Books
Sketches of a master
Two new books celebrating the work of the artist Josef Herman trace a widely varied, productive journey from Poland
July 30, 2009 13:17
Two new books celebrating the work of the artist Josef Herman trace a widely varied, productive journey from Poland
July 30, 2009 13:17The Art and Life of Josef herman
By Monica Bohm-Duchen
Lund Humphries, £35
Josef Herman Remembered
Nini Herman (Ed)
Quartet, £15
From a visit to his capacious West Kensington studio around 1990, I recall the painter Josef Herman, surrounded by his paintings and examples from his superb African sculpture collection, talking eloquently about his friendship with artists such as Epstein, Bomberg and Martin Bloch. “Art should never be for art’s sake, but for life’s sake,” he said. Two new books on the artist, who died in 2000 aged 89, show how deeply he dedicated himself to the quest for truth in his paintings.
In her well-researched Art and Life, Monica Bohm-Duchen perceptively explores the intricate, diverse strands that made up the man and his vibrantly humane art. His childhood in a claustrophobic Warsaw tenement — where extreme poverty existed alongside what he called “the habit of self-learning, of wide reading, of passionate debate” — is evoked, as well as inspiring early influences and encounters with the antisemitic art establishment. An early painting, The Cobbler (or My Father) (1943), is reproduced, showing a squatly dignified, bearded man absorbed in hammering the sole of a shoe. Its serene monumentality, its palette inclined to subtly glowing earthy browns and blues, indicate the artistic path Herman went on to pursue.
In 1938, aged 27, Herman had left Poland for good. As the train left the station, his mother told him: “Never come back.” For two years, he lived happily in Brussels, delighting in the Low Countries’ tradition of Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Constant Permeke — a painter of peasant life and landscape whom he met and greatly admired.
In 1940, Herman fled to France, and was hustled on to a ship (going where, he had no idea) by “two huge Polish military policemen”. He arrived in Liverpool, and settled in Glasgow, where he befriended the sculptor Bruno Schotz and a fellow Polish-Jewish refugee painter, Jankel Adler.
In 1942, Herman heard the news that his entire family had been murdered by the Nazis. As Nini Herman, Josef’s wife, later recalled, “he suffered a total breakdown… Jankel Adler… nursed Josef through those weeks with maternal tenderness”.
From 1944-52, Herman lived in the Welsh mining village of Ystradgynlais with his first wife Catriona MacLeod. The poignantly harmonious, mysterious paintings he produced there (and during ensuing visits) of miners, lamps like haloes — resting, squatting or singing against “a copper-coloured sky” — are some of the finest achievements in modern British art.
In a brilliant essay among many moving recollections in Josef Herman Remembered, Jack Lindsay writes of these Welsh pictures: “Well might Herman feel that he had come home, as no return to his Warsaw street, if such a return had now been possible, would have been a homecoming.”
Both books recall later years spent in Suffolk (1962-72) and London, and long working trips to Israel, Mexico, Spain and Scotland. The later paintings, including a late 1980s’ Homage to Women of Greenham Common, show a tendency to radical refinement of colour and form, and a lifelong devotion to art for life’s sake.
Philip Vann is author of ‘Joash Woodrow Landscapes’ and Cyril Power: The Complete Linocuts’