Biography (w.I.P.)

The following is an assembled working biography based on the latest edits in the conversation. It is intentionally labelled working: the opening and painting emphasis were still being refined when this archive was created.

Arthur Joseph Keene (1900-1986), known professionally as Van Art, was a British painter, cartoonist, graphic designer and comedian whose work was closely connected to Coventry and its industrial and civic life during the twentieth century. Keene earned his living as a graphic designer within the city’s motor industry, including work at the Riley factory, while maintaining an independent practice as a painter. Alongside this, he performed as a stand-up comedian in clubs in and around Coventry. Painting, drawing, humour and observation formed interconnected strands of a creative life that moved readily between fine art, commercial design and popular culture.

Keene painted throughout his life, producing portraits and landscapes alongside his better-known graphic work. His 1975 portrait Mrs Constance Male is held in the collection of the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry. Around 1978 he was commissioned to produce a large-scale painting of Meriden, Warwickshire, approximately 8 x 6 ft, which was installed at Meriden Hall, where he lived until his death in 1986. His son, Arthur Keene (1930-2013), would also become a painter, establishing the second generation of an artistic lineage later continued by his grandson, Tobias Keene.

Born in Coventry in 1900, Keene’s life encompassed both the First and Second World Wars, each experienced at markedly different stages of his life. Family accounts recall that, as a boy during the First World War, he was among those who climbed into artillery pieces to clean them out. During the most intense bombing of Coventry in the Second World War, family history records that Keene and his young son Arthur ran through the city as buildings were struck and collapsing behind them. Arthur was subsequently sent to live at a parish in the countryside. Family accounts suggest that the parish was also taking in other children displaced from Coventry and other British cities affected by wartime bombing.

It was within this lived experience of wartime Coventry that Keene produced cartoons for the Coventry Evening Telegraph under the name Van Art. His drawings focused on factory workers, civilian experience and the persistence of ordinary life under exceptional circumstances. Their humour is characteristically understated, locating resilience not in heroic imagery but in work, conversation and the everyday behaviour of Coventry’s inhabitants.

Works from Van Art’s Blitz Series, including The Spirit of Coventry: 1940 A.B. (After the Blitz) and The Spirit of Britain, are held by the Imperial War Museums. Other surviving wartime cartoons document a wider series produced in Coventry in the early 1940s, and contemporary newspaper records discussed in the research indicate that sales of Van Art cartoons contributed to wartime charitable fundraising.

The surviving Van Art booklets were compilations of cartoons originally published in the Coventry Evening Telegraph. These include Going to It! Depicting Fun in the Factory (If Any) (1942), centred on wartime factory life, and Van Art’s Sketch Book – Paging All Sportsmen (1946). Together, the newspaper cartoons and subsequent collections form an extended record of Coventry observed from within its working and social life.

Across painting, drawing, graphic design, performance and cartooning, Keene’s practice remained grounded in close observation of people and place. His surviving work records Coventry not simply as a subject, but as a lived environment shaped by industry, war, humour and reconstruction.

Three Generations of British Painters

For KEENE.STUDIO, Van Art is also positioned as the first generation in a three-generation lineage of British painters: Arthur Joseph “Van Art” Keene (1900-1986); his son Arthur Keene (1930-2013); and his grandson Tobias Keene. The archive therefore treats painting as foundational to Van Art’s biography rather than as a secondary activity appended to his better-documented wartime cartoons.