During my last years in Moscow, under the tutorship of Vladimir Moroz, I was immersed in the crystal beauty of naïve art. Vladimir introduced me to this world which empowered me with a new way of seeing. I had flirted before with Douanier Rousseau (1844-1910) and the Georgian painter, Niko Pirosmanishvili (1862-1918), albeit from an academic viewpoint. Now my master began to initiate me into the wonders of this movement in art. In fact, the last exhibition I curated in Moscow as the artistic director of the Moscow-based gallery and art agency was Hamayun, a show of the works of Liubov Mickhailovna Maikova, known as Babushka Liuba, a naïve and exceptional aged artist who, like Monet at the start of the 20th century, decided to paint colourful flowers in the midst of the tragedies of her age.

At the same time, studying in Soviet Moscow in the 1970s meant that paradoxically I felt distanced from the principles of Socialist Realism. How can one reconcile the simplicity of reality depicted in such naïve art with the gripping, unreal, utopian reality of a tragic Communist society, as depicted by the Socialist Realist painters? The directness and immediacy of the plain unadorned truth, as glimpsed in Babushka’s paintings and those of other naïve artists, confronted the distant and distanced directness of ideological Party ‘truth’.

The apparent lack of political commitment of the naïve painter stands in contradiction to the apparent simplicity of Socialist Realism. Yet, at the same time, both movements evince a naïve grasp of reality. Reconciling these two supposedly antagonistic movements proved to be an impossible Sisyphean struggle. At least this was so until, after a 25-year gap, I found myself in London.

At the Duchess Theatre in London in April, I had the good fortune to see Bill Kenwright’s production of the play The Pitmen Painters. This was based on a factual and truly epic history of miners on Tyneside in northeast England who became amateur artists known as the Ashington Group, after the small mining community near Newcastle on Tyne where they lived from the 1930s to the 1970s. Their story had been originally researched and published by William Feaver in the 1970s. Based on Feaver’s book, the events have now been dramatized by Lee Hall. The production was directed by Max Roberts. The play had transferred from the Royal National Theatre, and is now touring internationally.

Watching it, I felt I was a privileged witness to the agonising relationship between what one may call high culture, and the (ultimately perhaps futile) aspiring yearnings of working class culture, epitomised by the aborted Ashington Group. From a provincial evening art class, under the auspices of the Workers’ Educational Authority, “the Group flourished. Word of it spread to Newcastle and beyond. Patrons of art became interested, notably Helen Sutherland … a shipping line heiress. Through her they got to know artists such as Ben Nicholson and David Jones”. These miners turned artists were recognised as “prime examples of working men’s self-expression. Their works toured The Netherlands, Germany and China”. Their inspired tutor, Robert Lyon (1894-1978), who went on to become Head of the Edinburgh College of Art, partly thanks to his work with the Ashington Group, led them from strength to strength, culminating in successful exhibitions where their work, depicting miners, landscapes, local urban scenes and other straightforward but powerful images, was sold to eager art collectors. They challenged all modernist theoretical discussions and succeeded in offering an alternative to contemporary art.

Their naivety was dangerous enough to cause the final dissolution of the Group. Their hopes to found a cultural centre, even a university, at Ashington, came to naught. The play ended with a moving song, ostensibly a hymn, but in fact an ode to lost illusions, sung in chorus by the men, and fraught with melancholy.

By 1984 the Group had folded. Its demise, and the demolition of the Hut where the miners had practised their art, could be said to epitomise the end of the working class struggle in the 20th century. In fact, the Hut’s destruction was a micro-reflection of the perestroika macro-upheavals taking place elsewhere in the world, and the final re-establishment of capitalist monopoly in Eastern Europe and beyond. The decline of Ashington and indeed the closure of its coal mines, as well as its art group, suggest that the urge to bear witness had faded, as Feaver relates in his powerful and sensitive book, Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group 1934-1984, from which I have quoted above. The beauty of the book and of Lee’s subtle dramatization of it lie in the highlighting of a series of events that, despite their provinciality, became a milestone, rivalling concurrent modernist and post-modernist developments in the arts. The violent and victorious Thatcherite struggle over the miners’ culture and their deeply-ingrained traditional proletarian power effectively eliminated one of the most substantial and vigorous props of the working class movement. That victory led to the disappearance of the Ashington Group, whose worldview proved to be impotent in the face of encroaching capitalism.

This book and the play have inspired me to start on a study of a local Maltese event of more recent times: the closing of the Malta Drydocks in 2010. As far as is known, the Malta Drydock culture does not seem to have set in motion any artistic activity or creativity, unlike the Ashington Group. But this if anything shows how vibrant and exceptional the Ashington painters were, and how their charismatic tutor spurred them on to produce works of art which are still valued and admired today. Naïve they may have been, but the freshness and strength of their original vision endure.

Intellectual creativity wishes to bring about radical changes in society, and ironically finds its vital source in former, discarded values, those that in fact it is trying to undermine. This burgeoning intellectual creativity is therefore vulnerable and often indeed lost, because it cannot encompass the new values it is itself promoting. The Ashington Group depicted their loathing of the present, and at the same time their pride in the dignity of what had been achieved by the working man, and a utopian dream of the future, the non-realisation of which brought in an overwhelming fear of their impending fate. At the same time these painters upheld the individuality of their collective achievement in the face of the incoming modernist tsunami of technological post-industrial power. This wave of social and political development replaced and swamped their early realism of hope with what Nicholas Hewitt has called a ‘pessimistic and disabused realism’ in his discussion of twentieth-century culture. The paintings of the Ashington Group are still admired and loved by a small circle of connoisseurs today, and their artistic victory in the middle of the twentieth century may perhaps be seen as a permanent triumph over the irreversible political defeat the miners of Britain indubitably suffered in the 1980s.