SALI HERMAN

Swiss-born, Sali Herman arrived in Sydney in 1938 and served as an official Australian War Artist in 1945-46. During the 1950s and ’60s he became especially known for his evocative streetscapes around Potts Point, Paddington and Woolloomooloo. As Barry Pearce observes, Herman’s depictions of the houses of inner Sydney ‘contain the essential measure of his achievement. What is their real meaning to him? He knew them intimately for twenty years, living in Potts Point at the heart of an artistic community… it was Sydney’s Montmartre’. ¹ Herman was interested in houses for, in his own words, the ‘beauty in their character’. As he once explained, ‘It is – I don’t know – not by any intention that I painted streets, it was simply because I loved them’.

In Couple walking the Empty Street, Herman’s ‘portraits’ are the houses as much as the people. Although Herman and his wife had moved to Avalon in 1960, he continued to paint both the outback and the inner urban subjects that he felt summed up the essence of Australia. Daniel Thomas has pointed out that the figures in the artist’s 1960s Sydney streetscapes sometimes evoke aspects of Herman’s own life story: possibly representing European immigrants now peacefully settled amidst the oldest suburbs in this ‘new world’. ²  In the words of Edmund Capon, ‘His intimate, personal and evocative visions of what were once considered the backwaters of the city [became] poignant statements on the march of progress. There is a hint of melancholy and a touch of pathos in his warm but honest paintings of humble dwellings that reflects an extraordinary sensibility’. ³

1. Pearce, B., Sali Herman Retrospective, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1981, p. 12.
2.  Thomas, D., Sali Herman, Collins, Sydney, 1971, p. 35.
3. Foreword in Pearce, op. cit., p. 5.