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Documentary, Visions of the Valleys
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00:00The Valleys of South Wales have a unique visual drama.
00:17I know of no other landscape where urban fingers press so deeply and closely into a wild, rugged upland.
00:30These valleys have inspired artists for more than two centuries.
00:36First, they were attracted by the natural wilderness, but soon it was industry that fueled their artistic imagination.
00:47Here was the cradle of the Industrial Revolution.
00:52An artist came here to record these extraordinary scenes.
01:00But artists didn't just portray the power of industry, they also showed the struggles of the people who worked within it.
01:16This was the world that I was born into and which formed me politically, as I became first a union official and then a local member of parliament and government minister.
01:34But this place also inspired me to go to art college and dream of following in the footsteps of these artists.
01:52I'm going to look at how artists have described the valleys for 250 years.
02:03But I also want to ask if they're trapped in a past so powerful that it's difficult to throw off.
02:10Very few artists describe the valleys as they are now.
02:15That story doesn't have the brutal romance of a coalfield racked with danger, disease, resilience and struggle.
02:26This isn't what you think of as the valleys, but this is what first drew artists here 250 years ago.
02:54This is the Vale of Neith with its wooded valleys and its waterfalls.
03:07It's a real beauty spot as it was in the late 18th century when artists journeyed hundreds of miles to come here and paint its unspoiled landscape.
03:21Industry was already present. There were iron works and foundries tucked into the valleys.
03:28But that wasn't what attracted artists. They came here for this wilderness.
03:34Towards the end of the 18th century artists did start travelling to the south of Wales valleys.
03:41Particularly in the 1790s one very famous artist came and that was of course Turner.
03:47So Turner came here from London. That must have been quite a journey.
03:51It was an epic journey in those days before trains. He travelled on horseback, on foot, by boat, carrying a large sketchbook, a small sketchbook, his painting box, his bag.
04:03He was a young man and he was a very intrepid spirit, very adventurous.
04:07And he set off in the summers on these trips that would last weeks.
04:11And if you think of it, these were places, they were uncharted territory for him.
04:15So in Turner's day, the valleys were a kind of frontier.
04:19You could say that. It was before the valleys had actually felt the full impact of the Industrial Revolution.
04:25But for him, I think it was the nature and this very awe-inspiring nature that drew him here, that inspired him.
04:34So this, this must have been the spot he painted this from.
04:37I would say that he painted this on this very spot, yes.
04:40Why would he have come here? He couldn't go to Europe.
04:43There was the French Revolutionary Wars in Europe, so artists couldn't travel to Europe.
04:47He'd studied at the Royal Academy from the age of 15.
04:50He was a landscape artist. He needed source material.
04:54If you were a young artist in London and wanted a wide range of landscapes, be it picturesque or wild and sublime like this,
05:03Wales was a good place for him to come.
05:06So for him, he was seeking maybe the extreme in nature, what we call the sublime landscape that fills you with awe,
05:13that fills you with fear and admiration at the same time.
05:16And I think under this thundering waterfall, he certainly would have found that.
05:20The waterfalls that inspired Turner also powered by the
05:23The waterfalls that inspired Turner, also powered by the
05:49The ironworks and foundries that were springing up around here.
05:53And as the 19th century dawned, artists became less concerned with the spectacle of nature,
05:59and more interested in the drama of industry.
06:02With skies blackened by smoke from the furnaces, artists weren't separate from these new industries, but also worked in them.
06:11Thomas Horner was a land surveyor who also painted the estates of the valley's iron masters.
06:18Two of his key works are kept in the National Museum in Cardiff.
06:22Beth, what have we got here?
06:24Well, we've got this rather extraordinary work by the artist Thomas Horner that came out of an album.
06:29And this page is actually hinged and would have actually in the book opened up to reveal this extraordinary image below.
06:38This wonderful vision of the Valley of Neath.
06:42As you can see, as well as depicting the landscape, we have this wonderful kind of orchestra of angels almost up in the sky.
06:48But at the same time as he was inventing these visions, he was also painting the new industry of the valleys.
07:08Yeah, so the book is actually a tour where you go through the valley, and as part of that tour, he visits some sites of industry.
07:17So again, we can compare that work with this work, which is further up, taken from Merthyr.
07:24And this is the Penny Darren Ironworks, very dramatically lit.
07:28And he's chosen to do it at night time so that he can accentuate all the fire and the industry and make it much more dramatic.
07:35So yeah, you can see really a progression from painting the landscape to actually artists becoming fascinated by the vibrancy of the industry that was happening.
07:44So you've got two landowners essentially commissioning Thomas Horner to paint what they're proud of.
07:51Somebody wanting to paint this beautiful Vale of Neath.
07:54And you've got another landowner who wanted to show off this cutting edge industry, the new blast furnaces and rolling mills.
08:02Yeah, so they're showing, you know, the land that they're developing in their houses, but they're also showing the industry and how they're making their money.
08:11The richest of the Iron Masters were the Crochet family.
08:23With the millions they made, the Crochets built this mansion, Kvartva Castle in Merthyr, to keep an eye on their empire.
08:32It still has the feeling of new money showing off its power to the neighbors and to the people who did the work for them.
08:45Generations of Crochets stared down from these walls.
08:50They were stern industrialists who ruled with a will of iron.
08:54But the most impressive paintings here are on a much less grand scale.
09:00What have we got here then?
09:16This is a watercolour of Covartva Ironworks by Penry Williams.
09:21It was commissioned by William Crochet II, the Iron Master, around about 1824-25 when the castle was built.
09:29A series of watercolours to be given as a birthday present to his second wife, Isabel Crochet.
09:34So you can see the ironworks here, all the work going on, the workers in the foreground as well, and the engine houses in the back.
09:43And this mass of smoke and flames going in here.
09:46Yeah, you can imagine the smog lighting up the sky and the smell.
09:50You just get a feeling of it from the painting itself.
09:53You must have been able to see Merthyr from many miles away.
09:56Yeah, miles away.
09:57When it was night time you would have been able to see big orange flames up in the night sky.
10:02So why would Crochet have wanted this to be painted?
10:06There's very few pictures done in the 1820s.
10:09Obviously this is before photography as well.
10:11I think it was to show off his wealth and his status really.
10:14He would have commissioned Penry Williams to do these and all of the others.
10:18That's right, because he'd spotted his talent early on.
10:21Penry Williams had been here with his father.
10:23His father was a painter and a stonemason.
10:26And Penry came along on one of his jobs and he was sketching one day.
10:31This is reputedly.
10:33And William Crochet II saw his talent and along with John Josiah Guest, Dowler Thighton Master,
10:40they both made sure that they patronised him to go to the Royal Academy to develop his skills further.
10:46Because they needed somebody, didn't they, to record these great works?
10:50Exactly, yeah.
10:51And this wealth and status that they had.
10:53Exactly.
10:54Local boy-made goods.
10:55Now this is one of the most famous images of the Industrial Revolution, isn't it?
10:59That's right.
11:00There's very rare images of actually the work going on inside one of these rolling mills.
11:05It's a very unique image and you can only imagine the heat, the noise, the smell as well.
11:10And the scale is huge, isn't it?
11:12Yeah.
11:13And you can actually see what the men are doing here.
11:15So Penry Williams, the artist, he must have been very familiar with the work that the men did.
11:21He probably would have been very friendly with them and known them as well because, I mean, he was from the poor side of the tracks, as they say.
11:29That's actually the castle in the background, looking down very imperiously towards the ironworks so that William Crawford could very easily see what was going on in the ironworks just down below.
11:41These workers must have been very pleased seeing that huge castle up there.
11:45It's really rubbing these people's noses in it.
11:48Yeah, I can imagine.
11:49There's this vast house which would cost millions to build now.
11:52All the money made out of this enterprise here, the labour of these people, would have looked up and seen this very, very grand house, one of the grandest houses in Wales.
12:02That's right.
12:03Lit up in the night.
12:04Yeah, exactly.
12:05When they were living in one up one down.
12:07Living in one up one down, working in very hard conditions.
12:11Crawshay and his fellow iron barons amassed huge wealth and created temples to industry.
12:32In the middle of another Penry Williams painting are the extraordinary boot ironworks in the Rumney Valley.
12:38An amazing building with chimneys inspired by the Dendera Temple of the Upper Nile.
12:44Just think, an Egyptian temple in the South Wales valleys.
12:57There's nothing left of the Egyptian extravaganza and many of the old ironworks are ruins now.
13:03Arches and towers that only hint at the power and noise they once generated.
13:10Tucked away in a scrapyard is an old factory that doesn't look much now, but was once an industrial marvel.
13:17By the middle of the 19th century, South Wales was fast becoming the engine room of Britain's Industrial Revolution.
13:34Ironworks and coal mines were springing up right across the valleys.
13:38It's difficult to imagine the scale of these works now.
13:45Only ruins remain.
13:47The Crawshay's tin plate works, just outside Trif Forest, is one of the most complete.
13:53It's still in the metal business, but selling scrap now.
13:56When it was built in 1835, it was the largest tin plate works in the world, supplying metal across the empire and also to the USA.
14:11Like the ironworks in Merthyr, it was recorded in popular prints, but there's one important thing missing from them.
14:18Being in this extraordinary building, you can see why artists were so attracted to the new industrial enterprises, the ironworks and the foundries and the tinworks.
14:34I mean, look at this picture, the drama of that light coming out of the blast furnaces in the night.
14:39The people, the men and women who made the wealth, they're very small, very difficult to see them.
14:47But there is one collection of paintings where you can actually see their faces.
14:56A series of remarkable portraits of the men who worked in the Trif Horace factory has recently come to light.
15:02These 16 tiny paintings, now at the National Museum in Cardiff, give us a glimpse of the early industrial workers.
15:12Beth, these are very unusual paintings, aren't they, from the mid-1830s?
15:17Yes, they're a wonderful group that we have. We have a selection here. There are, in fact, 16.
15:22And they're all paintings showing the workers of Francis Crawchet.
15:25And they're all shown in this very distinctive style, set in a landscape, mainly with a sky behind.
15:33And we think they're by the artist William Jones Chapman.
15:36He's an artisan artist, although they're only attributed to him at the moment.
15:40And they're all named and identified.
15:42So we have some skilled workers, we have some unskilled workers, we have managers.
15:48And they're quite extraordinary because they show them, as you can see, as individuals.
15:51And he captures the character and the facial features of each worker.
15:56No women, I should mention, as well, in the group. It's all 16 are male workers.
16:01This is a manager here.
16:03Yeah, this is John Davis, so he's the tin manager.
16:06And I think you can see the difference, really, with the clothes. He's obviously not hands-on.
16:10You can feel him as a person. I think that comes across very much.
16:13And that's quite unusual, you know, for workers to be depicted in this way.
16:16Oh, yeah. Great care has been taken. I mean, the faces are beautifully painted and very sympathetically painted, aren't they?
16:23Yes. And they're all identified, as well.
16:25So we know, for instance, that this is William James and that he was a roller and he's here, pictured with the tools of his trade.
16:31So, you know, he's taking pride in his job.
16:34It gives them real dignity, which is quite right, of course, because these were the people who created the wealth.
16:40Indeed, they were very important to their owners. They needed their workers to continue to make the money.
16:46But these portraits only tell half the story.
16:52Conditions in the Crochet's iron and tin plate works were harsh and dangerous.
16:58Just four years before they were painted, the workers were pushed to breaking point.
17:03This is one of the bedrooms of Kvartva Castle, the former mansion of the Crochets.
17:13They weren't popular. In 1831, the workers of Merthyr rose up against the poverty and starvation they were suffering.
17:22The red flag was unfilled for the first time.
17:26The rising was put down brutally and one man, Dick Pandaren, was taken to Cardiff and hanged, allegedly because he was the leader of the rising.
17:36At the time, there was no visual record of the Merthyr rising or of the conditions the workers were protesting about.
17:46The iron barrens didn't want the hard reality of industrial South Wales to be seen.
17:51Occasionally, artists did look at the ordinary people of the valleys.
18:00Tip girls were paid to carry coal and ashes from the iron foundries.
18:07And Thomas probably wanted to portray the harshness of their lives.
18:12But this is such a romantic image that she might have been carrying a Greek urn.
18:19But historian Ellen Jones has her own theory about the painting.
18:24The title of Sackcloth and Ashes, I thought it referred to the shame of these women earning their bread by the sweat of their brow.
18:31But in fact, it refers to society's shame that women are still earning their living in this way, comparatively late to the 19th century.
18:39And when this was painted, would it have been commissioned to make that message?
18:45I don't know. Was it commissioned or was it the artist painted himself?
18:48He was a very evangelical Christian with strong views about the role of women in society.
18:55And he did think it was shameful that women be employed in hard labour outside the home.
19:00So it's quite possible that he was inspired, trained by the classical images,
19:04but portraying what he thought was a social problem of society not giving women their proper place and their proper dignity.
19:16Recently, a collection of portraits has emerged from the shadows of history that show women in the valleys as they really were,
19:24this time through a new medium, photography.
19:27Ellen, who are these photographs of exactly?
19:32Well, these are photographs taken in about 1865 of women in the ironworks in Tredegar,
19:38taken by a local photographer.
19:41And what is special about these pictures is that they are very, very rare.
19:44There aren't very many pictures of workers, there are very few pictures of women workers, taken, it seems, some of them actually in the works,
19:55because this one seems to have a stone wall behind her.
19:58Some of them seem to be more shot in a studio, like this one here.
20:02But they are very immediate, they're very detailed, and show us all the sort of sense of hard labour that these women were doing.
20:11These women were working in physical work in the ironworks.
20:17How would people in 1865 have felt about women working in ironworks and coal mines and so on?
20:24They would probably have been viewed as rough, tough women, common, as my grandmother would say.
20:31She was born in 1878 and she had a very strong view about common women.
20:35And she would have been shocked, for example, to see these women wearing trousers.
20:42That is very rare, isn't it?
20:43That is a shocking image. Shocking, shocking image.
20:46Because they are wearing trousers that show their, well, the shape of their legs above the knee, Kim.
20:52Above the knee, and they're wearing these aprons.
20:55But these people were really the lowest of the low.
20:57These women workers in Tredegar were part of a massive social change in the valleys.
21:07The mines and the ironworks and the railways were hungry for workers.
21:14And the massive inward migration transformed these valleys and created this now famous iconography of rows of terraced houses stacked up the hillsides.
21:29Squeezed between the mines in the bottom of the valleys and the wildernesses on the top.
21:34But the life for this new population was grim.
21:41With tens of thousands squeezed into rapidly built pit villages.
21:46Working underground in coal mines, fraught with danger.
21:50There emerged a passion for change.
21:53And the people who came to work in the valleys were amongst the most radicalized in the world.
21:57Coming from across Wales and the rest of the United Kingdom, they soon joined together in chapels and trade unions.
22:05At the heart of every community was the welfare hall of Miners Institute.
22:10The coal industry was booming, but wages and conditions weren't improving.
22:15Workers organized themselves into trade unions.
22:19And buildings like this were raised by subscription from their meager earnings.
22:27But life in these tough valleys communities wasn't portrayed by painters.
22:33The art that celebrated the coming of industry to the valleys didn't show the realities of life there.
22:42The only pictorial record of this time is in newspaper and magazine illustrations.
22:48Often showing the aftermath of the all too frequent pit disasters.
22:52But one pioneering cartoonist in Wales gives a remarkable insight into how these turbulent times were represented in the popular press.
23:03His name, Joseph Morwood Staniforth.
23:07So Chris, what is this book of cartoons?
23:12Well, J.M. Staniforth was the cartoonist for the Western Mail and the Evening Express in Cardiff.
23:18And he drew cartoons throughout the six month dispute in 1898.
23:23And at the end of it, the Western Mail published them as a separate pamphlet for Threppence.
23:28So these are really the only visual record of a very important strike.
23:33Yeah, I mean, this is pre-photography in newspapers.
23:35So you've got people who are sketch artists and then you've got these cartoons which are acts of interpretation.
23:40And every day he is drawing something, following the progress of the dispute, responding to the things that are cropping up and the changing public attitudes around the positions of the miners and the mine owners.
23:52But as the politics of the coal field changes, so does Staniforth's depiction of South Wales coal miners.
23:58It does. What you have here, 1898, you have a collier who is respectable, solid, hardworking, knows his place in society.
24:07Somebody who's deserving of some measure of respect.
24:10Later on, we've got one here, 11 years on, you've got a collier who is much less comfortable.
24:15You know, he is threatening, he's more animalistic.
24:18And I think that transition represents increasing concern on the part of the cartoonist and possibly, therefore, by society at large over what was happening in the coal field.
24:28And how many people would have seen these images?
24:30The Western Mail's got a circulation of approaching 100,000 at this time.
24:34He was also drawing for the News of the World, so he was reaching possibly over a million people by the early 20th century.
24:40And, in a way, that's how South Wales got known then?
24:42Yeah, South Wales was, of course, the home of the South Wales coal industry.
24:47It was the hub of the, you know, the economic hub of the British Empire, as it were.
24:51It powered the Royal Navy. You know, all of Britain's greatness could be predicated on what was going on in South Wales.
24:57So, these cartoons must have been one of the ways in which people actually discovered the valleys.
25:01I suppose so, because people didn't travel to the valleys as tourist areas.
25:05These were places of some mystery, didn't necessarily encounter miners going about their daily business.
25:09You know, there were relatively few photographs of works of art that represented the mining valleys.
25:15Cartoons, however, were appearing in daily newspapers and conveying something through imagery of what these societies were like.
25:27Another glimpse of the protests in the valleys from the early years of the 20th century comes from an extraordinary set of photographs.
25:34A photographer in Tonopandi, Levi Ladd, took pictures of striking miners meeting there in 1910, just before their violent confrontation with the police.
25:47The fragile glass plate negatives were mostly lost, but a handful have survived and give us a vivid image of the politics of this time.
25:56The years around the First World War saw peak production in the South Wales coal field.
26:14Out of the tens of thousands of people working, there emerged a new generation of artists.
26:22For the first time since Penry Williams in Merthyr, they'd grown up alongside the Colliers and their families.
26:30Trained at Swansea School of Art, they brought a new realism to the portrayal of this industrial world.
26:37Evan Walters was the oldest, and in the 1920s and early 1930s, he painted a series of images of coal miners that still impress today.
26:52Not widely known, they're rare portraits of working men painted with a deep understanding of who they were and the conditions they faced.
27:01The portraits date from the year of the general strike onwards.
27:08They show men pinched by hunger as the Great Depression brought desperate poverty to the valleys.
27:22Chris, after the First World War, of course, the coal industry crashed.
27:27Yeah.
27:28The demand for coal is dropping dramatically.
27:30Yeah, particularly in South Wales, you've got new industries like oil and electricity coming through.
27:36You've got a lot of competition in the export market.
27:39And so South Wales coal, which had been really, you know, top quality, is now struggling.
27:44It's high price and they're finding it difficult to shift.
27:47And what that means is that you get mines beginning to close and large numbers of miners being laid off.
27:52And within ten years, you know, you're looking at a really serious unemployment problem in South Wales.
27:57But it's also the time, isn't it, when artists start to try to reflect this pain in their own work.
28:04Well, you've got an artist like Evan Walters, for instance, who starts to paint portraits in the South Wales coal field in the mid-1920s.
28:10So this is at a point when the industry is really struggling for its very existence and so are the communities.
28:16You know, you've got the general strike, you've got the seventh month long lockout of 1926.
28:21And then, you know, widespread unemployment that comes hard on the heels of that.
28:25And what you've got with those portraits are real miners.
28:29These are real people living in South Wales who've experienced that kind of human tragedy.
28:34You know, their whole raison d'etre has disappeared because the industry has shrunk and they no longer have the means of making a living.
28:41And I think you can see that the tragedy, it's written in the art.
28:44These people are real examples of this economic catastrophe.
28:48And artists weren't just painting portraits, they were also painting the reality of mining.
28:54Yeah, I mean, somebody like Vincent Evans, the paintings that he does of miners underground working, you get a real strong sense of the physicality of that labour.
29:03It's not brought out in any other way at that time, I think, except perhaps through works of literature like George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier.
29:09You know, you've got the muscles, the sweat, the pain, the claustrophobic environment.
29:14So for miners in work, the work itself hadn't changed very much, you know, from the late Victorian Edwardian period.
29:20And that's captured in those paintings.
29:22And were those paintings regarded as proper things to go into art galleries at the time?
29:27Well, I think there's a struggle there, you know.
29:29In a sense, industrial art is still trying to find its way in the artistic environment of the early 20th century.
29:35And that's why so many of these painters have to find other subjects to make their careers through.
29:40These were hard years in the South Wales Valleys, with colliery closures, mass unemployment, and near starvation.
29:52Few pictures show this, but a painting by another Swansea student, Archie Reese Griffiths, catches the mood.
29:59Griffiths has his blackened automatons approaching the viewer from a valley whose hills are more grey than green, beneath a sky that promises bad weather.
30:14The radicalism and socialism continue to grow.
30:30Marty at the head of the run of the valley was dubbed Little Moscow in 1930.
30:36Evan Walters' painting, The Communist, depicts this political world.
30:42Here's the orator, decked out in a bright red shirt, exhorting the masses to revolution.
30:49Walters never wrote about this painting, so we don't know if it's in support of the communist, or if it's supposed to be satirizing him.
31:00Those paintings of the 1920s and 1930s became symbols of the struggle against the worst aspects of capitalism.
31:19They attracted to the valleys artists, writers, and filmmakers, who took those images out to the wider world.
31:28Two European artists came to the valleys during the war, and were highly influential.
31:36Both were Jewish, Joseph Hermann from Poland, and Heinz Koppel from Germany.
31:44They never met, even though they worked at the same time.
31:49One promoted an image of the dignified miner.
31:54The second helped usher in the idea of the valleys as an imaginative dreamscape.
32:03Joseph Hermann became celebrated for his portraits of Welsh miners.
32:22He was inspired by a vision of men returning home from the pit in Ostrad Gunlice, silhouetted against the sunset.
32:34Hermann lived in the village, and went underground to sketch the men at work.
32:40His fame grew after he painted a huge mural of miners for the Festival of Britain in 1951.
32:49These sculpted figures, influenced by African carvings, became some of the best-known images of the Welsh Valleys.
32:58I think for Joseph Hermann, coal mining was what he referred to as dignified labour.
33:18He saw it as being real men's work, producing something real that was a commodity that was going to get sold.
33:27And it was hard labour, and there was something that he really valued in that.
33:40He'd grown up in a Warsaw ghetto, with his whole family living in one room, and his father working as a cobbler.
33:46This was a completely different idea, that you'd see these miners coming out of the sunset and crossing the bridge and going off down the pit.
33:52And he saw the sort of masculinity and the power of that.
33:55But he also saw it in a slightly romantic way as the wealth being brought up from under the earth.
34:00The fires being burnt with it.
34:02And it's something about nature being expressed.
34:05Rock underneath our feet being brought to the surface.
34:07So there was a sort of timeless energy that he felt was in that whole story.
34:12He was deeply moved by the quality he found in that community and the landscape.
34:30And desperately wanted to start painting it and stayed for a decade.
34:35Heinz Koppel lived in Dowlice near Merthyr.
34:38And while he was less well known than Herman, his influence on art in the valleys was also profound.
34:45He was teaching unemployed miners, kids, anybody who wanted to come along and see what they'd make of this new style of painting that he was teaching, this sort of self-expression.
34:54And the students at Cardiff College of Art who lived in the Rhonda and went down on the train every day, the Rhonda group as they became known, they all found out about him.
35:03And they went up to see him and their experience of sort of suddenly coming across somebody that they regarded as a real artist who'd got a real set of inquiries about how to paint and really excited them.
35:16These are artists who are finding new ways of seeing the world.
35:19They're not just regurgitating the same kind of landscape view, a little still life, you know, some safe scene.
35:24They're saying, how do we see the world? What can we do differently from people in the past?
35:29One of the things that Heinz Koppel used to say to his students is, how would a child see it?
35:35Try and see it absolutely from basics. Try and go back to basics in what you do.
35:40And people need help to go back to basics sometimes, and both Herman and Koppel, I think, were seen as people who could help throw out some of the baggage of art and start fresh.
35:52Joseph Herman's paintings of miners reflected a new confidence in the post-war years.
36:02These men were no longer the downtrodden figures of Evan Walters and Archie Rhys Griffiths, but symbols of a new world.
36:19Everything changed in 1945. A Labour government was elected. The mines were nationalised. The NHS was created.
36:26Even old pits like this one in this banner of Mahdi. These were rebuilt, reconstructed.
36:32There was a tremendous new sense of optimism in the valleys.
36:37When I grew up in the valleys in the 1950s, there was full employment and a tremendous sense of optimism everywhere.
37:00We were open all kinds of influences. We were reading the novels of Jack Kerouac and looking at abstract expressionist painters in America like Jackson Pollock.
37:11And there were young artists in these communities in this valley. And they were trying to reflect the world around them.
37:19But they were painting in a new way.
37:26Young valleys artists like Ernest Ziboli, Robert Thomas and Charles Burton were part of this post-war generation entering art college for the first time.
37:37They no longer painted scenes of industry, but streets brimming with shoppers, lively paintings in bright colours.
37:46Gwen Evans is one of the last survivors of this group.
37:50Well, it is optimistic. Of course, it coincided with us younger people.
37:56It naturally would have optimism. We were going to change the world.
38:00But that air of optimism was strong.
38:04We never thought of ourselves as making history. We were just a group of committed people.
38:09And one thing we wanted to do was paint.
38:11We revelled in this sort of whole atmosphere of the Rhonda.
38:15It was in our bones. Every stone glowed.
38:18And it drove us on to paint and record what we saw.
38:22Because a lot of the art that was being produced was like a sophisticated art.
38:27Whereas ours was raw, we went out and we met on a Saturday morning and we did different areas of the Rhonda.
38:34One morning we'd meet in Tree Herbert. It might be below freezing.
38:38I can remember sitting in a stream, my feet on the blocks of ice, and drawing away.
38:43And then we'd retire to a cafe. Doms was the favourite in Tree Orkey.
38:47And discuss what we'd done. And it was usually quite a serious hour or two.
38:52People were looking to the future. They were looking to make a new world after that Labour government really turned so many things upside down.
38:59And said, let's start again in a different way.
39:01And I think that if you look at those paintings by Charles Burton, the early Ernie Zaboli paintings, Glyn Morgan too, they're expressing quite an optimistic view of the valleys.
39:11You know, you're seeing tidy places in both senses of the word.
39:15You're seeing order and attractive rural landscapes around the community.
39:20And really that was the truth that people were seeing around them.
39:23They weren't seeing sort of poverty and destitution, which might well have been the picture had they been painting in the 30s.
39:28They were seeing a regulated, harmonious world.
39:31It wasn't only men who grasped the possibility of the new age.
39:41Nan Youngman, an English artist and teacher, set up a scheme to show art in Welsh schools and painted a series of evocative streetscapes.
39:52Cardiff-born Esther Granger was also inspired by the landscape and its people, painting this austere portrait of a miner's wife, Con Morgan, in the 1950s.
40:10Perhaps the most singular vision of the valleys came from Ernest Zaboli, the son of Italian immigrants, he went to art college after national service.
40:20But the valleys, and specifically, Astrid Rhonda and Penryse, became his artistic universe.
40:27When he went away to teach in North Wales, in the mid-1950s, he struggled to paint, needing the landscape of his home to spur him on.
40:39As his work matured, Zaboli created his own iconography of the valleys.
40:52Often seen at night, his paintings show streets and houses clinging to the sides of the hills.
40:59Street lamps and car headlights illuminating this nocturnal world, with the artist himself looking on.
41:08I think all of those artists who came from the valleys saw it as important to show their own home and express that, and they were in love with their own home.
41:31And I think that comes through very strongly in the warmth of the paintings.
41:35Koppel and Hermann, they were in love with it as well, but even coming as outsiders, they, yes, they did really express their feelings for the places they were.
41:45When you look at the geography of it, and the amazing placing together of rows and rows of houses, with mountains behind them, you know, it was an amazing picture.
41:56And so many artists coming together here just found it a place full of visual excitement.
42:02But in the 1960s and 1970s, the valleys faced grimmer realities.
42:20The Aberfan disaster of 1966, when a coal tip collapsed on top of a primary school, killing 116 children and 28 adults,
42:31was like a curse that returned, a ghost from earlier in the century, when accidents were tragically common.
42:42The disaster was commemorated in this painting by Nicholas Evans.
42:47Evans was a kind of Valley's grandma Moses, who only took up painting in his sixties, and whose work of monochrome miners captures the gloom and desperation of his youth underground.
43:00His Aberfan painting gets something of the grief that followed this terrible tragedy.
43:06If the bright new future of the post-war era was fading, the mystique of the mines continued to draw artists like moths to the flame of a miner's lamp.
43:29Valerie Gantz is a Swansea painter, and although the valleys were just a few miles away, there remained a hidden world to her until she began sketching there in the mid-1980s.
43:42Now these sketchbooks are so wonderful. When did you first go down a mine?
43:48I think it was about 1982, and I worked in a private mine, a drift mine.
43:56Was it the sculptural qualities, the drama, the special light that attracted you to the mines?
44:02I don't really, no. It was the fact that it was almost like a forbidden place, and I've always wanted to go to places I'm not supposed to go to.
44:11But, of course, you went to the most forbidden place for a woman, and that's into the baths, where the men were actually washing.
44:19I mean, you've got the wet skin, the white tiles, and the reflections and colours of the towels. It was a beautiful subject.
44:28These are incredible life drawings. But, I mean, there are full frontals in here, Valerie.
44:34Oh, yes.
44:35And the men didn't mine you?
44:37No.
44:38Not at all?
44:39No.
44:40It says something about coal miners in South Wales, doesn't it?
44:42Well, I mean, I'm so used to drawing people without their clothes on that it didn't make any difference.
44:49In fact, I was in the little road next to the mine one day, and along came a lorry, and the men called out to me, and I answered, but I didn't recognise them.
45:06He said, ah, you don't know me with my clothes on.
45:08Ha, ha, ha, ha. Great.
45:19You actually went to live, of course, in a mining community right next to the mine, in Abitallari, and how did you begin to paint that?
45:27How do you, that sense of community, how do you translate that onto a canvas?
45:31onto a canvas observation and sketchbooks and i'd go to their choir practice and their band practice
45:39and snooker halls and and so forth and they were very happy to let me do what i liked
45:45they were really good about it and as much as one was able to i became part of that community
45:52and they were really welcoming it was a lovely atmosphere
46:05but the world that valerie gans painted was soon to change
46:15the long post-war boom ended for the valleys in the late 1970s
46:19the demand for coal and steel began to decline catastrophically
46:26the coal industry was heading for a momentous strike
46:40i was working for the national union of mine workers during the 1984-85 strike
46:46it's an experience etched on my memory but little recorded by artists
46:52photography and film are the main documents of the time
46:56all of these images and posters these were all designed during the minor strike of 1984-85
47:03by the miners in fact i designed some of them myself
47:07but you know the extraordinary thing is that there was very little art created by artists about the
47:14strike at the strike at the time but there was a rich vein of creativity that came after the strike
47:23the end of the strike in 1985 saw the rapid closure of the coal mines and steelworks
47:29which had defined the valleys for so many people for so long
47:3330 years later little remains of these industrial powerhouses
47:41tower colliery at her wine was one of the last taken over by the miners and staying open until 2008
47:49it remains empty and decaying a memory of generations of men who worked underground
47:55hidden away there's a mural by one of the miners themselves an anonymous personal statement about 150
48:06years of work at the site
48:21but the passing of these industries has inspired some artists who find subject matter in the struggles of
48:27the past
48:34various artists in different ways have shown the valleys emerging from the closure of the mines
48:40david carpanini was born here in blank guimby in the avon valley north of port albert
48:46for 50 years he's been portraying the people of this village as stubborn survivors
48:57of this picture is very important to you isn't it well indeed as a subject it's something that
49:04has recurred many times in my work it contains the house where i grew up from the age of nine months
49:11and the path here behind that building i walked many many times and it is a dramatic view it is an
49:21extraordinary visual pattern of folding forms and rhythms that i saw almost every day of my life
49:28clearly things have changed over 50 years but nonetheless it was a dynamic recurring powerful
49:36symbol of a working dynamic community and it's firmly embedded in my psyche i don't think there's any
49:44question about that clearly i'm also doing a good deal of work in more recent times from
49:50my memory because as you can see it has changed quite significantly but the excitement of one's
49:57engagement from a child with the experience of growing up here i once described was like growing
50:03up in a fine renaissance city like florence clearly i don't have a pierre della francesca in my local
50:08church but i did have every day of my life a changing visual spectacle that i have constantly found
50:17extraordinarily stimulating and you've never forgotten the people have you no no well i again think that's
50:22the other issue as well although much of my work is about pure landscape the majority of my work is
50:28about people in situations and they are as i've heard you say before survivors they're very resilient
50:35people and often you find the situation where people are hopeless it comes across in some of my
50:41paintings they're not just about south wheels they are about the more a broader perspective of human
50:49experience where anyone in difficult circumstances has found a way to survive
51:02the more a broader perspective of human life and the more a broader perspective of human life
51:09david garner also deals in the fallout from the pit closures the son of a miner he uses the remnants
51:16of industry to make art miners boots donkey jackets are his raw materials
51:23all of this stuff is about coal mining why why why do you produce art about coal mining
51:28well it's just it's the background i came from you know my dad was a miner for 50 years and i grew up in
51:34a you know mining community mining village it was a place called abba bar guide uh came out of college
51:41royal college and um straight into the miner strike 84 85 miner strike and started to produce work which
51:47reflected what was going on all right this piece here is an incredibly um intensely personal piece of work
51:55because this is about your dad isn't it yeah this is uh very personal this um my dad died of uh pneumoconiosis
52:03and i made this piece when he died it's called do not go gentle which is an obvious reference to the
52:10the dylan thomas poem and that fight for life and also a fight for recognition um and compensation for
52:18for the cause of death and that that x-ray is actually his x-ray that he got from the hospital
52:24it's an x-ray from kofili miners which i eventually managed to to get from them they were very reluctant
52:30to release it but yes it's the actual x-ray yeah and this is actually his jacket the majority of the work
52:40i make which incorporates found objects they have to be authentic you have to be the real thing it's kind
52:45of no compromise there at all so you know the jacket is is his that the x-ray is his and his nebulizer
52:52the nebulizer yeah that authenticity is is so important really
53:15and this piece is about one of the worst things that ever happened in wales yeah i'm a van 66 i was
53:21in primary school eight years old i remember it happening vividly and these objects as well of
53:26course these are are from 1966 these seats they're very old primary school chairs which i managed to
53:33source 30 of them you know to represent a class and what i did i cast coal and bitumen wedges to sit on
53:3930 primary school chairs and the idea came from a a photograph i saw where the spillages came into
53:47a school the school window in abavan and it settled on on a desk and chair and i saw that image that
53:53gave me the idea because of the nature of the bitumen over time it moves which was fantastic really
53:59for the narrative of advan really it's something that people who might not be part of that art elite
54:13that audience they don't have to have a special language to understand it do they no they don't um
54:21that's something i'm i'm always conscious of as well you know again it might be cut it might come from
54:25my background is that i i like the person next door to me to to be able to read something into the
54:31work you're not going to read all the sort of the subtleties and maybe the the detail but i would like
54:36somebody in my street to be able to look at the work and think yeah that's about abavano that's about
54:42whatever you know i like ordinary people to be you know to be um to be part of of the audience really
54:56david garner like david carpanini is deeply concerned with the devastating after effects of industry
55:03but there are other artistic views of the valleys which are equally powerful
55:10kevin sinnet lives and works in the garu valley one of the most popular contemporary welsh artists his
55:17figure paintings are full of dynamism and color with people out in the streets and up on the hills
55:25of the valley to me he captures the vitality of the valleys better than anyone
55:40paintings which celebrate the humor and panache of the people who live and love in these towns and villages
55:55and other artists with a distinct vision is john selway who's painted in abitaleri for over 60 years
56:03selway studied alongside david hockney at the royal college of art in the 1960s and his work has
56:16developed into a rich magic realist style selway draws on music and poetry and his sinewy forms seem to
56:27envelop you even when they're not directly about the landscape where he lives they could only have
56:33been painted in these steep sided valleys where the sky is far above
56:45in this program i've looked at how the history of the valleys and the art that's been made there
56:50a closely connected
56:55but perhaps the powerful presence of the past especially the industrial past has now become too
57:01dominant
57:04over the past decade or so there's been a tendency to memorialize the suffering of the valleys
57:11monumental sculptures erected on the site of pit disasters and closed collieries
57:18in a way it's understandable the mines were closed and demolished so quickly that the older generation
57:25wants to pass on what's been lost but sometimes history hangs over the valleys like a shroud
57:38but people love living in the valleys and they're beginning to regain the natural splendor that attracted
57:44artists like turner in the 18th century i'm sure and i hope that this beautiful landscape will now inspire
57:53a new generation of artists to create their own contemporary visions of the valleys
57:59we're joining martha carney on a great irish journey here on bbc4 tomorrow night at eight
58:16next tonight there are a chance to meet the normans with part two of professor robert bartlett's series
58:21and the invaders are intent on conquest stay with us
58:32you
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