
The Letter, c. 1940
Selected Exhibition

50 Years
LONDON Cork Street
Polish born artist Josef Herman is perhaps best known for his transcendent images of coal miners, fishermen and farm workers from Wales, Scotland and Suffolk, capturing the dignity of ordinary people and a reverence for the quiet beauty in everyday life.
Born in Warsaw in 1911, into a poor family in the Jewish slum
area, eldest of three children, his formal education finished at
the age of 12. He was encouraged to study art, seeing that he had
real talent for drawing. Evening classes with Professor Slupski led
to being admitted in 1930 to the Warsaw School of Art and
Decoration which he could hardly afford and left after 18 months.
He continued drawing and painting in his spare time and in 1932 had
his first exhibition in Warsaw in a framers shop, showing mostly
large expressionistic watercolours featuring peasants in sombre
colours.
He has been shown extensively, abroad - in 1956 had a
retrospective in public galleries in Melbourne and Auckland. He was
shown on smaller scale in Switzerland, Germany and the USA - New
York hosted two exhibitions during the eighties. His work has been
displayed in many British Council group exhibitions all over the
world. He was awarded OBE for his services to British art in 1981,
in 1990 became a Royal Academician and in 1992 received the Silver
Medal for his services to Welsh Arts
In 2014 Herman was included in the group exhibition Refiguring the 50s at Ben Uri Gallery. The show examined the work of five figurative artists working in Britain in the 1950s, who each had a strong identification with the place in which they chose to live and work and which formed, for a significant part of their careers, the primary focus of their practice. For Herman, this was Ystradgynlais in South Wales with its indigenous mining community.