INTERACTIONS: MARTIN BLOCH & JOSEF HERMAN PETER ROSSITER
DATE October 2023 SOURCE Courtesy of the Author
Interactions: Martin Bloch & Josef Herman Peter Rossiter
The two artists first met in 1943. Martin’s brother-in-law, the art restoration expert Helmut Ruhemann, had made the introductions, suggesting they had “something in common”. Josef knew of Martin’s work and reputation before this. His flight from native Poland brought him to Britain in 1940 where the authorities eventually directed him to Glasgow. There he found friendship, support and encouragement from the sculptor Benno Schotz. Josef assisted Schotz in mounting the Jewish Art Exhibition at The Glasgow Jewish Institute which ran from December 1942 to January 1943. The catalogue indicates that Martin exhibited two works in this exhibition: a London street scene titled The Red Lion, Barnes which was painted in February 1939; and “a Self Portrait”.
Martin Bloch, The Red Lion, Barnes © 2005 Peter Mennim 2005 Peter Mennim
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Red Lion, Barnes Ostensibly a portrait of a quiet London backwater, the painting is full of the idiosyncratic street furniture and rich colour combinations which Martin loved, but it is also a picture which works on a symbolic level. In February 1939 war, although not declared until September, felt imminent. Gas masks were issued and to counteract rising levels of anxiety, the people were encouraged by propaganda to trust once again the strength and power of Britain and her Empire. 1 One of the prime images used to rally these emotions was the lion. The Red Lion (albeit in this case of plaster or concrete, and painted a striking red), stands proudly on the rooftop, a symbol of national identity, of power and strength, and of protection. “…for a time the townscape, corners of London, completely captivated his attention.” (Martin Bloch by Josef Herman, Jewish Quarterly, Spring 1954) Self Portrait It can be said Josef first “met” Martin in the form of his self portrait at the Glasgow Art Exhibition, not knowing that he would soon leave Scotland, meet the artist in person, and find in him a friend and ally in his attempt to make his own mark on the London art scene. Unfortunately the catalogue only gives a simple description “Self Portrait” without dimensions - so the painting exhibited in Glasgow could have been either Self Portrait with a Pipe (1926), or Self Portrait with a Red Cap recently completed in 1942.
Already in 1934 Winston Churchill had told Parliament, "We must expect that, under the pressure of continuous attack upon London, at least three or four million people would be driven out into the open country around the metropolis". In 1938 panic during the Munich Crisis resulted in the migration of 150,000 people to Wales, reinforcing official fears of social chaos.
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So far, I have not been able to find any images of the exhibition and in the absence of further evidence, it seems more probable that the 1926 Self Portrait with a Pipe was the one shown in Glasgow. There are other records of this painting being shown during Martin’s lifetime, whereas the Red Cap painting, a more private work, was apparently exhibited only after his death. The 1926 self portrait shows a figure rendered with restrained tonality, suggesting serious thought. The artist has been looking in a mirror but if there was simply a mirror reflection involved then his eyes would meet ours, instead his deeply dilated pupils are caught looking away - like one of those moments when you momentarily catch a glimpse of yourself before you realise who you are looking at. The pipe is caught out of the mouth, so no hiding in a consoling suck, or cloud of smoke. A band of light strikes the bridge of the nose which gives the face its mask-like appearance but beneath that there is an almost childlike sensitivity or vulnerability. The Self Portrait with a Red Cap was painted in 1942, so it could have been completed in time to be shown at Glasgow in December. It is the only self portrait the artist produced whilst living in Britain but it is certainly not the only time he depicted himself in his paintings. One way of reading The Self Portrait with a Red Cap is to see it as belonging to (or even the summation of) a sequence of autobiographical self-analytical images: The Calendars 1934, Miracle in the Internment Camp 1941, Dream of the Dragon 1941 and The Burden 1941. 2 These paintings form a group of works, a kind of diary of the artist’s mental states, depicting himself going through the experiences such as being interned as an ‘enemy alien”, and surviving being “bombed out” during the Blitz. The Red Hat self image is at first glance a less serious work than the 1926 self portrait; there is a slight suggestion of a smile around the lips and a touch of comedy in the balancing of the whole composition which uses the disproportionately large red shape of the hat to justify the off-centred head. The space thus created on the left contrasts wonderfully with the other busier side of the canvass. If you imagine a line drawn vertically down through the centre you can see how well the work is divided between "noise and silence".
The Burden 1941 (a special note on this work, as it no longer survives – very possibly one of the canvasses lost in the 1942 air raid) The subject is a cast iron Victorian or Edwardian umbrella stand which stood, usually filled with twigs, beside the fireplace in the Camden Hill Rd house which Martin and Lotte occupied as house-sitters during 1941; the stand was shaped in a pseudo classical form, depicting the figure of Atlas upon whose shoulders rests the whole world. There are a number of drawings from this time both of the fireplace on its own, with a fire burning in the grate, and also studies of the Atlas figure. The mood is sombre and contemplative and their style very similar to the series of drawings done as an internee. Residual feelings from both bombing and the experience of internment remain present in the painted works throughout the 1940's. Another factor which should not be missed is that this painting is a record of the winter of 1941, the bleakest period of the war and indeed coldest winter of the century, with a blackout every night, and virtually everything rationed. “How precious it was just to have enough fuel for a fire" (Barbara, the artist’s daughter).
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But Martin’s choice of a red hat that so strongly suggestive of the Phrygian bonnet presents all sorts of deeper resonances. In Ancient Rome, the pileus, the original variant, was worn by former slaves who had been emancipated by their master and thus became considered citizens. Martin’s failure to have his British citizenship completed before June 1940 resulted in his being rounded up as an “enemy alien” and interned on the Isle of Man. Two years later, he would still be reflecting that if he had been able to swear allegiance and sign the papers in time, none of that would have happened to him. And, the French Revolution of course made the Phrygian cap a modern political icon: adopted by the revolutionaries as “the red cap of liberty”, it remained associated thereafter with France’s national allegorical figure of Liberté. Here it echoes Bloch's general respect for the peasant and the worker and his identification with all those that are set apart and mark themselves out as misfits in "normally" dressed society. More particularly, the plight of Jews in France had changed totally in the Summer of 1942, 3 even before the German army occupied the Vichy “Free zone” in November, on the eve of Glasgow exhibition. If Red Cap was indeed the Bloch self portrait displayed in the Glasgow exhibition, it presents us with a further, extraordinary coincidence: Josef Herman, before leaving Poland in 1938, was a member of “The Phrygian Bonnet”, a realist/expressionist pro-communist group deeply concerned about the plight of the working man. 4 In the final analysis the Self Portrait with a Red Hat remains an enigmatic painting. We cannot be sure whether Martin is thinking of himself, of the plight of the Jews, or of the French people as a whole and his love of France. France was a country he admired and loved. In 1914 he had been a student in Paris and met with the pupils of Matisse; Martin spoke French and he visited France several times later in his life, particularly the two last summers before the war started, when he made painting trips to Normandy and Brittany. ___________________ In 1942 and 1943 both artists learned of family deaths resulting from the holocaust. Martin’s mother died in Theresienstadt in January 1943 and in the previous summer Josef heard through the Red Cross that his entire family had perished in the Warsaw Ghetto. Not only did the two artists have this painful experience of personal loss in common, they also shared similar outlooks on creating art and being an artist. But there were also obvious differences: Martin was 28 years older, and he consistently made teaching art an important part "The scenes of terror and despair that took place across France as Jews were rounded up for deportation in JulyAugust also marked a turning point in French public opinion. Before, anti-Jewish policies followed the law and could be tolerated, or even approved, as one of the planks of Marshal Pétain's program of national revival" (Vichy France and the Jews, Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton, NY 1981, p.270) 4 I discovered this only well after Josef’s death, otherwise it would certainly have been a question when I interviewed him on his memories of Martin 3
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of his life, whereas Josef refused to take on a single pupil. Martin’s family home was in Nysa, then Neisse in German Silesia, and he received a typical German Jesuit education. He came from a prosperous middleclass background; indeed, his father was an employer of workers, as he owned a lace-making factory. In contrast Josef’s father was a self-employed cobbler, and Josef remained much closer to his Jewish/Yiddish roots. Both artists had strong left-wing sympathies, they were very literate, spoke several languages, they both had an independent bent of mind. Martin fled persecution in Nazi Germany, between June and September 1934 he was given shelter in Denmark and was eventually granted the right to come to Britain as a refugee on the 12th September. His first London address was 130 Ebury Street, where he shared studio space with Roy de Maistre. Thereafter he lived at various addresses in Southwest and West London, and immediately found subject matter for his drawings and paintings, depicting the streets of Victoria, Kensington and Hammersmith, or Barnes. His sketching trips ranged along the Thames beyond Chiswick. He was also attracted to West End subjects, such as ‘All Souls and the BBC’ and ‘Air Street’. 5 As already noted, Martin was rounded up with other “enemy aliens” and spent more than six months in internment camps, first in Huyton and then on the Isle of Man. Josef with his Polish nationality was not subjected to this treatment. After his release from internment in January 1941, fears of espionage and other wartime restrictions meant it was no longer possible for Martin to continue his usual practice of standing in the street drawing whatever he chose. As part of the war effort everyone was made useful and Martin became a fire-watcher on the roofs of Kensington but he was also permitted to work as a war artist, recording bomb damage. This resulted in a group of wartime works showing buildings close to where he was living in West London and also destruction in the City of London. Several drawings from this time bear on their reverse the indelible blue ink stamp of the censor. During the Blitz, Martin was forced to move three times due to bomb damage; in one incident he almost lost all his paintings, and they had to be rescued from an upper floor. Two paintings from this period that I have not been able to trace were probably destroyed at this time. When Josef and his recent bride Catriona moved to London in February 1943, they were very lucky to find a purpose-built studio on the top floor of Alma Studios, Stratford Rd. It was a short walking distance from where Martin was living at that time in Campden Hill Rd. Josef came to London because he had been offered a Bond Street exhibition with Reid and Lefevre. He was given gallery space with L S Lowry who was then also a new “name”. The works Josef exhibited were based on memories of his Jewish / Yiddish cultural background, mostly drawings and some gouaches.
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Another lost painting, for which sketches survive (Martin Bloch Trust)
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Monica Bohm-Duchen’s biography of Herman describes Josef’s experience of London: his mixed feelings and his unsettled mind (Chapter 4 “Dead as Ashes”). It seems Josef found it difficult to get a foothold in the London art scene. He also didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a kind of Yiddish graphic-story teller. A spontaneous decision to leave the city for a trip to Wales with Catriona ends up, by chance, in their spending the next 11 years in Ystradgynlais, where Josef begins first to draw and then to paint coal miners. Martin was once again looking for a place to live, so when Josef decided to quit London for good, he handed over the lease of 3 Alma Studios to his friend. It offered rather cramped accommodation for Martin and his wife Lotte, with all the Biedermeier furniture they had rescued from Berlin, but the main studio room on the other side of the flat was large enough to take on small groups of private pupils. The location was in many ways ideal for Martin. He moved in on 10th November 1944 and lived there until his death ten years later. The view looking up towards Kensington High Street was a subject for several drawings and a late painting. Students were taught to develop their own self confidence, the use of colour theory, how to work in oils and also regularly practiced drawing from the nude with live models, predominantly female. The high north-facing windows gave ample natural light and were not overlooked.
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Still Life with Oriental Figure Caryl Roese whose mother was actually the Hermans’ housekeeper at Ystradgynlais remembers seeing the Buddha, Bull and Lion figures on Josef’s mantelpiece and that they belonged to Catriona. Caryl was also able to identify the long-shaped object at the bottom of the mantlepiece: a tool which was used to open and close the fire door; so this confirms the location conclusively. With regard to date, a greeting card sent by Martin to close friend and colleague Jutta Rhor dated December 1945 also depicts the three figures. It was never in Martin’s working method to draw from memory: for him drawing was to draw from life, from what he could actually see. In this his work was totally different from Josef, who up until his move to Wales drew largely from his memories and imagination. It would seem then, that the first drawing of the mantlepiece items would date from around December 1945 and the work would have been painted in 1946. Technically the painting reveals a relationship between Martin and Josef’s method: Martin delineates his forms with strong outlines, and uses rich earthy pigments like burnt umber or yellow ochre, and builds up the paint surface in layers, working from a light ground with darker semi-transparent washes – these techniques all clearly influenced Josef. Josef lists in his autobiography some of the artists that inspired and influenced him: “the modern Flemish Expressionists”, with their inheritance from “Brueghel and the Dutch Rembrandt“, he goes on to acknowledge indebtedness to Rouault “and the early works of Gromaire”. 6 Josef describes all these artists as “ the soil for my ‘family tree’”. With the coincidence of both place and time, 7 I would like to suggest that Martin’s example could also have been acknowledged here - to use Josef’s poetical language, one might say that Martin’s example “watered the soil”. _____________________
In February 1949 Josef and Martin exhibited together in a joint exhibition in the Ben Uri Gallery. Martin’s section of the exhibition comprised of 16 oil paintings, covering a wide variety of subjects and forty drawings, half of which depicted scenes from a recent trip to America. Both artists received equal billing in the exhibition title ‘Martin Bloch and Josef Herman’, despite the fact that a greater proportion of the wall space was devoted to Martin’s Marcel Gromaire 1872-1971, a French painter. He painted many works on social subjects and is often associated with Social Realism, but can be said to have created an independent oeuvre distinct from groups and movements. 7 It was not until 1946 that I returned to painting in oils”, Josef Herman, Related Twilights p.94 6
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paintings. Josef said he was painting in oils from 1946 onwards, so why were none of his works in this medium exhibited? I do not know whether this decision was made by the Ben Uri Gallery or if it was the result of an agreement between the two artists. The older artist had just recently returned from a lecture tour in the United States and teaching appointment at the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis. His previous London exhibition in the beginning of 1939 had not been a great success and was greatly eclipsed by the advent of war. His search for a wider following across the Atlantic had also failed to meet up to expectations. Generally it is hard for artists to gain recognition and make a name for themselves; in 1940’s London it seems to have been particularly difficult. Martin’s hope for appreciation from abroad was not unreasonable but he did not have the drive and type of self promoting demeanour that America, or even Britain required. Josef was better equipped when it came to this aspect of being an artist, he had a personality better suited to the job.
Included in the Ben Uri exhibition was a Bloch work labelled, ‘lent by Josef Herman’: House with Figureheads (1936). This painting was first shown in Martin’s 1939 London exhibition, and it was also one of the 12 paintings which Martin was to take with him to exhibit in the USA, being then shipped back from Minneapolis with the other unsold works. Josef must have acquired it in late 1948 or early 1949. He loved the painting with its air of mystery, the rich dark tones, and the non-academic drawing style of the figures and cars. 8
Adorned with numerous carved and painted ship figureheads which almost swamp the building, the house was a visual curiosity, 8 and a ready-made Bloch subject. The picture links with other sculptural/architectural Bloch paintings but it also provided an early opportunity to see the artist’s response to the unique quality of London light. The street scene with its caricature cars and policeman, the house: everything in the picture is understated to give emphasis to the evocation of atmosphere. Martin’s predilection for the quiet backwaters and quirky details of the urban scene, suggest he shared Walter Benjamin's belief that "the marginalia of the city carry the most important clues for its decipherment" 9. The city needs to be learned, caught and studied in much the same fashion as a sitter for a portrait whose character is illuminated by deep psychological understanding. In the spirit of Benjamin’s radio programmes, 10 which Martin probably heard before leaving Berlin, the cityscape is as if experienced through the eyes and mind of a child. Martin’s painting with its low angle of vision, with the naively drawn pedestrians and cars and with this feeling of the surprise of turning a new corner and finding a new vista certainly suggests a very Benjaminesque perception: the roving eye discovering unexpected delights. Three other Bloch paintings in the Ben Uri exhibition were of North Welsh subjects: Bangor at Nightfall, Bethesda Quarrymen and Caernarvonshire Slate Heaps. Martin travelled to Bangor in 1947 and/or 48 (the exact chronology is a bit confusing here) to visit a friend who lived in Bangor, a Professor Dodd (whom I’ve not been able to trace). Bethesda is about six miles south. The paintings’ titles with specifically named locations seem to draw attention to the fact that the artist was working in a different field from Josef’s South Wales coal miners. In the exhibition catalogue the viewer is told, “Since 1944 Josef Herman has been living in the Welsh mining village of Ystradgynlais”. Josef showed 23 graphic works: 10 in pastels, and 13 in pen and ink. More than half of Josef’s works depicted Ystradgynlais coal miners. Josef loved the Welsh landscape and the village itself but it was really in the people that he found the greatest inspiration, he famously saw miners as “walking monuments to labour”. With this act of iconisation Josef hit on a rich vein of imagery which would sustain him for 11 years and continue well after he left Wales. To such an extent that for many people, Herman = Miners. This in turn has maybe led to a blurring of an important distinction between Martin’s slate quarrymen and Josef’s coal miners. A look at the history of the two industries reveals crucial differences. Penrhyn Quarry at Bethesda was privately owned, the site of a brutal suppression of the unions, an infamous year-long strike, the scars of which were still felt in the community and recognised nationally. The slate industry was in decline, there were no new jobs in slate quarrying. In the Unfortunately, it is now demolished; originally it belonged to a dealer in antique nautical curiosities See Graeme Gilloch, Benjamin and the City, 1995. 10 On Radio Berlin from 1927 to 1933: aimed at ‘children and adults with enquiring minds’ 8 9
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past there had been troops brought in, a protest march to Bangor, starving families, a three-year strike, struggles with strike-breakers, deep resentment and divisions. There was a massive divide between the English-speaking owners and the indigenous Welsh working families, who in the eyes of many were virtually treated like slaves. 11 On the other hand, coal mining had a very different image, particularly after Clement Attlee’s Labour government nationalised the industry in 1947. On 1 January 1947 a notice was posted at every colliery in the country which read, "This colliery is now managed by the National Coal Board on behalf of the people". Coal had been a crucial part of the war effort, 10% of young men reaching draft age to enter the forces were sent down the mines to become “Bevan’s Boys”. The industry relied on workers drawn from all over the country and the commonwealth and it was expanding: between 1947 and 1956, the NCB spent more than £550 million on major improvements.
The Festival of Britain exhibition, 60 for ‘51 Martin felt honoured when invited to participate in this exhibition: a selection of 60 artists working in Britain to be shown at the South Bank in 1951 and then to travel round the country. He appreciated it was a chance to achieve further recognition but it was also quite daunting. There was an attempt to set format 12 rather inimical to Martin’s natural working processes. Normally to create a work he would first familiarise himself with the subject, drawing directly from life. Back in the studio he would work with the drawings making more drawings, often returning to the subject several times before deciding on the final structures of the image but at the same time striving to maintain the first flash of inspiration which had prompted the initial reaction to the scene. It would be at this point, often using a squared-up drawing that he would know the proportions of the canvas. Very different from filling a preordained space. According to Stephen Andrews, Martin’s pupil and friend, it was Josef Herman who suggested that Martin should adopt a Welsh subject; and as already noted at the Ben Uri exhibition two years earlier, Bloch had recently started drawing and painting Bethesda quarrymen. Martin’s paintings depict the daily event when at the end of work the quarrymen make their way home, a 50-minute walk downhill from the Penrhyn quarry to enter Bethesda over the Afon Ogwen bridge.
The first Baron Penrhyn, Richard Pennant, was a slave owner, anti-abolitionist MP and Irish peer. The fortune gained from slave plantations in Jamaica was crucial to his development of the slate industry and building Penrhyn Castle. 12 "not less than 45 by 60 inches"; I have come across a suggestion that the organisers actually supplied 4ft by 6ft canvasses – in any event, those were the actual dimensions of Martin’s work and that of two other artists. 11
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Down from Bethesda (1951) A comparison with the earlier works shows the same motif but in the 1951 painting the mood has darkened, the palette is now built around a reduced grouping of pigments and tonalities, and the returning quarrymen are drawn with a greater sensitivity and individuality. The sun, setting in the west, now colours a back-lit sky and is reflected in a dull orange on the surface of the road-bridge, whereas before it shone more brightly along the parapets. The distinctive shapes of the coal waste heaps dominate the horizon and the waters of the river Ogwen is coloured by iron oxides and water weeds. It was a revelation in 2007 to stand on the spot where Martin drew his studies for this painting: I found not only the same strange colours in the river, but even the stump of the tree which appears on the left side of the painting. 1951 was the 50th anniversary of the quarrymen’s strikes. It is hard to say to what extent Josef, with his strong socialist beliefs, influenced Martin in the choice of a subject with such resonances; Josef was the more outspokenly left-wing thinker of the two, but it would seem both artists were consciously expressing a mutual resistance to current “taste”. Josef’s own painting for the 60 for ‘51 exhibition no longer exists, due to water damage and then being cut up. His painting depicted larger than life size figures, four miners and a woman, presumably a miner’s wife, holding a baby. The work had a powerful simplicity about it matched by the sharply delineated shape of a coal waste heap and the bald title: South Wales.
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As well as contributing to 60 for ‘51, Josef was given the commission to decorate the Pavilion of Minerals; here Josef embarked on the largest scale work of his lifetime, arguably reaching the apex of his career. Monica Bohm-Duchen reports, “To the end of his life, Herman would express his regret that he never again had a chance to work on a public project of this kind.”13 And she quotes from a very revealing journal entry dated July 1968: “I have no illusion about myself. I know I would have fulfilled myself better on a greater scale if I had been a mural painter and not an easel painter…. The real point about mural painting is its public significance and its monumental scale. My pictures are but a poor substitute. I sometimes think of the tiniest canvas as a large wall. In this spirit, I work happiest…. The only original picture, completely my own, that I ever painted, was the mural for the Festival of Britain.” In this definitive statement Josef underlines a fundamental difference between the two artists. To be a mural artist producing artwork on a grand scale, was inimical to Martin. His work speaks to the viewer on a one-to-one basis. He had no personal interest in making large public statements, the nearest he ever got a public project of this kind was to encourage his pupils at Camberwell to decorate the School canteen. The overall timbre of the 60 for ‘51 exhibition was in keeping with post war taste: congruent with a Britain that liked to idealise itself and preferred landscape to depict a kind of rural romanticism. 14 Josef depicts his miners not at work but as symbols or monuments to their work, in this sense he was as much a romantic as the other contributors. There were two other renderings of industrial landscapes among the contributors to 60 for ‘51: Blast Furnaces by Julian Trevelyan and Industrial Landscape, River Scene, by L.S. Lowry, neither artist approached their subject with any desire to be a social realist, and when considered beside these two, or anyone else in the exhibition, Martin’s depiction of the working man comes the closest to facing the truth.
Bloch and Miners Carol Roes whose father was a coal miner has told me how one day when Martin was staying with Josef, she took him to the Ystradgynlais mine and they went down together in a lift, each to make drawings of miners at work. This is reflected by several images in a late sketch book of Martin’s: a portrait of a miner, the coal face being worked, and miners resting after work. However, he never made paintings of the subject; this was very much Josef’s territory.
The Art and Life of Josef Herman, p101. “Romanticism was the most widely represented style in the Arts Council’s prestigious 60 for ‘51 at the Festival of Britain” Anne Massey, The Independent Group, Modernism and Mass Culture in Britain 1945-59.
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Moreover, in 1950 Martin had written, “The figure is part of the whole. The workman should not appear as a hero, he is part of his surroundings, of nature, of the work he is doing.” (Martin Bloch Reflections on painting, August 1950, Tate Archive).
The Bloch-Herman ‘dispute’ An article written by Josef for The Jewish Quarterly in Autumn 1963 acts as a kind of postscript to these interactions. Josef recounts events on a hot summer day in 1949 when the two artists go out together to do some sketching, which led to a heated argument, and eventually a rapprochement. It is a good story but a close examination of it reveals it to be implausible. Josef had a short temper; in the article he describes, and justifies his anger, saying how he got angry with Martin for diminishing the symbolic importance of the subject. To Josef waste heaps are symbols of oppression and exploitation, and he was intensely frustrated that Martin has turned his attention to the surrounding trees, bushes, and sky, making the subject a thing of beauty: “I hurriedly looked at the motif and the drawing Martin had almost completed, and flared up! Here in front of me was a landscape with all the suggestions of a bleak existence………What are all these bright coloured shapes in aid of? What sense is there in a tiny blue tip sitting passively against a yellow sky? Doesn’t he know the meaning of a tip?” 15 It would seem Josef has conflated two different events. The text, written in 1963, fourteen years after that hot summer’s day, more probably reflects Josef’s reaction to a painting by Martin of a North Wales slate heap – indeed, the same painting which had been exhibited in their joint Ben Uri exhibition in 1949. 16 It is very unlikely that Josef could ever have seen Martin drawing the landscape from life with colour as this was definitely not in Martin’s methodology at the time. From the mid 1930’s until death in 1954 Martin’s drawing practice included pencil, conté pastel, and occasionally pen or a biro - the colours that he saw he retained in his mind and then recreated his sensation in the studio. There are other reasons why this story does not ring true: if the location of the event Josef describes took place in South Wales then Martin’s drawing would have been of a coal waste tip, and anyway there were no trees or bushes anywhere near the colliery tips around Ystradgynlais in 1949.
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Martin Bloch A Memoir by Josef Herman, Jewish Quarterly 08/1963 See image in Annexe below
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Coal tip drawing by Martin Bloch c.1950 Drawings by Martin of coal waste tips from this period show a realistic and accurate account of what they looked like. Half of the eighteen paintings which Martin completed in the final seven years of his life depict Welsh subjects. Just one of them, the last, is of a South Wales subject: exhibited as “Welsh Village” it is actually of a view of Josef’s Ystradgynlais. The painting commemorates a recent visit to stay with Josef and Catriona in their house Penybont (house by the bridge), drawings for the painting can found in a sketchbook dated 1953. It shows a bridge over the river Tawe close to Josef and Catriona’s home.
Conclusion Although Josef and Martin had much in common, one of the most telling differences between them was that Josef was a much more prolific author, and indeed possessed an eye for publicity and self-promotion, which was a skill which Martin really lacked. Josef reluctance in admitting the influence of Martin on his work has obstructed our vision of some fascinating interrelationships. This continued after Martin’s death with the two Jewish Quarterly articles, and in a sense, still continues to this day. My hope is that this article will illuminate some hints of what has been consequentially obscured.
Peter Rossiter 14
Images annexed
Photo of Stephen, Josef and Martin with Down from Bethesda 1951.
Google earth image of Bethesda bridge showing the slate waste tips and their rounded tops still recognisably the same two mounds as in the 1951 painting.
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Martin Bloch, Slate Heaps in North Wales, 1948-51 (National Gallery of Wales, Cardiff)
Martin Bloch, Welsh Village, 1953 (Brecknock Museum and Art Gallery)
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Martin Bloch, Group of Miners (on display at Hays Castle Exhibition – ‘Josef Herman: Cymru Refugee Artists’)
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