THE JOURNALS – JOSEF HERMAN
THE JOURNALS
Josef Herman
Hardback, February 2003
£25, 304pp 50 b&w illus. 8pp colour, 1 870015 81 9
The Journals begin in 1948 in Ystradgynlais, the Welsh mining village that
Josef Herman loved, and which he made his home for more than a decade,
finding there what he needed to express himself as a painter. He arrived in
the Swansea Valley at the end of a journey which began in Warsaw where he
was born in 1911. His passion for art and an awareness of the prevailing
anti-Semitism took him to Brussels where he studied his beloved Flemish
masters. But, with the Nazi invasion he escaped to France, ending up finally
in an internment camp in Scotland. In these Journals we read how he
discovered the fate of his family and of his subsequent and enduring
anguish.
Josef Herman’s years in Wales coincided with him establishing his
reputation – a fact barely reflected in the Journals. Instead we see the
very private preoccupations of a man and an artist, always drawing and
painting, thinking about what he wants to express, how to achieve it, how to
strip away anything not essential. These are, above all, an artist’s
Journals: there is much discussion of painters he admired, Rembrandt,
Caravaggio, Goya, Cézanne, Permeke and Moreau, among others; of their
techniques; of the elements that make a good drawing; of colour and his
appreciation of pigment; of working methods; of the role of place – Wales,
Suffolk, Corfu, Mexico – and the role of memory and the imagination. We
live with his anxieties about a certain painting and watch him struggle to
find the right expression for it, always working and reworking.
Although there are gaps in the Journals these prove irrelevant as we are
drawn in to Josef Herman’s private world – family, friends, literature,
music, politics and the art world break in, but much less than his friends
might have expected. Outwardly a gregarious man and a lover of good
conversation, it would seem from these Journals that he lived almost
entirely for his work, and his growing desire to isolate himself expresses
itself more and more strongly towards the end of his life. But not quite
entirely – ever the observer of the world around him he writes, ‘…the
moment of life matters. Life is the centre, not art.’
Josef Herman died on 19 February 2000.
