Episode 2 Framing Wales

Welsh art of the 20th century is the story of how artists grappled with their tumultuous times,

producing work that sometimes reflected and sometimes challenged the Wales they'd emerged from.

Once upon a time I wanted to be one of those artists, and after school here in Aberdare

I went to Hornsey College of Art in London, and straight into the art college revolt of 1968.

All in agreement?

I propose that we now march down to Wood Green Civic Centre.

'Later, as Minister for the Arts, I hit the headlines when I criticised

'what I saw as the emptiness of some modern art.

'Now I've retired from politics and taken up painting again.

'In this series I'm going to look at the story of art in Wales

'during the 20th century, meet some amazing artists, and discover some unforgettable works of art.'

Before the First World War,

art in Wales had been the province of the wealthy and well-to-do

but in the aftermath of the war

a new generation of working-class artists came to the fore.

In this programme I look at how they painted their side of Wales

and how one of them took art in a new direction.

War can sometimes direct the creative arts onto new paths,

and subsequently peace can bring periods of recovery and reflection.

This was particularly true after the horrors of the First World War,

in which the artist David Jones found himself in the fierce fighting at Mametz Wood.

EXPLOSIONS AND SHOUTING ECHO

After the war, he came here, to Capel-y-Ffin, in the Black Mountains between Abergavenny and Hay.

He joined the sculptor Eric Gill and his family,

who had taken over a monastery to set up an artistic community.

For Jones and Gill, Capel-y-Ffin was a retreat from the modern world.

Even today the place has a haunted, isolated quality.

At the tiny chapel there I met David Jones authority Anne Price-Owen.

Why did David Jones come here, of all places? THEY CHUCKLE

Well, he arrived here because Eric Gill had already arrived with his entourage, from Ditchling.

Ditchling was in Sussex, wasn't it?

-Yes, that's right.

-So he's moved from Sussex, with those kind of rolling hills, to...Capel-y-Ffin.

Capel-y-Ffin,

a valley which hardly ever sees the sunlight,

and to a remote monastery here,

where he re-established his little religious fraternity.

And David Jones follows him here, comes up for Christmas, arrives on 22nd December in 1924.

As soon as he arrives practically,

Jones is getting drawing materials out and starting to draw here.

What Jones found here

was the stillness which is almost tangible today

and this tremendous impact and power of nature,

which I'm sure is the cause for him having drawn so many landscapes.

Capel-y-Ffin had no electricity, presumably no plumbing. It must have been pretty tough living here.

Very, very hard, but it mightn't have seemed that hard to David Jones because of his time in the trenches.

There was a community spirit here, as he had found in the trenches,

the camaraderie with the other soldiers and so on.

Some of his landscapes are pulsing with life, they're animated.

A wind or a breeze seems to pick them up and toss them about

and you feel your eye...

You say, "That's a good tree," and then you see something else,

so that there is this throbbing and veering in his artworks

and I think that that's what makes him

such a wonderful and exceptional painter.

Art in Wales in the early 20th century was full of the evocative landscapes like Capel-y-Ffin,

but there was another side of Wales that rarely found its way into art galleries.

Wales was one of the powerhouses of the Industrial Revolution with its coal and steel industries.

In the 1920s there emerged a small group of artists who painted industrial Wales and its people.

Often they were from working-class backgrounds

and they were fortunate to find an art college that supported them.

It was in Swansea and it's still there today.

In the 19th century, Swansea was the centre of the Welsh metal industry, nicknamed Copperopolis.

Money had flowed into the city and the wealthy elite of Swansea became great supporters of the arts.

Remember, anybody can make a mark, you don't have to be an expert,

you just have to be a person who's capable of thinking.

Founded in 1853, the Swansea School of Art

really came to life in 1909,

when a Scotsman, William Grant Murray, took over,

and what's remarkable is that he began to seek out students from working-class communities

who would never have dreamt of a career as artists.

'Kirstine Dunthorne has written the history of Swansea School of Art

'and thinks that Grant Murray had a decisive effect.'

Grant Murray encouraged as many people as possible

to come from all walks of life and all trades and so on,

to come and do some part-time study here.

He managed to obtain all kinds of grants and bursaries

and huge additional amounts of money to support capable students,

whether they were painters and decorators or miners before or whatever.

Some turned out to be extremely good fine artists, painters, and so on

and them he gave as much support and encouragement as was humanly possible.

He was just good, was he, at recognising talent when he saw it?

Yes, when he saw it he was very good at recognising it.

'Tangible evidence of Grant Murray's working-class students

'can be seen in the art-college register,

'recently rediscovered by archivist Gill Fildes.'

What have we got here, what is this great volume?

This volume basically lists all the students that were at the college of art between 1909 and 1923.

So basically what you'd now put on a computer database they hand-wrote in a ledger.

And are some of the most famous of the students listed in here?

Yes, they're all here if they were here at that time, so if you look at someone like Evan Walters...

So Evan Walters was here in 1909, which is the start of this ledger.

Evan John Walters was 16 years and 11 months old when he started, but actually that's not when he started.

He enrolled earlier, because it is across here, showing that he was enrolled in 1906.

So he came here rather young, he was 12 or 13 when he started.

He called himself a painter even at the tender age of 16,

and it shows you that he attended for 884 hours,

so he was quite heavily here for the whole year.

There's an amazing mix, isn't there, of occupations?

Yes, anyone who worked with their hands in any way whatsoever seems to have been pulled in to this college.

So you do get steelworkers, you get copper industry workers, you get people who work in printing.

You get a real mix of people.

Evan Walters, who was born in 1893,

was the first of Grant Murray's students to make his mark.

Many of his paintings are on display at the Glynn Vivian Gallery,

just over the road from the art school.

Lecturer Barry Plummer has a passion for Walters's work

and has been digging into the background of the artist's life.

Evan was from Llangyfelach, a village about five miles from here.

He was born in the pub, which is still there, the Welcome Inn.

There's anecdotal evidence that he could draw extremely well

at two or three. He could draw in the sawdust on the floor of the pub.

By the age of 13 he was working as a full-time painter and decorator

but at the same time he started to study art in a serious way, coming to the local art school here.

Evan Walters's most important early painting

was a portrait of Winifred Coombe Tennant,

a key patron on the Welsh art scene in the 1920s and '30s.

She was a great supporter of Walters and many other Welsh painters.

Now, this is a very striking composition,

-and very architectural, I think.

-Yes.

But bold marks across the canvas, bold rhythms, sliced in half.

Where would he have got those ideas from?

He was always an adventurous artist, there's no doubt about that,

but he would have got some of these ideas, I'm convinced,

from looking at the artists of the past as well

and taking what he could from them, certainly someone like

Singer Sargent, who was one of his tutors at the Royal Academy School.

Also...you're quite right, the architectural parts of this,

the dominoes there, which echo the shape of the corner there,

the chair which has cut through the frame there,

and the little table at the top.

This is a extremely well composed and, as you say, dramatic painting.

'While Evan Walters earned his living painting the wealthy and influential,

'his most lasting work were three extraordinary portraits of Welsh miners.

'Painted during and just after the General Strike of 1926,

'they are very rare images of working-class life

'and almost unique in the annals of British art at the time.'

-What we've got here is a real person, isn't it?

-Indeed.

I mean, this is not some kind of idealised collier

or a noble human being, this is a real human being.

It is, and we know who it is, it's a man called William Hopkin.

He was distantly related to Evan Walters and also a friend,

lived very close to the father's pub so they knew each other really well.

So I think this is partly why this is such a powerful painting.

And it was painted during the 1926 Lockout,

when this guy probably wasn't earning any money at all.

Probably none at all. He looks thin, he doesn't look very well.

There's a fierceness in his eyes, which the local press commented on

when this painting was exhibited first of all, at the Eisteddfod.

-This is completely different.

-It is indeed.

This is a painting of a collier who is at work, it's the end of a shift.

Yes. Again this man was known to Walters.

The difference is, if you notice, really, is the facial expression.

This is much more relaxed, he is slightly chubbier in the face.

He's a handsome man, a bit of a Jack the Lad type almost, isn't he?

Wonderfully big strong hands of the miners,

probably used to cutting out anthracite.

And full of detail, I mean, look at his pink lips.

You'd have to see miners to know that when they came up from the pit

the only bit of them, apart from the whites of their eyes,

that wasn't black were their lips, because they licked their lips.

Now, if we look at this third portrait,

in many ways the most intriguing of them, I think,

-it's such a thoughtful look this guy's got.

-Yeah.

Very different from the other two. It's a look almost of scepticism.

It is like a look of scepticism, and it's called The Convalescent Miner.

He certainly doesn't look well,

he's part of that 1926 General Strike, he's a locked-out miner.

He's sculpted the face so beautifully

that the technique is... absolutely brilliant.

The technique is wonderful.

This is very different to anything you'll see in 1926 in South Wales

or even in the UK as a whole.

These were unique portraits.

'After a successful London show in 1927,

'Walters became established as a portrait painter,

'but he was always a restless artist

'and in the 1930s

'began to experiment with the novel double image technique.

'It was unusual enough for newsreel companies to seek him out

'and this film clip,

'seen here for the first time in over 70 years, shows him at work.'

Looking round in the realm of art,

we encountered an artist who paints what he sees with both eyes.

Each of these overlapping images

represents what the artist would see with one eye closed.

The reason of course is that we look at things

with eyes that are in different positions.

Mr Evan Walters, the artist, demonstrates with an actual model.

He is painting exactly what he sees in relation to its background

and the experiment will reproduce on canvas

just what you would see if you held up your hand before your eyes and gazed at the wall beyond.

You would see two hands. Try it when you get home.

At the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, conservation officer Emma Fisher

is working on one of Walters's double image paintings.

Evan Walters started painting this double vision technique in the 1930s.

What was he trying to do, do you think,

and how did he actually create this technique?

The head looks like a very straightforward portrait almost,

but when you start looking around the painting you can see where

he's repeated the hand and another eye too,

so it gives an effect almost of movement.

It was possibly his response

to the experimentation that was going on in art at the time.

So this was Evan Walters's stab at modernism?

That's right, it possibly was.

How do you set about cleaning something as precious as this?

First of all you make an assessment of the condition of the painting,

to make sure it's safe to start cleaning.

What we use is a cotton wool swab and some saliva,

I roll it very gently over the painting.

The enzymes in saliva are very good at removing dirt.

If it was in somebody's home and they were smokers

then you do find that lots of tobacco's built up on the painting,

If you see, there's quite a bit of dirt there already.

You have to be careful you don't put that back in your mouth, do you?

That's right, you wouldn't want to put it back in again.

Walters's double image experiment wasn't a commercial success

and his reputation faded, but his earlier work had an important effect.

Evan Walters inspired a new generation of young Swansea painters

who chose to paint the working men and women that they saw around them.

One of them, a miner, Vincent Evans, painted this beautiful rendition

of miners underground notching timber to support the roof.

And it's clear that Vincent Evans knew about coal mining

because of the accurate detail in this picture.

Another Swansea student of the 1920s

was Archie Rhys Griffiths from Gorseinon.

His paintings of miners are sadder and more subdued than Vincent Evans'.

This isn't a surprise. They're painted in the Great Depression,

when there was mass unemployment in many parts of industrial Wales.

These were tough times for artists as well

and there were few people who wanted to buy paintings like this.

The story of Archie Rhys Griffiths is a sad one.

He suffered from depression and alcoholism.

Despite early promise, he stopped painting by the end of the 1930s,

dying in obscurity and leaving behind only a few paintings

to show what he could have achieved.

If the career of Archie Rhys Griffiths was stifled by the hard times of the 1930s,

one of his contemporaries from Swansea School of Art

took a different route and went on to great success.

Ceri Richards was born here at Dunvant, near Swansea.

He was to become the most successful Welsh artist of the 20th century.

His father was a tinplate worker

but also a playwright and founder and conductor of the choir at this chapel.

Ceri Richards, brought up in this highly cultured working-class family,

was an accomplished musician as well as an artist.

In 1969, near the end of his life, Ceri Richards was interviewed for television about his early days.

I used to go to a local person in Swansea who held painting classes

when I was quite young

and I copied all the most difficult reproductions,

but I'd no idea what the professional training of an artist meant.

I was told to go and see the principal of the local art school,

who I knew nothing about, and I was accepted for the local art school.

But for the young Ceri Richards,

studying in Swansea in the 1920s with no television or art magazines,

seeing the latest paintings wasn't easy.

However, in Wales there was one source of matchless modern art.

This is the collection of Impressionist paintings

bought by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, the granddaughters of a wealthy coal owner.

The collection is now here at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff

but when Ceri Richards saw it in 1923 it was at their home in Gregynog

and it changed forever the way in which he saw the world.

They had assembled part of their collection which contained the Impressionists.

The world I thought was a fixed, static thing

but all the interpretations were very different,

so that 50 artists would produce 50 reactions to the same sort of situation.

This is what I was interested in, actually, I had never thought about it in those terms before.

The Impressionists fed the young Ceri Richards' imagination.

After leaving Swansea he went to the Royal College of Art in London.

By the early 1930s

he was one of Britain's most experimental young artists.

Ceri Richards' son-in-law is the leading art critic Mel Gooding.

At the family home, he showed me some of Richards' daring early works.

Mel, this is the very epitome of modernism.

How did a boy from just west of Swansea get to paint like this?

Well, the painting dates from 1933.

Ceri would be just 30 years old,

he was about six or seven years out of the Royal College

and he was working as a commercial artist at the time,

drawings and things like that for... advertising agencies and so on.

So this was work done when he could find time to do it.

It's a picture of his wife, pregnant with their first daughter,

and in a way that in itself is a kind of slightly shocking thing

that could only have been done

by somebody who was aware of certain currents in modern painting.

Now, he'd come to a knowledge of those things

to some extent at the Royal College, where he'd been introduced to

the work of Picasso, of...Matisse.

It's Ceri's awareness of European painting that made him distinctive.

-This was painted and constructed three years after the nude.

-Yes.

What was he working at here, how did he develop to this stage?

Well, this is 1936, which is the year

of the great International Surrealist Exhibition in London.

Ceri had been deeply interested in surrealism from the early '30s.

This is called The Sculptor And His Model.

What makes it surrealist, I suppose,

is that its theme is about the male and the female

and the different ways in which the male and the female

define the world through their own experience.

The female here, whose...

you know, her breasts wittily suggested by vacancies,

a darkness and a void, where fullness might be expected.

It's clearly very voluptuous, and, you know,

there's a great deal of sex, shall we say,

in his rendering of the female form here.

The sculptor...

is represented by a much more kind of mathematical,

much more angular...kind of... shapes and forms.

I think, without question,

it's one of the great masterpieces of surrealism, European surrealism,

and one of the few great masterpieces of surrealism

actually produced in this country, in these islands.

Ceri Richards wasn't the only artist in Wales inspired by modern art.

Cedric Morris, also from Swansea,

painted this wicked Expressionist portrait

of upper-class art lovers Frances and Caroline Byng-Stamper.

Privately he called it The English Upper Classes.

The sisters were far from amused.

Graham Sutherland had been a struggling artist

in the London of the early 1930s.

In 1934 he came to Pembrokeshire

and turned the county's winding lanes into a surreal dreamscape.

By the late 1930s, the shadow of war was looming.

With their jagged forms and darkening skies,

both Sutherland and Richards' work reflect the anxieties of the time.

A painting in the Richards family collection,

while on the surface a still life, seems to me full of foreboding.

Now, this is 1938.

The painting is much darker.

It seems to be about dreams and about...

maybe...it reminds me of war.

There's a lot of violence in this painting, and I think there was

a lot of violence in a lot of art just about this time, '38, '39.

It's the period that was described by Churchill, if you remember,

after the war as the gathering storm.

It's a painting which reflects the mood of the period.

As in the First World War, so after 1939

artists like Ceri Richards were recruited to record the war effort.

He came back to Wales to the same tinplate factory in Gowerton where his father had worked.

His drawings are surrealist images,

with strong-handed workers enveloped in the swirling smoke of the factory.

When you went in there from outside, you couldn't see very much.

And they worked in a perpetual sort of gloom.

This is what I got as well, the heat.

Well, it wasn't so... it WAS very, very hot,

but not like in a steelworks.

I mean, it was...this ballet

between the four or five people...

..involved in this rolling to the required lengths and cutting.

AIR-RAID SIREN BLARES

The horror of war was witnessed close to home

when the centre of Swansea was destroyed by German bombs in 1941.

Swansea School of Art graduate Will Evans

ventured out into the smouldering ruins to record the devastation.

His paintings aren't only powerful works of art

but also some of the best documentary evidence

we have of the Swansea Blitz.

But, as we'll see in the next programme,

out of the ashes of war grew a new generation of painters and sculptors

inspired by refugee artists who escaped fascism to come to work in Wales.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail [email protected]