0:00:02 > 0:00:06Welsh art of the 20th century is the story of how artists grappled with their tumultuous times,
0:00:06 > 0:00:15producing work that sometimes reflected and sometimes challenged the Wales they'd emerged from.
0:00:15 > 0:00:21Once upon a time I wanted to be one of those artists, and after school here in Aberdare
0:00:21 > 0:00:30I went to Hornsey College of Art in London, and straight into the art college revolt of 1968.
0:00:30 > 0:00:32All in agreement?
0:00:32 > 0:00:35I propose that we now march down to Wood Green Civic Centre.
0:00:35 > 0:00:40'Later, as Minister for the Arts, I hit the headlines when I criticised
0:00:40 > 0:00:44'what I saw as the emptiness of some modern art.
0:00:44 > 0:00:47'Now I've retired from politics and taken up painting again.
0:00:49 > 0:00:53'In this series I'm going to look at the story of art in Wales
0:00:53 > 0:01:00'during the 20th century, meet some amazing artists, and discover some unforgettable works of art.'
0:01:08 > 0:01:10Before the First World War,
0:01:10 > 0:01:13art in Wales had been the province of the wealthy and well-to-do
0:01:13 > 0:01:15but in the aftermath of the war
0:01:15 > 0:01:19a new generation of working-class artists came to the fore.
0:01:19 > 0:01:23In this programme I look at how they painted their side of Wales
0:01:23 > 0:01:27and how one of them took art in a new direction.
0:01:54 > 0:01:59War can sometimes direct the creative arts onto new paths,
0:01:59 > 0:02:05and subsequently peace can bring periods of recovery and reflection.
0:02:05 > 0:02:08This was particularly true after the horrors of the First World War,
0:02:08 > 0:02:15in which the artist David Jones found himself in the fierce fighting at Mametz Wood.
0:02:15 > 0:02:18EXPLOSIONS AND SHOUTING ECHO
0:02:23 > 0:02:30After the war, he came here, to Capel-y-Ffin, in the Black Mountains between Abergavenny and Hay.
0:02:30 > 0:02:34He joined the sculptor Eric Gill and his family,
0:02:34 > 0:02:39who had taken over a monastery to set up an artistic community.
0:02:48 > 0:02:53For Jones and Gill, Capel-y-Ffin was a retreat from the modern world.
0:02:53 > 0:02:57Even today the place has a haunted, isolated quality.
0:02:59 > 0:03:04At the tiny chapel there I met David Jones authority Anne Price-Owen.
0:03:05 > 0:03:08Why did David Jones come here, of all places? THEY CHUCKLE
0:03:08 > 0:03:13Well, he arrived here because Eric Gill had already arrived with his entourage, from Ditchling.
0:03:13 > 0:03:15Ditchling was in Sussex, wasn't it?
0:03:15 > 0:03:23- Yes, that's right.- So he's moved from Sussex, with those kind of rolling hills, to...Capel-y-Ffin.
0:03:23 > 0:03:25Capel-y-Ffin,
0:03:25 > 0:03:29a valley which hardly ever sees the sunlight,
0:03:29 > 0:03:31and to a remote monastery here,
0:03:31 > 0:03:34where he re-established his little religious fraternity.
0:03:34 > 0:03:43And David Jones follows him here, comes up for Christmas, arrives on 22nd December in 1924.
0:03:43 > 0:03:45As soon as he arrives practically,
0:03:45 > 0:03:49Jones is getting drawing materials out and starting to draw here.
0:03:54 > 0:03:56What Jones found here
0:03:56 > 0:04:01was the stillness which is almost tangible today
0:04:01 > 0:04:05and this tremendous impact and power of nature,
0:04:05 > 0:04:11which I'm sure is the cause for him having drawn so many landscapes.
0:04:23 > 0:04:29Capel-y-Ffin had no electricity, presumably no plumbing. It must have been pretty tough living here.
0:04:29 > 0:04:36Very, very hard, but it mightn't have seemed that hard to David Jones because of his time in the trenches.
0:04:36 > 0:04:40There was a community spirit here, as he had found in the trenches,
0:04:40 > 0:04:44the camaraderie with the other soldiers and so on.
0:04:48 > 0:04:55Some of his landscapes are pulsing with life, they're animated.
0:04:55 > 0:05:00A wind or a breeze seems to pick them up and toss them about
0:05:00 > 0:05:02and you feel your eye...
0:05:02 > 0:05:06You say, "That's a good tree," and then you see something else,
0:05:06 > 0:05:10so that there is this throbbing and veering in his artworks
0:05:10 > 0:05:13and I think that that's what makes him
0:05:13 > 0:05:17such a wonderful and exceptional painter.
0:05:22 > 0:05:29Art in Wales in the early 20th century was full of the evocative landscapes like Capel-y-Ffin,
0:05:29 > 0:05:33but there was another side of Wales that rarely found its way into art galleries.
0:05:35 > 0:05:42Wales was one of the powerhouses of the Industrial Revolution with its coal and steel industries.
0:05:42 > 0:05:50In the 1920s there emerged a small group of artists who painted industrial Wales and its people.
0:05:50 > 0:05:53Often they were from working-class backgrounds
0:05:53 > 0:05:57and they were fortunate to find an art college that supported them.
0:05:57 > 0:06:00It was in Swansea and it's still there today.
0:06:04 > 0:06:11In the 19th century, Swansea was the centre of the Welsh metal industry, nicknamed Copperopolis.
0:06:11 > 0:06:18Money had flowed into the city and the wealthy elite of Swansea became great supporters of the arts.
0:06:19 > 0:06:24Remember, anybody can make a mark, you don't have to be an expert,
0:06:24 > 0:06:28you just have to be a person who's capable of thinking.
0:06:28 > 0:06:32Founded in 1853, the Swansea School of Art
0:06:32 > 0:06:35really came to life in 1909,
0:06:35 > 0:06:38when a Scotsman, William Grant Murray, took over,
0:06:38 > 0:06:45and what's remarkable is that he began to seek out students from working-class communities
0:06:45 > 0:06:49who would never have dreamt of a career as artists.
0:06:55 > 0:07:00'Kirstine Dunthorne has written the history of Swansea School of Art
0:07:00 > 0:07:03'and thinks that Grant Murray had a decisive effect.'
0:07:03 > 0:07:06Grant Murray encouraged as many people as possible
0:07:06 > 0:07:10to come from all walks of life and all trades and so on,
0:07:10 > 0:07:13to come and do some part-time study here.
0:07:13 > 0:07:17He managed to obtain all kinds of grants and bursaries
0:07:17 > 0:07:23and huge additional amounts of money to support capable students,
0:07:23 > 0:07:27whether they were painters and decorators or miners before or whatever.
0:07:27 > 0:07:32Some turned out to be extremely good fine artists, painters, and so on
0:07:32 > 0:07:38and them he gave as much support and encouragement as was humanly possible.
0:07:38 > 0:07:41He was just good, was he, at recognising talent when he saw it?
0:07:41 > 0:07:44Yes, when he saw it he was very good at recognising it.
0:07:53 > 0:07:57'Tangible evidence of Grant Murray's working-class students
0:07:57 > 0:08:00'can be seen in the art-college register,
0:08:00 > 0:08:03'recently rediscovered by archivist Gill Fildes.'
0:08:03 > 0:08:06What have we got here, what is this great volume?
0:08:06 > 0:08:14This volume basically lists all the students that were at the college of art between 1909 and 1923.
0:08:14 > 0:08:19So basically what you'd now put on a computer database they hand-wrote in a ledger.
0:08:19 > 0:08:22And are some of the most famous of the students listed in here?
0:08:22 > 0:08:28Yes, they're all here if they were here at that time, so if you look at someone like Evan Walters...
0:08:28 > 0:08:32So Evan Walters was here in 1909, which is the start of this ledger.
0:08:32 > 0:08:38Evan John Walters was 16 years and 11 months old when he started, but actually that's not when he started.
0:08:38 > 0:08:44He enrolled earlier, because it is across here, showing that he was enrolled in 1906.
0:08:44 > 0:08:48So he came here rather young, he was 12 or 13 when he started.
0:08:48 > 0:08:52He called himself a painter even at the tender age of 16,
0:08:52 > 0:08:55and it shows you that he attended for 884 hours,
0:08:55 > 0:08:58so he was quite heavily here for the whole year.
0:08:58 > 0:09:01There's an amazing mix, isn't there, of occupations?
0:09:01 > 0:09:07Yes, anyone who worked with their hands in any way whatsoever seems to have been pulled in to this college.
0:09:07 > 0:09:13So you do get steelworkers, you get copper industry workers, you get people who work in printing.
0:09:13 > 0:09:15You get a real mix of people.
0:09:17 > 0:09:20Evan Walters, who was born in 1893,
0:09:20 > 0:09:24was the first of Grant Murray's students to make his mark.
0:09:26 > 0:09:31Many of his paintings are on display at the Glynn Vivian Gallery,
0:09:31 > 0:09:33just over the road from the art school.
0:09:36 > 0:09:39Lecturer Barry Plummer has a passion for Walters's work
0:09:39 > 0:09:43and has been digging into the background of the artist's life.
0:09:45 > 0:09:48Evan was from Llangyfelach, a village about five miles from here.
0:09:48 > 0:09:51He was born in the pub, which is still there, the Welcome Inn.
0:09:51 > 0:09:54There's anecdotal evidence that he could draw extremely well
0:09:54 > 0:09:58at two or three. He could draw in the sawdust on the floor of the pub.
0:09:58 > 0:10:02By the age of 13 he was working as a full-time painter and decorator
0:10:02 > 0:10:08but at the same time he started to study art in a serious way, coming to the local art school here.
0:10:08 > 0:10:12Evan Walters's most important early painting
0:10:12 > 0:10:14was a portrait of Winifred Coombe Tennant,
0:10:14 > 0:10:19a key patron on the Welsh art scene in the 1920s and '30s.
0:10:19 > 0:10:23She was a great supporter of Walters and many other Welsh painters.
0:10:23 > 0:10:26Now, this is a very striking composition,
0:10:26 > 0:10:29- and very architectural, I think.- Yes.
0:10:29 > 0:10:35But bold marks across the canvas, bold rhythms, sliced in half.
0:10:35 > 0:10:38Where would he have got those ideas from?
0:10:38 > 0:10:41He was always an adventurous artist, there's no doubt about that,
0:10:41 > 0:10:44but he would have got some of these ideas, I'm convinced,
0:10:44 > 0:10:47from looking at the artists of the past as well
0:10:47 > 0:10:50and taking what he could from them, certainly someone like
0:10:50 > 0:10:53Singer Sargent, who was one of his tutors at the Royal Academy School.
0:10:53 > 0:10:57Also...you're quite right, the architectural parts of this,
0:10:57 > 0:11:02the dominoes there, which echo the shape of the corner there,
0:11:02 > 0:11:05the chair which has cut through the frame there,
0:11:05 > 0:11:07and the little table at the top.
0:11:07 > 0:11:11This is a extremely well composed and, as you say, dramatic painting.
0:11:14 > 0:11:19'While Evan Walters earned his living painting the wealthy and influential,
0:11:19 > 0:11:26'his most lasting work were three extraordinary portraits of Welsh miners.
0:11:26 > 0:11:29'Painted during and just after the General Strike of 1926,
0:11:29 > 0:11:33'they are very rare images of working-class life
0:11:33 > 0:11:37'and almost unique in the annals of British art at the time.'
0:11:37 > 0:11:39- What we've got here is a real person, isn't it?- Indeed.
0:11:39 > 0:11:43I mean, this is not some kind of idealised collier
0:11:43 > 0:11:47or a noble human being, this is a real human being.
0:11:47 > 0:11:50It is, and we know who it is, it's a man called William Hopkin.
0:11:50 > 0:11:55He was distantly related to Evan Walters and also a friend,
0:11:55 > 0:12:00lived very close to the father's pub so they knew each other really well.
0:12:00 > 0:12:03So I think this is partly why this is such a powerful painting.
0:12:03 > 0:12:06And it was painted during the 1926 Lockout,
0:12:06 > 0:12:10when this guy probably wasn't earning any money at all.
0:12:10 > 0:12:13Probably none at all. He looks thin, he doesn't look very well.
0:12:13 > 0:12:17There's a fierceness in his eyes, which the local press commented on
0:12:17 > 0:12:21when this painting was exhibited first of all, at the Eisteddfod.
0:12:22 > 0:12:26- This is completely different. - It is indeed.
0:12:26 > 0:12:31This is a painting of a collier who is at work, it's the end of a shift.
0:12:31 > 0:12:34Yes. Again this man was known to Walters.
0:12:34 > 0:12:37The difference is, if you notice, really, is the facial expression.
0:12:37 > 0:12:40This is much more relaxed, he is slightly chubbier in the face.
0:12:40 > 0:12:44He's a handsome man, a bit of a Jack the Lad type almost, isn't he?
0:12:44 > 0:12:47Wonderfully big strong hands of the miners,
0:12:47 > 0:12:50probably used to cutting out anthracite.
0:12:50 > 0:12:53And full of detail, I mean, look at his pink lips.
0:12:53 > 0:12:56You'd have to see miners to know that when they came up from the pit
0:12:56 > 0:12:59the only bit of them, apart from the whites of their eyes,
0:12:59 > 0:13:03that wasn't black were their lips, because they licked their lips.
0:13:04 > 0:13:09Now, if we look at this third portrait,
0:13:09 > 0:13:12in many ways the most intriguing of them, I think,
0:13:12 > 0:13:15- it's such a thoughtful look this guy's got.- Yeah.
0:13:15 > 0:13:19Very different from the other two. It's a look almost of scepticism.
0:13:19 > 0:13:23It is like a look of scepticism, and it's called The Convalescent Miner.
0:13:23 > 0:13:25He certainly doesn't look well,
0:13:25 > 0:13:29he's part of that 1926 General Strike, he's a locked-out miner.
0:13:29 > 0:13:31He's sculpted the face so beautifully
0:13:31 > 0:13:34that the technique is... absolutely brilliant.
0:13:34 > 0:13:36The technique is wonderful.
0:13:36 > 0:13:39This is very different to anything you'll see in 1926 in South Wales
0:13:39 > 0:13:42or even in the UK as a whole.
0:13:42 > 0:13:44These were unique portraits.
0:13:51 > 0:13:54'After a successful London show in 1927,
0:13:54 > 0:13:58'Walters became established as a portrait painter,
0:13:58 > 0:14:00'but he was always a restless artist
0:14:00 > 0:14:02'and in the 1930s
0:14:02 > 0:14:06'began to experiment with the novel double image technique.
0:14:06 > 0:14:10'It was unusual enough for newsreel companies to seek him out
0:14:10 > 0:14:11'and this film clip,
0:14:11 > 0:14:16'seen here for the first time in over 70 years, shows him at work.'
0:14:17 > 0:14:19Looking round in the realm of art,
0:14:19 > 0:14:23we encountered an artist who paints what he sees with both eyes.
0:14:23 > 0:14:25Each of these overlapping images
0:14:25 > 0:14:28represents what the artist would see with one eye closed.
0:14:28 > 0:14:31The reason of course is that we look at things
0:14:31 > 0:14:33with eyes that are in different positions.
0:14:36 > 0:14:38Mr Evan Walters, the artist, demonstrates with an actual model.
0:14:38 > 0:14:42He is painting exactly what he sees in relation to its background
0:14:42 > 0:14:45and the experiment will reproduce on canvas
0:14:45 > 0:14:49just what you would see if you held up your hand before your eyes and gazed at the wall beyond.
0:14:49 > 0:14:54You would see two hands. Try it when you get home.
0:14:55 > 0:14:59At the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, conservation officer Emma Fisher
0:14:59 > 0:15:03is working on one of Walters's double image paintings.
0:15:03 > 0:15:09Evan Walters started painting this double vision technique in the 1930s.
0:15:09 > 0:15:12What was he trying to do, do you think,
0:15:12 > 0:15:15and how did he actually create this technique?
0:15:15 > 0:15:18The head looks like a very straightforward portrait almost,
0:15:18 > 0:15:22but when you start looking around the painting you can see where
0:15:22 > 0:15:24he's repeated the hand and another eye too,
0:15:24 > 0:15:27so it gives an effect almost of movement.
0:15:27 > 0:15:29It was possibly his response
0:15:29 > 0:15:32to the experimentation that was going on in art at the time.
0:15:32 > 0:15:36So this was Evan Walters's stab at modernism?
0:15:36 > 0:15:38That's right, it possibly was.
0:15:38 > 0:15:41How do you set about cleaning something as precious as this?
0:15:41 > 0:15:45First of all you make an assessment of the condition of the painting,
0:15:45 > 0:15:48to make sure it's safe to start cleaning.
0:15:48 > 0:15:53What we use is a cotton wool swab and some saliva,
0:15:53 > 0:15:56I roll it very gently over the painting.
0:15:56 > 0:15:59The enzymes in saliva are very good at removing dirt.
0:15:59 > 0:16:01If it was in somebody's home and they were smokers
0:16:01 > 0:16:05then you do find that lots of tobacco's built up on the painting,
0:16:05 > 0:16:08If you see, there's quite a bit of dirt there already.
0:16:08 > 0:16:11You have to be careful you don't put that back in your mouth, do you?
0:16:11 > 0:16:13That's right, you wouldn't want to put it back in again.
0:16:17 > 0:16:22Walters's double image experiment wasn't a commercial success
0:16:22 > 0:16:27and his reputation faded, but his earlier work had an important effect.
0:16:39 > 0:16:45Evan Walters inspired a new generation of young Swansea painters
0:16:45 > 0:16:49who chose to paint the working men and women that they saw around them.
0:16:49 > 0:16:55One of them, a miner, Vincent Evans, painted this beautiful rendition
0:16:55 > 0:17:00of miners underground notching timber to support the roof.
0:17:00 > 0:17:04And it's clear that Vincent Evans knew about coal mining
0:17:04 > 0:17:08because of the accurate detail in this picture.
0:17:24 > 0:17:26Another Swansea student of the 1920s
0:17:26 > 0:17:30was Archie Rhys Griffiths from Gorseinon.
0:17:30 > 0:17:35His paintings of miners are sadder and more subdued than Vincent Evans'.
0:17:35 > 0:17:39This isn't a surprise. They're painted in the Great Depression,
0:17:39 > 0:17:43when there was mass unemployment in many parts of industrial Wales.
0:17:43 > 0:17:46These were tough times for artists as well
0:17:46 > 0:17:50and there were few people who wanted to buy paintings like this.
0:17:53 > 0:17:56The story of Archie Rhys Griffiths is a sad one.
0:17:56 > 0:17:59He suffered from depression and alcoholism.
0:17:59 > 0:18:03Despite early promise, he stopped painting by the end of the 1930s,
0:18:03 > 0:18:07dying in obscurity and leaving behind only a few paintings
0:18:07 > 0:18:09to show what he could have achieved.
0:18:15 > 0:18:21If the career of Archie Rhys Griffiths was stifled by the hard times of the 1930s,
0:18:21 > 0:18:24one of his contemporaries from Swansea School of Art
0:18:24 > 0:18:27took a different route and went on to great success.
0:18:27 > 0:18:31Ceri Richards was born here at Dunvant, near Swansea.
0:18:31 > 0:18:36He was to become the most successful Welsh artist of the 20th century.
0:18:36 > 0:18:38His father was a tinplate worker
0:18:38 > 0:18:44but also a playwright and founder and conductor of the choir at this chapel.
0:18:45 > 0:18:50Ceri Richards, brought up in this highly cultured working-class family,
0:18:50 > 0:18:53was an accomplished musician as well as an artist.
0:19:01 > 0:19:08In 1969, near the end of his life, Ceri Richards was interviewed for television about his early days.
0:19:09 > 0:19:15I used to go to a local person in Swansea who held painting classes
0:19:15 > 0:19:17when I was quite young
0:19:17 > 0:19:23and I copied all the most difficult reproductions,
0:19:23 > 0:19:28but I'd no idea what the professional training of an artist meant.
0:19:28 > 0:19:34I was told to go and see the principal of the local art school,
0:19:34 > 0:19:39who I knew nothing about, and I was accepted for the local art school.
0:19:49 > 0:19:52But for the young Ceri Richards,
0:19:52 > 0:19:57studying in Swansea in the 1920s with no television or art magazines,
0:19:57 > 0:20:00seeing the latest paintings wasn't easy.
0:20:01 > 0:20:06However, in Wales there was one source of matchless modern art.
0:20:08 > 0:20:12This is the collection of Impressionist paintings
0:20:12 > 0:20:17bought by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, the granddaughters of a wealthy coal owner.
0:20:19 > 0:20:24The collection is now here at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff
0:20:24 > 0:20:31but when Ceri Richards saw it in 1923 it was at their home in Gregynog
0:20:31 > 0:20:34and it changed forever the way in which he saw the world.
0:20:39 > 0:20:43They had assembled part of their collection which contained the Impressionists.
0:20:43 > 0:20:46The world I thought was a fixed, static thing
0:20:46 > 0:20:49but all the interpretations were very different,
0:20:49 > 0:20:55so that 50 artists would produce 50 reactions to the same sort of situation.
0:20:55 > 0:21:00This is what I was interested in, actually, I had never thought about it in those terms before.
0:21:10 > 0:21:13The Impressionists fed the young Ceri Richards' imagination.
0:21:13 > 0:21:18After leaving Swansea he went to the Royal College of Art in London.
0:21:18 > 0:21:20By the early 1930s
0:21:20 > 0:21:24he was one of Britain's most experimental young artists.
0:21:26 > 0:21:31Ceri Richards' son-in-law is the leading art critic Mel Gooding.
0:21:31 > 0:21:36At the family home, he showed me some of Richards' daring early works.
0:21:36 > 0:21:40Mel, this is the very epitome of modernism.
0:21:40 > 0:21:44How did a boy from just west of Swansea get to paint like this?
0:21:44 > 0:21:47Well, the painting dates from 1933.
0:21:48 > 0:21:51Ceri would be just 30 years old,
0:21:51 > 0:21:55he was about six or seven years out of the Royal College
0:21:55 > 0:21:59and he was working as a commercial artist at the time,
0:21:59 > 0:22:06drawings and things like that for... advertising agencies and so on.
0:22:06 > 0:22:10So this was work done when he could find time to do it.
0:22:10 > 0:22:16It's a picture of his wife, pregnant with their first daughter,
0:22:16 > 0:22:22and in a way that in itself is a kind of slightly shocking thing
0:22:22 > 0:22:24that could only have been done
0:22:24 > 0:22:29by somebody who was aware of certain currents in modern painting.
0:22:29 > 0:22:33Now, he'd come to a knowledge of those things
0:22:33 > 0:22:37to some extent at the Royal College, where he'd been introduced to
0:22:37 > 0:22:41the work of Picasso, of...Matisse.
0:22:41 > 0:22:48It's Ceri's awareness of European painting that made him distinctive.
0:22:51 > 0:22:58- This was painted and constructed three years after the nude.- Yes.
0:22:58 > 0:23:02What was he working at here, how did he develop to this stage?
0:23:02 > 0:23:05Well, this is 1936, which is the year
0:23:05 > 0:23:10of the great International Surrealist Exhibition in London.
0:23:10 > 0:23:14Ceri had been deeply interested in surrealism from the early '30s.
0:23:14 > 0:23:17This is called The Sculptor And His Model.
0:23:17 > 0:23:20What makes it surrealist, I suppose,
0:23:20 > 0:23:24is that its theme is about the male and the female
0:23:24 > 0:23:27and the different ways in which the male and the female
0:23:27 > 0:23:29define the world through their own experience.
0:23:29 > 0:23:32The female here, whose...
0:23:32 > 0:23:37you know, her breasts wittily suggested by vacancies,
0:23:37 > 0:23:43a darkness and a void, where fullness might be expected.
0:23:43 > 0:23:47It's clearly very voluptuous, and, you know,
0:23:47 > 0:23:50there's a great deal of sex, shall we say,
0:23:50 > 0:23:54in his rendering of the female form here.
0:23:54 > 0:23:56The sculptor...
0:23:56 > 0:24:00is represented by a much more kind of mathematical,
0:24:00 > 0:24:06much more angular...kind of... shapes and forms.
0:24:06 > 0:24:08I think, without question,
0:24:08 > 0:24:13it's one of the great masterpieces of surrealism, European surrealism,
0:24:13 > 0:24:16and one of the few great masterpieces of surrealism
0:24:16 > 0:24:20actually produced in this country, in these islands.
0:24:23 > 0:24:28Ceri Richards wasn't the only artist in Wales inspired by modern art.
0:24:28 > 0:24:31Cedric Morris, also from Swansea,
0:24:31 > 0:24:34painted this wicked Expressionist portrait
0:24:34 > 0:24:39of upper-class art lovers Frances and Caroline Byng-Stamper.
0:24:40 > 0:24:44Privately he called it The English Upper Classes.
0:24:44 > 0:24:47The sisters were far from amused.
0:24:49 > 0:24:52Graham Sutherland had been a struggling artist
0:24:52 > 0:24:55in the London of the early 1930s.
0:24:58 > 0:25:01In 1934 he came to Pembrokeshire
0:25:01 > 0:25:06and turned the county's winding lanes into a surreal dreamscape.
0:25:12 > 0:25:16By the late 1930s, the shadow of war was looming.
0:25:16 > 0:25:19With their jagged forms and darkening skies,
0:25:19 > 0:25:24both Sutherland and Richards' work reflect the anxieties of the time.
0:25:27 > 0:25:30A painting in the Richards family collection,
0:25:30 > 0:25:36while on the surface a still life, seems to me full of foreboding.
0:25:36 > 0:25:40Now, this is 1938.
0:25:40 > 0:25:42The painting is much darker.
0:25:42 > 0:25:45It seems to be about dreams and about...
0:25:45 > 0:25:48maybe...it reminds me of war.
0:25:48 > 0:25:51There's a lot of violence in this painting, and I think there was
0:25:51 > 0:25:56a lot of violence in a lot of art just about this time, '38, '39.
0:25:56 > 0:26:01It's the period that was described by Churchill, if you remember,
0:26:01 > 0:26:05after the war as the gathering storm.
0:26:05 > 0:26:09It's a painting which reflects the mood of the period.
0:26:14 > 0:26:18As in the First World War, so after 1939
0:26:18 > 0:26:23artists like Ceri Richards were recruited to record the war effort.
0:26:23 > 0:26:29He came back to Wales to the same tinplate factory in Gowerton where his father had worked.
0:26:29 > 0:26:32His drawings are surrealist images,
0:26:32 > 0:26:38with strong-handed workers enveloped in the swirling smoke of the factory.
0:26:40 > 0:26:44When you went in there from outside, you couldn't see very much.
0:26:44 > 0:26:47And they worked in a perpetual sort of gloom.
0:26:47 > 0:26:52This is what I got as well, the heat.
0:26:52 > 0:26:56Well, it wasn't so... it WAS very, very hot,
0:26:56 > 0:26:58but not like in a steelworks.
0:27:01 > 0:27:04I mean, it was...this ballet
0:27:04 > 0:27:07between the four or five people...
0:27:08 > 0:27:14..involved in this rolling to the required lengths and cutting.
0:27:14 > 0:27:17AIR-RAID SIREN BLARES
0:27:32 > 0:27:36The horror of war was witnessed close to home
0:27:36 > 0:27:40when the centre of Swansea was destroyed by German bombs in 1941.
0:27:47 > 0:27:49Swansea School of Art graduate Will Evans
0:27:49 > 0:27:54ventured out into the smouldering ruins to record the devastation.
0:28:06 > 0:28:10His paintings aren't only powerful works of art
0:28:10 > 0:28:12but also some of the best documentary evidence
0:28:12 > 0:28:15we have of the Swansea Blitz.
0:28:23 > 0:28:26But, as we'll see in the next programme,
0:28:26 > 0:28:32out of the ashes of war grew a new generation of painters and sculptors
0:28:32 > 0:28:39inspired by refugee artists who escaped fascism to come to work in Wales.
0:28:48 > 0:28:50Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
0:28:50 > 0:28:51E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk