Josef Herman Rolf on Welsh Art

I'm on a wonderful Welsh adventure,

as I discover more about four outstanding artists

influenced by this great land.

During the series, I'll be creating paintings inspired by their work.

I'm going to have to paint in ways I've never done before.

And at the end of it,

I'll probably turn to you and I'll say,

"Can you tell what it is yet?"

We're in the South Wales Valleys,

a landscape once dominated by King Coal.

But most of the physical evidence of the collieries,

like the old pitheads, has long gone.

But for a Polish artist called Josef Herman,

it was the miners themselves that were the inspiration.

Josef Herman's paintings of Welsh miners

have become some of the 20th century's

most enduring images of working men.

All his subjects of colliers

were taken from one former pit town,

Ystradgynlais in the Swansea Valley.

Herman was one of the first artists ever

to put the Welsh working classes on a pedestal

and I just love these paintings.

This banner - rough translation, Peace And Strength In Unity -

is a reminder of the area's mining past.

Josef Herman's art portrayed the miner as a hero.

For him, it was all about the strength and the power

of the working man.

Josef Herman once said,

"In labour, my spirit finds itself."

You can see there was a strong moral core to his art

and I've got to paint a miner in his style later.

Sure, I can copy Herman's technique,

but if I've got any chance of painting in his spirit,

I've got to truly understand the man.

I can't pretend to be a political artist - far from it.

So this is going to be a challenging one.

Josef Herman and his first wife Catriona

arrived here in Ystradgynlais in 1944 for a short visit.

What the Polish immigrant witnessed in this town

not only changed his art forever, but it changed his life, too.

He and Catriona briefly stayed with locals

before moving into the Pen-y-Bont Inn,

where Josef set up his studio.

A coal field

makes an odd landscape.

And the mining village

leaves little to the imagination.

But I found my kind of interest here.

On the face of it,

it's hard to explain why a foreign artist

would settle in such a small industrial town in South Wales.

But he was a left-wing intellectual

and this was an era when the working class

were all concerned about self-betterment

and politics was discussed on every street corner.

That area over there was known as Red Square for that very reason.

Josef decided to commit himself to Ystradgynlais

when he bought an old soft drink factory

and had it converted into a house and a studio.

And I can just picture him getting up,

as he did every morning at four o'clock,

to go up there and paint while the miners walked past

on their way to their job in the pit.

'I've asked Josef's son David to meet me at his dad's old studio.

Here we are. The old pop factory.

'This is actually the first time he's ever been here

'because David was born after Herman left the Valleys behind.'

-ROLF LAUGHS

-David.

-How very nice to meet you.

-Rolf Harris.

Sorry you had to come through the rain.

-It wouldn't be South Wales without it.

-Your dad's old studio, this was.

It is absolutely amazing. My goodness. Just... Yes, amazing.

What is it like to see your dad's work like this?

Of course, I grew up surrounded by these.

You know, these are like old friends, really,

and you have a very strange relationship

growing up with pictures, you know.

What do you know about your father's early life in Warsaw?

Terrible times. Terrible times. He was born in 1911.

He grew up in a very poor home,

his father was an illiterate cobbler,

and it was a time...

By the 1930s, anti-Semitism was getting a lot worse in Poland.

It wasn't just something that started with the Nazis in Germany,

there was also anti-Semitism in Poland.

At a certain point in the late '30s, my father felt it was really...

He was on the left, he was a Socialist,

and he really thought it was time to get out.

And he describes the scene

when he said goodbye to his parents at the railway station,

and his mother said to him, "Never come back. Never.

"Never, never."

And he was then incredibly lucky.

He went to France - first to Belgium and then to France - to study art,

and as the Germans invaded Belgium he went to France.

As the Germans came to France,

he managed to get a lift from an American woman called June Peaches July,

who gave him a lift down to Bordeaux

and he got on one of the last boats coming out of occupied France

and came to Britain, and he came to Glasgow.

Then in 1942, he heard from the Red Cross

that his whole family had been killed by the Nazis,

all gassed by the Nazis.

Not just his family,

but everyone he knew, really, in Warsaw who hadn't already got out.

I wasn't there.

Chance, luck. Nothing else.

The others didn't deserve their death.

I didn't deserve remaining alive.

Finish.

And he came to South Wales,

not really knowing what he would find at all,

and he came to this village.

And then, on this bridge, in this village,

in sunset with their heads lit like halos -

"Like the old saints," he said -

he saw these miners walking across the bridge.

And something just clicked at that moment,

and there's something about these sort of monumental shapes,

these figures, set against sunset, coming back from work.

It was in South Wales in this small mining village in the 1940s and '50s

that he found his subject as an artist,

he found his voice as an artist,

he found the kinds of colours that mattered to him as an artist.

So this time here, just mattered to him more than anything else.

'Meeting Herman's son David'

will really help me connect with his father,

as I appreciate his style of painting

was so affected by his past and by his politics.

Back in Herman's day,

there were thousands of coal miners in South Wales.

But if my painting has any chance of doing him justice,

I need to find a working collier.

And that's a pretty formidable task in this day and age.

# Working in a coal mine

# Going down, down, down

# Working in a coal mine

# Whoop! About to slip down

# Working in a coal mine

# Going down, down, down

# Working in a coal mine

# Whoop! About to slip down

# Five o'clock in the morning... #

The Aberpergwm mine is a working pit just a few miles from Ystradgynlais.

It was originally closed by the National Coal Board in 1985,

following the miners' strike.

'It's now privately owned,

'and employs over 200 colliers to mine coal to power local industry.'

Good luck down there, son.

I don't want any trouble out of you!

-Rolf, where's the wobble board?

-Just there!

Give us a bit of a...

MIMICS ROLF'S MOUTH MUSIC

-HE LAUGHS

-What?

I can't do it! Brilliant.

It's based on a dog panting.

HE PANTS

And then just drop the bass notes in.

THEY PANT

THEY LAUGH

As I meet the boys from the drift mine,

I suddenly understand why Josef Herman so admired the miner.

Josef Herman would've loved to have sketched these miners. G'day!

He would've loved to have seen a pit once again thriving

in the Welsh Valleys that he loved.

'I've also spotted my subject,

'a young apprentice called Carwyn Donovan,

'who comes from four generations of miners.'

..Carwyn is mechanical.

We're doing a drawing of you some time.

I think so!

-Are you all right?

-I'm good, yeah. Fit and well.

You'll gave to wash your hands now.

And today, I'm going to paint Carwyn at the nearby Tower Colliery,

which finally closed down three years ago.

-Hey!

-How are you today?

Nice to see you again!

Even blacker than you were yesterday!

Very good.

Although Herman loved sketching,

his drawings bore little resemblance to his finished paintings.

This is why I make only notes from nature,

and draw and paint from memory.

The subject is then a lost world that I recover.

But it was in his imagination that they really took form.

Body shapes and features were exaggerated.

Building on a rich palette,

he'd play with light and with perspective.

Herman used a combination of charcoal, Indian ink,

watercolours and oils.

Although Josef produced thousands of drawings,

he only did a small number of paintings each year.

It took Herman a good few days to do one painting.

Producing a painting is a matter of long hours of labouring, labouring, labouring

until it comes a moment of complete elevation,

or a revelation even to yourself that you actually did it.

It is as though you would suddenly be awakened from a pleasant dream.

'But I want to try and do all this in one sitting.'

-Are you happy with that position, Carwyn?

-Yeah. It's no problem, yeah.

Cos it gives me a chance to show the body as well as just the face.

So I've just got to work out what the body's going to look like.

It's a really strong shape, that, you know...

It reminds me of Herman's images of the miners -

the gutsy, strong lines.

You're actually from Ystradgynlais, are you?

-That's right, yeah.

-Do you know a lot about Josef Herman?

-Only from what my grandfather used to talk about him.

-Yeah?

He used to mention him, you know.

It was so unusual to have...

Here was somebody...

An outsider, who was from Poland, coming to Ystradgynlais,

so that made him different from one point of view.

And then the second part that was unusual

was that he wanted to paint miners.

He saw them as heroic figures?

Well, obviously, you know.

But as I say, it was just a way of life to us

and to everyone from Ystradgynlais.

Perhaps it took an outsider to realise it.

My grandfather's generation

would've been used to seeing portraits of the King and the Queen and army generals,

-none of which meant much to us working class, you know?

-Yeah.

-What do you think of Herman's art?

-Fascinating, really.

As I say, us younger generations

always look to our fathers and grandfathers

as the heroes that Herman portrayed them as, you know.

Yep.

'We'll get back to the portrait later.

'Herman often painted men down in the mine.

'But like me,

'he also liked to sketch people when they were off-guard, in the street.

'In Ystradgynlais, he became so well-known

'that locals nicknamed him Jo Bach,

'that's Welsh for "Little Jo".

'I don't know what he would've made of the didgeridoo, though!'

Very good.

ROLF PLAYS DIDGERIDOO

Very spiritual, that is.

-Yeah.

-And again, Rolf. And again!

-And again?!

-Again!

MOBILE RINGS

I've been a fan of yours for so long.

Do you know, you look a lot younger than I thought?

-IN WELSH ACCENT:

-I was only a child then myself, you see?

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

Enough fun for now.

I'm off to see those who had a big impact on Herman's life here.

That'll do it, whoa, stop. Thank you.

'I'm meeting some of Joe's old pals at one of his favourite haunts, the Miners' Welfare Hall.

'It's now home to the Josef Herman Foundation.

'It was built on penny-a-week donations from colliers,

'and Joe used to hold weekly art classes here.'

-From Joe Bach.

-From Joe Bach.

'Carole Hopkin and Betty Rae Watkins were two of his closest friends.'

He wanted to stay in a mining village, so my aunt and uncle,

Dai and Peggy, invited him to stay

in Ystradgynlais, in their cottage,

two up, two down, no bathroom.

As soon as he arrived in Ystradgynlais, he knew this was the place he wanted to be.

What was his impact on the village?

People like Joe don't come around often.

To me, he was the first man I really fell in love with.

It's the first time I've admitted this.

Every Thursday night, in my grandparents' house, the literati of the valley would meet.

Writers, artists, politicians.

The voices would rise and we'd listen and we thought,

"Something important is happening, something very exciting is happening."

They'd get very volatile, sometimes, because they were all strongly political and socialist people.

-Left wing?

-Very left wing.

He had this great humanity

that came out from him.

He always had time for people.

He was here for 11 years, but when he left,

I gather he never forgot this place.

No, never.

When he died, his widow, Nini, sent his ashes to be buried, scattered in the studio.

They were scattered under the fig tree, so that Joe came home.

In his memorial service, he'd asked that the Welsh national anthem be sung.

That was very moving, that he'd given instructions to the very end,

to mention Wales and to honour Wales.

Joe Herman left Ystradgynlais in 1955,

because the damp weather was affecting his health.

But the community was already changing,

and the pit he'd known so well on the outskirts of town shut down.

Then, 30 years later, came the miners' strike of the 1980s,

followed by the closure of pit after pit.

South Wales' mining communities were devastated.

Josef Herman didn't die until 2000, so I'm keen to know

from his son, David, what his father thought about the whole thing.

What would your dad have thought about the decline of coal mining in Wales?

He'd have been so sad to have seen what happened,

both to the miners individually that he knew, to the community, to the whole industry around the country.

He still lived to see the coal miners strike in the 1980s and that affected him profoundly.

It was because it was a way of life.

When I say that there was a tradition which he felt he belonged to,

what he called his family tree of artists who had also painted workers, that tradition, too,

was coming to an end.

I think he had that sense, late in his life, that this really was a moment of change,

something coming to an end which had mattered a great deal to him.

By the early 1990s,

the landscape of the South Wales Valleys had changed dramatically from Herman's day.

At one time, there were 600 coal mines in Wales.

Then, in 2008, this mine, Tower Colliery in Hirwaun,

was the last deep mine in Wales to close.

It brought to an end over a century of coal-mining history in this part of the world.

I think it's fitting that I'm painting Carwyn

at the Tower Colliery, as a tribute to all Welsh miners through history.

And you know, I believe it's a venue that Herman would have approved of.

What's the community like now in Ystradgynlais, now that the mine there

has closed down?

Well, Ystradgynlais hasn't been as hardly hit

as other Valleys communities, but it definitely had an effect,

the pit closure programme decimated most communities.

There was that old saying, you close a pit, you close a community.

After British Coal closed most of the collieries in South Wales they came to close this colliery,

they said the place was geologically unviable.

The men working here knew that wasn't true, so they got

all their redundancy money together, pooled it together

and bought the colliery between themselves. They ran it at a profit for 13 years.

It closed about two or three years ago, I think it was.

If they could work this at a profit

for another 13 years,

you wonder how many of the other mines that were closed down would still have been able to work.

That's it, exactly.

What does it mean to you to be a miner?

It's definitely more than just a job.

It's everything.

I couldn't imagine doing anything else.

Really?

That's what I always wanted to do and I'm glad I've had the opportunity to do it.

I think that's about it. What do you think?

Well...

It's amazing. Any chance of getting a print?

-Of this? No problem, we'll do that straight away.

-Thank you very much.

Excellent, thank you.

'But I'm wondering whether my painting is all wrong.

'I'm really worried that it's not Herman-esque enough.

'I think I need to visit the Glynn Vivian Gallery in Swansea

'to see Herman's most iconic painting of Welsh miners up close.

'Hopefully that will tell me whether I've got my painting right, or not.

'Herman painted this mural for the 1951 Festival of Britain.

'It shows miners resting after a long shift.'

Seeing this mural up close,

I realise that

my painting of Carwyn is a bit too...

I can't think of any word to call it other than a bit too pretty-pretty.

It's a bit too realistic, it's not symbolic enough.

I think I'd like to try and do something

like another painting of Carwyn,

where I try and get that primitive,

age-old feeling,

like the Easter Island statues, with him more sort of slab-like,

and without losing his identity,

to try and get that feeling of the strength of these massive figures.

So, I'm going back to the drawing board and I'm starting all over,

but I don't feel too bad about redoing my painting from scratch.

Even the great man himself struggled to find perfection.

Probably, I should say,

every second picture is destroyed.

That's to say that the dissatisfaction

is so great,

that you just want to...

This whole image, wipe out from the existence of the world.

It has never been, and start again.

Well, I'm back in my own studio now.

I've got a big blow-up photograph of one of the characters from the Josef Herman mural.

I've also got...

the original painting that I did of Carwyn.

To me, that looks nothing like the heroic statuesque figures that Herman created.

I've put some background on the canvas and I'm going to get into it and start, see how we go.

Try and get this pudgy arm going down here.

Big, sausage-shaped fingers going down there.

That's already looking more like a Herman, I think.

Herman chose to

really forget about their features, not make a big thing of them, because he wanted them to be

like heroic sculptural shapes, he didn't want to have individual people recognised, I think.

Yeah, that's good.

I could do a bit more white on the top of that, I think.

Yeah, can't find an orange at the moment, so I'll have to make one up.

And a bit of light coming on that cheek there, like that.

And sort of a dimmer light coming down there.

I'm liking this very much.

Very much enjoying it.

Just look straight at me for a while. That's good.

And the light coming on this side of the face...

You haven't had those teeth whitened, have you?

Yes, that's good. And a great big boot there, the huge miner's

reinforced solid boot.

They've got metal toecaps, so if anything falls on them, it won't destroy their toes and their feet.

He had a pair of gloves, I seem to remember,

slung on his belt.

What I'm going to try to do now

is try to establish some of these colours, because they had a very bright orange top,

Carwyn's crew and his team of miners that were working with him.

That's the way

Carwyn's helmet looked when I saw him.

But then I've got to go back to the Josef Herman feel and get

some lighter colour on here.

Purple matter,

and we'll do...

And those big sausages of fingers.

Oh, yes. Although it looks nothing like

Carwyn, it looks as if it's catching the light from something there.

Those eyes are there in the darkness,

and I'll imagine all that black coal dust on his face.

I must say, it really helped me, going to the Glynn Vivian Gallery and seeing that big mural

of Josef Herman's that he'd done for...

the 1951 exhibition.

It was just wonderful, because I'd lost my way, I think,

trying to recreate a painting in his style.

I was all over the place.

If you're painting and it's not working for you...

Everybody struggles at some time, to get the thing to work the way they want it to.

I think you've just got to persevere with it.

Yeah, I want it to stay a bit

dingy there.

I'm liking that.

Yeah, rather like that.

That should be in shadow from the hand like that, so you get that shadow coming round.

Yes, yes, yes.

Josef Herman left the Valleys

and moved away, but for the rest of his life,

his heart was still in Wales, and he drew on his memories to paint miners

and to recreate the mining scene that he'd known so well.

He thought that miners were real heroes,

and having met Carwyn and his mates... I couldn't agree with him more.

We all need heroes in our lives.

OK, let's sign this.

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