The story of the Ashington Group is an inspirational and uplifting one. The Group was composed of Northumbrian coal miners in the early 1930s. Their world was one of ten-hour shifts for two pounds and six shillings a week of work in darkness, dust and hard, hard work. There were over a million minors working the mines then, and the Worker’s Educational Association offered a Tuesday evening art appreciation class to them, led by Durham University art history lecturer named Robert Lyon.
Whereas we might not know a lot about the Group’s members and teacher, playwright Lee Hall has written a play about the Group entitled The Pitmen Painters that takes us inside their heads. The play has received rave reviews for the production directed by Max Roberts, at the National Theatre’s Cottesloe Theatre in London.
They play focuses on the tension between the teacher and the students as they begin their studies and later between their careers in the pit and in the studio as they become artists instead of students of art history. In the play, Hall wants viewers to feel the frustration of Lyon in his early classes as he comes to realize the minors haven’t the vocabulary, experience and education to understand the references embedded in the art he shows them. And he exposes us to the insecurities of the minors who have confidence in neither their capacity to create art nor the value of their artistic voice.
The play focuses on the early history of the Group where all the dramatic tension lay. At that time it was merely a class that moved from lectures in art history to a studio format of experimentation. Lyon introduced the painters to various artistic techniques beginning with lino-cutting and moving on to painting. As the course progressed, the classes became critiques to which the minors brought the work they did at home—class members critiqued both the art of their peers and the historical art that inspired them.
The play is not just about painting, it is also about class differences in a society that is tremendously hierarchical. There is a poignant moment in the play when Oliver, a class stand-out says after having stayed up all night painting: “I was shaking—literally shaking—‘cos for the first time in me life, I’d really achieved something that was mine…. And I felt like for those few hours there—I was my own boss.”
In 1936, the Group was formally named and defined by a show that they presented at the Hatton Gallery in Armstrong College, Newcastle. The paintings by the Group members revealed their lives: the soccer games, the pub, union meetings, meals, war preparation and the like. The show, the Group and its members were very well received and their exhibition is famous as the first art exhibition to feature exclusively, the work of the working class.
The Group faded as the men aged and their interests varied, but in the 1970s, interest in the Group was revived by exhibitions in Durham and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. There followed, shows in Holland, Germany and in 1980, a Group show was the first exhibition of western art in China since the Cultural Revolution.
www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/pitmen
Post a Comment