Painter of vivid word-pictures
Andrew Lambirth
THE JOURNALS by Josef Herman Peter 1-laWan,125, pp. 263 ISBN 1870015819 Most people familiar with the work of the Polish-British painter, Josef Herman, associate him with portraits of miners. He is remembered as a sort of social realist, the peasant's painter, who hymned the dignity of manual labour and the glories of working close to the earth. The reality was, as ever, more complex. The son of a cobbler, Herman was born in Warsaw in 1911, and fled the Nazis, first to the Low Countries, then to France and Scotland, where he landed in 1940. He could speak no English but already had a reputation as a painter, and his manifest gifts and raffish charm enabled him to thrive. Herman didn't simply use his eyes. CI loved the mind's hard labour,' he jotted later.) Articulate and well-read, constantly scribbling down his thoughts and feelings, he soon mastered the English language, using it expressively if at times unconventionally.
The present volume, edited by the artist's widow Nini with an informative introduction by Richard Morphet, covers various periods of Herman's life from 1948 until his death. Unfortunately there is no consecutive run of diaries — apparently Herman destroyed most of his notebooks in 1983 when he thought he was going to die. Fortunately he didn't die until February 2000, and many of the observations collected here belong to his later life, though they are quite likely to roam vagrantly back over earlier years. The book begins in the Welsh mining town of Ystradgynlais, to which Herman and his first wife chose to move in 1944, and where they were to remain for 11 years. The place and its inhabitants had a profound effect on him. (He later wrote, 'Only Ystradgynlais changed my life and work.') After the 1948-50 section there is a big gap until May 1968, written in Suffolk, then there are only 20-odd pages to cover the 1970s in London. The second half of the book dates from the 1980s and 90s, and is also set in London.
It is not an account of Herman's career, but a record of his private preoccupations — as much about other artists as about techniques, money worries or the nature of love. The constant reformulating of his beliefs about art was obviously of daily relevance to an artist so addicted to activity ('only work gives me tranquillity'), who continued to paint for as long as he could stand at his easel; in his last months he was confined to a wheelchair, and continued to draw in a notebook.
His vivid word-pictures of places are a delight. We are offered extensive notes on what he is reading, and his particular admiration for the writings of artists. The text is perhaps top-heavy with gnomic philosophical utterances. Yet the writing contains a good deal of poetic truth — as indeed do his paintings, which have always been imaginative recreations rather than realistic statements. After all, revelations of the spirit are as much the stuff of his art as of his writings — 'If spirituality does not come through my work, then and only then. I failed,' he wrote in 1993, Even when dealing with moods of black despair or futility, the overall tone of the book is life-affirming: an invaluable documentation of an artist's inner life.
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