The Two Josef Hermans David Herman 2024 (Lecture)
In the Friends of the Glynn Vivian talk David Herman, son of the artist Josef Herman, will talk about the two very different phases of Josef’s career in Britain. He arrived in Glasgow as a refugee in 1940 and during the war his work consisted of mainly drawings and paintings of memories of Jewish life in Poland, what he called ‘Memory of Memories’. Then he moved to Ystradgynlais in 1944 and found a completely different subject: coal miners in South Wales. He didn’t just find a new subject, which made his name in Britain, but he also found a new palette and a completely new technique, monument images of working men and women, usually set against a brilliant sunset. Why did he need to find a new voice? And how did he reinvent himself as an artist?
This talk coincided with an exhibition of the Miners panels Herman 1951 at the Glynn Vivian.
Herman’s work alongside Fine Art winners of the Josef Herman Foundation Art Award in Memory of Carolyn Davies at Swansea College of Art titled Where to Now and an Exhibition of Herman’s work from the Archive at The Welfare in Ystradgynlais.
Josef Herman’s Artist Contemporaries in Wales- 2015 Dr Ceri Thomas (Lecture)
The Polish Jewish refugee artist Josef Herman’s connections with south Wales are relatively well known. He came to the then mining village of Ystradgynlais in 1944 for a fortnight and, captivated by its miners and the wider community, remained for eleven years. In 1962, he was awarded the Fine Art “Golden Medal” at Llanelli National Eisteddfod. Herman was born in Warsaw in 1911 and within a couple of years of his death in the year 2000 the Josef Herman Art Foundation Cymru was set up in the Welfare, Ystradgynlais.
Two years ago, the Foundation, a registered charity, entered into a partnership with the Tate Gallery in London. It is called ‘Mining Josef Herman’ and one of the initiatives is to ‘excavate’ his contemporaries.
At 7pm on Friday 1st May, Ceri Thomas will give an illustrated talk in the Welfare, Ystradgynlais, on some of Herman’s artist contemporaries in Wales. These include the English-born Mary Fogg (1918-2012) and the Welsh-born Will Roberts (1907-2000). Herman was best man at Fogg’s wedding in Neath in 1945 and Roberts, who was also based in that town, first encountered the Polish artist in Ystradgynlais in the same year.
This generation of artists, including Herman himself, became part of what has been called a ‘Welsh environmentalism’ in painting that had began with other artists before the war and which flourished in the immediate post-war period.
Ceri Thomas is a curator, art historian and artist who specialises in the visual culture of modern and contemporary south Wales. He was a trustee of the Josef Herman Art Foundation Cymru from 2010 to 2015.
Sarah Rhys Artist in residence 2015
Sarah Rhys’s residency was a research and development Arts Council Wales funded project. She explored Ystradgynlais and the surrounding area responding to the place and landscape through a deep mapping, responding and creating interventions with drawings, writings, photography and installations. She has explored the relationship between human and landscape a theme that ran strongly through Josef Herman’s work, and the notions of dislocation, place, belonging and ‘hiraeth’.
The residency included an exhibition and an artist’s talk at The Welfare Ystradgynlais.