Pitmen Painters - Gallery opened

Seventy years on, Ashington's proudly unprofessional artists gain respectability

Martin Wainwright
Friday October 27, 2006
The Guardian


Seventy years after meeting in a shed with old brushes and cans of decorating paint, a unique school of artists was honoured yesterday by the opening of a £16m museum and gallery to house their collected works.
Off-duty miners, who were glad to get a fiver at Newcastle market for their efforts, now have their paintings carefully hung in controlled temperatures and shown off under concealed lights.

The collection began in 1934 when, after exhausting shifts down Woodhorn or Ellington pits, the group started art appreciation classes at Ashington YMCA in Northumberland.

"It is a marvellous achievement," said Princess Anne at the museum's official opening, stamping the final seal of respectability on the Ashington Group of Unprofessional Artists, whose opinion of royalty, and anything else related to the establishment, was not high.
Ian Lavery, the president of the National Union of Mineworkers, who has worked with Wansbeck district and Northumberland county council to create the tribute at Woodhorn's preserved pithead, said it had been a brave venture at the time.

"There was plenty of community activity in those days," he said, "but it revolved around giant leeks in allotments, whippets and pigeons, rather than drawing in a shed."

Miners such as Oliver Kilbourn and George Blessed, the actor Brian Blessed's uncle, had started an adult education group under under the aegis of the Workers' Educational Association.

"They had just done a session studying evolution," said William Feaver, an art critic and historian who has been a driving force behind the museum. In 1934, they voted for art appreciation. "They didn't know what art appreciation was, but they liked the sound of it," he said. The WEA dispatched a Durham university lecturer, Robert Lyon, to Ashington. He tried showing slides of Michelangelo's work at "several sticky evening sessions" before abandoning teaching and saying: "Why don't you have a go?"

The results were so sensational that the Ashington Group was lionised by London critics, offered visits to the National Gallery and the Royal Academy, and featured in a series of 1930s and 40s documentaries. But the Pitmen Painters, as they were nicknamed, were unimpressed by fame and continued to explore art using the combative methods of the NUM. Members had to agree to accept criticism from others in the group, often trenchant, and to abide by regulations drawn up after debates which could go on all night.

"They had a discussion about whether it would be acceptable to do abstract painting," said Mr Feaver, who was joined at the royal opening by relatives and neighbours of the painters, who are now all dead. "They agreed to have a go, spent a year doing just that and then decided, 'Well, abstract's not much cop'. There are people today who may think that they were right."

The group faded out of the headlines after the second world war but continued quietly with their work, recruiting younger members - all men because of the strict social order of pit villages - and trying new techniques.

Their rediscovery began in the 1970s when Mr Feaver, then teaching in Newcastle, noticed some Geordie pensioners at an exhibition in the city's Laing art gallery. "They invited me up to their hut in Ashington and I was amazed," he said. "There were all these paintings, cobwebby and in stacks against the wall, which they called their permanent collection. They spat on their fingers - there was a lot of spit involved with the Ashington Group - and rubbed the paint so that I could see what they looked like when they were clean.

"When you're a critic, you often get invited to discoveries which people describe as wonderful. This is the one occasion in my life when that was absolutely the case. The best of the group would certainly have gone to art school today. Their dedication was humbling."

The permanent collection subsequently became the first western exhibition in China after Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, partly because Chinese officials were taken with the idea of "workers' art". Mr Feaver said: "Having to explain the meaning of phrases such as 'pigeon crees' or 'fish and chips' to thousands of visitors to the show in Beijing was an extraordinary fulfilment of Robert Lyon's original belief - and the group's - in the universal extension of art appreciation."

The collection's display in the new Woodhorn Colliery Museum and Gallery, which also houses Northumberland's county archives and a museum of local life and mining, follows tours to Germany and the Netherlands.

The group's fame is likely to grow as Lee Hall, the author of Billy Elliott, is writing of a play about them. But Ashington's isolated community has not become a lasting centre of fine art. The self-taught ethos of the Pitmen Painters has all but gone. "Remember this was the last generation to start work at 12," said Mr Feaver. "Today's young people can all study and practice art at school. None of the group's children became artists either, although an impressive number seem to be professors."