The wandering artist – a Polish exile in Britain

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Darrelyn Gunzburg finds émigré art in Bristol at ‘Josef Herman: Warsaw, Brussels. Glasgow, London, 1938–1944’

Into every life a little luck should fall. In the case of Josef Herman (1911–2000) this happened in May 1940. Without it British art would have been the poorer and never known the work of the Polish-born Realist painter who influenced contemporary art by giving rank and status to the British working class and the Welsh miners.

Herman, or 'Joe Bach' as he was affectionately nicknamed by the Welsh, gained his fame and reputation after 1944 when he settled in Ystradgynlais, a mining community at the top of the Swansea Valley, where he lived for 11 years. Knowing this makes the current exhibition more remarkable, for all the exhibited pieces were produced in the six years and four cities in which Herman found himself before settling in Wales, when he was on the run from the persecution of the Nazis in Europe.

The works on show depict a side of Herman that is little known. Born in Warsaw, Poland, the eldest of three children from a poor Jewish family, Herman left school at the age of 12 to become an apprentice printer and then an artist. He attended the Warsaw School of Art 1930–32, and exhibited his first work in 1932. Surrounded by intensifying anti-Semitism, in 1938 Herman escaped to Brussels, where he continued to paint until May 1940 when the Nazis attacked Belgium.

Suddenly, Herman was one of two million refugees trudging the long road to France. He found safe passage by hitching a ride with an American tourist with the unlikely name of June Peach July, a woman who had been touring France in a small car when war broke out. Taking the back roads they reached the port of La Rochelle, bursting with people desperate to leave France.

Here it was that luck intervened in the form of Herman’s black leather coat. Mistaken for a Polish deserter, two military policemen bundled Herman onto a ship of Polish airforce men bound for Canada. They were diverted, by the threat of submarines, to Liverpool. Herman had never meant to come to Britain. He arrived, as he himself put it, ‘like a stranger, among strangers, in the night’, alighting at Liverpool in June 1940. Knowing no one and speaking no English, Herman was ordered by immigration to report to the Polish Consul in Glasgow. There he awaited further orders. They never appeared but the two and a half years he spent in that city, without threat of discrimination or fear of being exiled, allowed his art to flourish. This was followed by 18 months in London, and finally he found a whole new trajectory in Wales, from the summer of 1944 onwards.

So what we see in this exhibition, laid out over three rooms, becomes in hindsight insider information from an émigré, a painted ‘epistle’ created in wartime Britain but describing European decimation.  Herman’s entire family perished in the Holocaust and he never returned to Warsaw, yet his family, community, and Polish way of life live on in his images. In The Artist’s Grandmother (early 1940s), painted in black and brown ink on ochre-coloured paper, an old woman made wise by life gazes out at us, arms cradled, head covered in a shawl, next to a tall candle casting its light across space and time. The exquisite pen and wash series entitled ‘A Memory of Memories’ contain outlined figures half washed away, ghosts hovering on the edge of consciousness groping for substance.

This collection also shows how porous Herman was to the creative threads of the time. The immensely moving Mother and Child Fleeing (aka Memory of a Pogrom) c.1942 depicts a mother running through a blue landscape, her face alight with anguish, the sky alight with fire. She cradles her child in safe, large, Picasso-esque hands but the subject matter and the raw pain of the piece pinpoint it as uniquely Herman. His series of portraits of unidentified men, said to be of fellow refugees in Glasgow, are Impressionistic — a man with a blue beard also has multiple shades of blue hair; green/ochre/yellow/blue faces are alive with emotions — yet all are distinctly Herman. Colour, faces in suffering, and a family and community that have passed away produce great vibrancy. Curiously, as Sarah McDougall notes: ‘He never paints in this way again, never uses colour once he starts painting his Welsh paintings’.

The show as curated to coincide with the artist’s centenary year by Sarah MacDougall, the inaugural Eva Frankfurther Research and Curatorial Fellow for the study of Émigré Artists at Ben Uri, The London Jewish Museum of Art. It first opened in London in September 2011 and is currently on view at the Royal West of England Academy until 8 July 2012. This is the first of the Ben Uri’s exhibitions to be seen in Bristol. It is accompanied by a catalogue edited by MacDougall.

Ben Uri, as an art museum for everyone, continues to punch above its weight and this beautiful and affecting exhibition is a testimony to that fact.

Josef Herman – Warsaw, Brussels, Glasgow, London 1938–1945  edited by Sarah MacDougall is published by Ben Uri, 2011.