Exhibitions
Josef Herman (Boundary Gallery, 98 Boundary Road, NW8, till 2 August; Flowers East, London Fields, Richmnd Road, E8, till 2 August)
Moral imperative
Andrew Lambirth
There are currently in London two exhibitions of a retrospective nature devot- ed to the art of Josef Herman. Each is accompanied by a book. Here I must at once declare an interest: I wrote the princi- pal text for the monograph published by the Boundary Gallery with Jones & Palmer Ltd (£9.95), and have been visiting Herman at his studio, and admiring his work, for the past ten years. I am, therefore, properly biased in his favour. Yet I do not feel it inappropriate to write of Herman once again. At least since its last public exhibi- tion at Camden Arts Centre in 1980 his work has not received the critical attention it deserves. Yet such a strong body of work as his needs a correspondingly robust reassessment; it's high time for a major ret- rospective at one of our top venues, such as the Tate. Herman deserves no less.
The two shows are complementary and wide-ranging, but even taken together they do not constitute a considered retrospec- tive. Herman was born in Warsaw 87 years ago, and he has worked prolifically. Although the painstaking and deliberate process of oil painting that he developed (applying sometimes 10 or 12 layers of alternate tempera pigment with oil glaze for his richly refulgent effects) did not allow for the completion of many oils per year, Herman has always drawn swiftly and surely. Prepared to destroy anything which does not meet the exacting standards of his inner censor, he has nevertheless unleashed a whirlwind of drawings on the world. He favours a mixed-media tech- nique which employs watercolour, ink, pen- cil, pastel and body colour in whatever proportions he finds suit the subject.
These drawings-cum-paintings (is a watercolour a drawing or a painting? Is a pastel?) have a pure spontaneity and vitali- ty which have made them much sought- after. Whether depicting peasants at work or rest, a nude girl moving around his stu- dio, or revellers at the Notting Hill Carni- val, these lively studies are the sap of Herman's achievement, its life blood. In recent years he has drawn tennis and snooker players, and made a tremendous series of portraits of children in London's North End Road (some' of which were shown at the Royal Academy in 1990).
The other book, Josef Herman: The Work is the Life by Robert Heller (Momentum £14.95), takes the example of Herman as a testament to the vigorous health of paint- ing itself. Yet, in many ways, Herman has worked away in Britain since 1940 in rela- tive isolation. He does not fit any neat cate- gorisation, has tended to avoid the half-hearted groupings of English art (he was never a part of the Neo-Romantic movement, for instance), • and remains above all else a European artist. He is a cosmopolitan émigré who managed to escape the Nazi advance, leaving Warsaw for Brussels, and then Brussels for Eng- land. His early British work, filled with melancholy nostalgia, harks back to the example of Chagall, and celebrates a way of life, that of Polish Jewry, which was being systematically and cruelly destroyed.
Herman went to Brussels rather than Paris (which might have been the more obvious choice) because he had more in common with the spirit of Northern Euro- pean art, with Rembrandt and Brueghel rather than the School of Paris that devel- oped out of Picasso and Matisse. He dis- covered Belgian contemporary masters with whom to throw in his lot, and was par- ticularly impressed by Permeke. Herman identified in the work of these Belgian Expressionists a moral rather than an aes- thetic beauty which struck a chord deep within him. Once he had adjusted to life in Britain, he sought out a subject to embody this new belief, and found it in the Welsh mining community of Ystradgynlais.
Herman has been too closely associated with the myth of the miners, but then he did live among them for 11 years. It's rele- vant to note here that he painted not only the demise of Polish Jewry, but also of the miners: his work often has an unbearably elegiac note. Equally it is criticised for being earthen and lumpy, as if fashioned from mud. So unjust! Herman's drawing `Miner Returning Home, 195Z by Herman oscillates between the monumental and the lyrical, while his colour has become more and more luxuriant with every passing year. Instead of the smouldering varnished sur- faces of the early work, which have so much in common with the work of Rouault, Millet and Daumier, Herman has developed a late style of bright colour enhaloeing his figures, making his pictures shimmer with emotion and light. His great gift has been to be able to combine shrewd social observation with metaphysical specu- lation, whilst yet relishing the purely formal qualities of colour and form. Contrary to popular belief, Herman does not only paint the toiling labourer: he is an accomplished portraitist, one of the most moving painters of trees, an adept of the still-life and flower picture and a ravishing painter of the nude. Late works from the 1990s, such as 'Fisher- man with Nets', 'The Midnight Woman' and the great triptych 'The Human Move- ment', have a majestic grandeur rarely encountered in the self-obsessed trivialities of contemporary painting. Josef Herman is the purveyor of a brand of popular human- ism which not only has deep resonance now, but will gather relevance in future years.
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