Josef Herman's personal sketches of Wales

Josef Herman was born in 1911 in Warsaw, Poland, to a Jewish family. My father left Poland in the late 1930s, 1938. His mother saw him off at the railway station and said never come back, meaning it was just too dangerous already in Poland then. He went via Belgium and France. He managed to come to Britain in 1940 during the Second World War, so he is primarily to be thought of as a Jewish refugee artist. Sadly in 1942 he gets that fateful letter from the Red Cross saying that all his family have been exterminated in the concentration camps so he becomes a survivor artist. In 1944, in the summer of 1944, my father came to Wales for the first time. It made an enormous impact on him. It was a moment that he wrote about on a number of occasions and in his memoirs Related Twilights he wrote about this visit to the mining village, Ystradgynlais, in South Wales. 'Under the bridge, out of a cold shadow, trickled a pool of water which got thinner and thinner as it ran on amidst the dry stones and glittering pebbles. Then unexpectedly, as though from nowhere, a group of miners stepped onto the bridge. For a split second, their heads appeared against the full body of the sun. The whole image was not unlike an icon depicting the saints with their halos. This image of the miners on the bridge against that glowing sky mystified me for years with its mixture of sadness and grandeur and it became the source of my work.' You get the image of the Byzantine icon, you get the mixture of the grandeur and the sadness, which is really at the centre of his art for the rest of his life from that moment on. It’s this sense of the grandeur of the working man as in a whole socialist political tradition going back for 100 years but it’s also the sadness of this hard relentless working life. The motif of the father as cobbler, a man who used his hands in this dignified way to make things, obviously imprinted itself significantly on the young Josef and really that was his light motif for the rest of his life really, was the dignity of manual labour, particularly of the male but not exclusively, but once he comes to Wales, that manifests itself almost magically for him as the South Wales coal miner. I think the impact of Ystradgynlais on Josef Herman was probably the greatest one in his whole career and he lived to almost 90. He had grown up in a very close-knit community, a working-class and very poor community in Poland. There was real poverty in Ystradgynlais at that time. You know, it was ‘30s, ‘40s, all the way up through the ‘50s, there was a lot of dire poverty which my mother remembers children coming to school without having had breakfast and coming in summer clothes where they had no winter clothes, and there was a lot of deprivation, but people were…it was a community. The people were very politically aware, lots of miners that were communists and socialists and members of the Labour Party, so it was a very strong political bias in the area and he shared that with the people of the village. The story goes that within a week or two of arriving, he had a nickname. He was Joe Bach which in Welsh is lovely because bach doesn’t just mean small Josef because he was physically short but it also means dear. He felt at home immediately and for a refugee feeling at home, finding a new home is a tremendous thing in their life. He wanted to absorb everything in the village from early in the morning to late at night. He would be up at four in the morning, every morning, sketching then painting, and the miners on their way to the mines, they would walk past his studio, they would see the light on and they knew that he was a hard-working artist and he had a tremendous rapport with these men, which he found enormously emotional and moving. You know, there was an affinity when he came to Ystradgynlais, they were essentially a manual labour town, a village, essentially based on coal, but again were desperately interested in culture. There were lots of people who were interested in him because he could bring something to them because they were creative people and they had this urge to create, so they bonded as an interest in culture and he brought the European dimension to them. One of the kind of key buildings in Ystradgynlais is the building I’m sat in now which is the Miners Welfare Hall, and it was only ten years old then. It was built in 1934. Now across South Wales there were Miners Welfare Halls and these were built out of the pennies from the wages of the miners given every week and they were essentially self-improvement, cultural community centres, so the hub of Ystradgynlais, you had this amazing place which would debate current politics, philosophy, the miners were self-read. They’d have a library, they were exceptional. There was this aspirational quality that was here and which he had. When we talked about Ystradgynlais as he pronounced it in the studio, yes, his eyes would always fill up with tears and he was still here, really. He carried Ystradgynlais with him, even though he left. For an artist for whom work is his life to find a new subject matter and to find a new set of colours and techniques that really work for him as an artist, to find a new voice as an artist, to do that, is always going to make the time and place where you achieve that tremendously important and it remained important to him all his life.