Swansea University Art Collection

Figure against Dark Sky by Josef Herman

Polish-born artist Josef Herman was renowned for capturing the essence of the British working classes, making a distinct contribution to the artistic scene in Britain from his arrival in 1940. Herman left his native Warsaw for Brussels in 1938, to escape oppressive political conditions in Poland. He subsequently fled to Paris and then to Britain in 1940, arriving in Glasgow. In 1943 he moved to London, where he exhibited with L S Lowry, moving again in 1944 to the Welsh mining village of Ystradgynlais, where the local mining community would inspire his subsequent paintings. His transcendent images of coal miners, fishermen and farm workers from Wales, Scotland and Suffolk represented the dignity of ordinary people and a reverence for the quiet beauty in everyday life. 

  Herman's central theme was working men: the eternal ritual of labour. Although his brushwork was always broad, paying little attention to detail, he captured the essence of his sitters, the sacred ritual of work, and by concentrating on a single figure, he gave it what he called an "essence of all to capture the universal in the particular - the frieze of life".