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Thursday 4 December 2008

‘Seeing by doing’

William Feaver explains how his book ‘Pitmen Painters’ inspired a new play at the National

Having showed them her Mondrian, her Courbet, her Henry Moores and Ben Nicholsons, she arranged for them to go to London one weekend at her expense. For most of them this was their first time in London; for some their first time south of the Tyne. They were shown round the Chinese exhibition at the Royal Academy, taken to the exemplary new Larkhall housing estate and the Tate, and ended up with tea and madrigals at the Hampstead home of a Tate curator, Jim Ede.

Invited to broadcast and hailed as vanguard, if not fifth-column, working-men artists, the class evolved into the Group. Inevitably (this being the late Thirties) they attracted Tom Harrisson and his Mass Observation outfit, reporting on ‘ordinary’ lives. Pigeonholed ‘unprofessional painters’, they became the focus of exhibitions and debates. During the war, when the idea of an Arts Council developed, they were picked on as model recipients of cultural provision. Robert Lyon, meanwhile, completed an MA thesis on ‘The Appreciation of Art through the Visual and Practical Approach’ and went off to run Edinburgh College of Art. Left to their own devices the Group decided that they could do without Arts Council patronage and exemplar status. By the end of the war they had their own hut in Ashington and a set of rules, among which (‘3g’) was the establishment of ‘a representative and permanent collection of members’ works of art’. That collection filled the hut.

When I met them they were still meeting on Monday nights to comment on new paintings (they tried sculpture and abstraction) and to look at slides made by Oliver Kilbourn, everything from Lascaux to Bridget Riley. We made a film, directed by Tristram Powell; someone in the Chinese Embassy saw it on the BBC and in 1980 the permanent collection went to China for showing in the Beijing Art Gallery and in Shansi and Liaoning provinces. The paintings were also exhibited in Berlin as Englische Arbeiterkunst.

In 1983 the National Coal Board decided to increase the ground rent for the hut from ten bob a year to a more imposing amount. The last surviving group members decided not to continue and the hut was dismantled shortly before the miners’ strike and the end of Ashington as a live mining community.

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