emotions are experienced in this exhibition on emerging from the Patricia Chapel—nothing matches the power or impact of its pictures. And many of Spencer’s most famous paintings are predella-like, not just in format but in design, containing large “numbers of representations in a row.” The Port Glasgow Resurrection, the “Last Day” sequence, the “Christ’s Passion” sequence, and so on, all reflect this strong linear component. The eye need not necessarily travel from left to right as if reading a text, but it does (in pictures of this sort and shape this is the eye’s natural tendency—it has to be cajoled into roving). Furthermore, if you look closely at, for example, a panel of the Port Glasgow Resurrection, The Reunion of Families, 1945, in purely painterly terms, ignoring it
s religious import and not attempting to assess its particular meaning, then the first quality that strikes you is the mutedness of the palette. The colours are uniformly sombre and subdued: beige, stone, moss green, grey, dull cinnamons and umbers. There is nothing rich here, nothing vibrant or glowing. At first I thought this might be a side effect of the very unsatisfactory lighting in the gallery or of the curious colouring of the walls the pictures are mounted on—a pale puce—but in fact this dullness is a feature of many of the large paintings on display. Unusually, reproductions of Spencer’s pictures tend to flatter the originals. His colours are predominantly dusty, flat, depthless—even the famous Desire from the “Beatitudes of Love” series shines on the page in a way it does not on the canvas. It is not hard to see why this should be so. In The Reunion of Families (or any number of other examples) the paint is applied very thinly, so thinly that the warp and woof of the canvas is rarely obscured by the pigment. There is absolutely no sense of any joy or satisfaction in the plastic tactile sensation that comes from the application of paint to canvas from loaded brush, no exploration of the fundamental possibilities of oil. Oil paint is used in these cases simply for its basic colour properties, and even then within this oddly reduced, dull range. The paint seems heavily thinned with turpentine, often leaving the squaring-up, pencilled grid clearly visible behind the near-transparent smear of colour. Of course, in these large pictures Spencer reproduces an overwhelming effect of texture, but this is more a result of his love of pattern and minute detail, which is depicted with assiduous and mind-boggling patience. In the great olive drab swathe that is Love on the Moor every brick in the wall which runs along the top of the picture is dutifully painted in, as is every dogtooth and stripe, herringbone and polka dot, dart and flick on the clothes of the picture’s swarming population.