"I
saw the industrial scene and I was affected by it. I tried to paint
it all the time. I tried to paint the industrial scene as best I
could. It wasn't easy. Well, a camera could have done the scene
straight off."
”A
Very Fine Industrial Subject Matter”
It
may be, of all people, Noel Gallagher we have to thank for this.
Though Lowry's work was well collected, much sat in vaults and an
ongoing campaign was calling for it to be better shown. But when he commented in an interview “they're not considered Tate-worthy” he
wrapped the whole thing up in a snappy soundbite. After which there
was really only one way to prove him wrong. (Though the Tate have
denied this and claimed their exhibition was already in the works.)
The choice of Tate Britain over Tate Liverpool may have been an
attempt to shake the 'Northern', and thereby supposedly provincial, tag. (Or not compete with the Lowry in Salford.)
Perhaps
it endured a triple whammy from disdain from critics. It was in a
naïve style, it straightforwardly depicted scenes of ordinary
working class life without any obvious need for gatekeepers. And –
most heinous of all – it was popular! It sold
particularly well in prints, its illustrational nature not losing too
much in the translation to reproduction. Much antagonism is a simple
case of snobbery. The disdain may well have been mutual. Like the earlier William Roberts, with whom Lowry has much in
common, he was a cantankerous and private character, who turned down
more honours than anyone else in Britain.
However,
all of that obscures more than it enlightens. You can't really answer
the question 'Was Lowry any good?' without asking 'what exactly was
he doing?'
Let's
start with the late work 'Piccadilly Circus, London'
(1960, above), partly because it screws with the notion of Lowry
being all about some kind of 'Northernness'. It was painted years
before I was born, yet contains enough that's recognisable to me to
spark off memories in my head – those bright red Routemaster buses,
as if built to be oversize children's toys. But we have to get past
all that. Lowry was painting the world of his day as he saw it. We
have to think ourselves back to a time when all those giant-size
Bovril adverts were boldly new, when for visitors to London it was
akin to seeing today's Piccadilly Circus, with its futuristic banks
of multiplex screens.
And
for that reason the show's title is bang-on. Lowry didn't paint these
scenes for us, arriving decades later. He painted modern life for a
contemporary audience. Understanding this explains how he was
influenced by Impressionist and post-Impressionist studies of real
life (though the shows' placing examples side-by-side perhaps
emphasises their differences above their similarities), and how he
was taken seriously by French critics even when their British
brethren only offered him disdain. As the curators put it:
“For
Lowry thinking about painting... meant always thinking about what is
most vivid, and pictorially unfamiliar, in contemporary life. The
crowd at a football match, or a sky full of chimneys belching smoke,
or the red of a London double-decker bus, any of them might jolt
painting back to life.”
Lowry
is – there's no avoiding it - repetitive. His motifs arrived early
and, while he found variation within them, he didn’t venture
outside them much. (And when he tried the results weren’t always
successful. As several reviews stated, 'The Cripple' is just a poor knock-off of Otto Dix.) There are
those who counter that his subject matter, the rhythms of city life,
was equally repetitive. And they’re right, though the repetition
does at times pale on you in a large comprehensive exhibition such as
this.
But
there’s an upside. The repetition, the naïve style keeps telling
you this should all be straightforward. But, much like folk art,
there’s something beguiling about it, it never quite settles. In
this way the persona Lowry affected and so rigidly stuck to - a
straightforward Northerner, with a day job and little time for
intellectualisations - should be seen as part of his art as much as a
self-defence mechanism.
People
have seen in Lowry social reformist criticism, celebrations of
working class life, disdain for the passive masses, straightforwardly
nice little scenes and more. That's the advantage of deadpan.
Everybody is able to project themselves onto those blank-faced
figures. And in so doing, they miss Lowry. Despite his twee image, he
didn't shy from showing the darker side of city life. We'll see
examples later. But the point is the way the tone fluctuates, between
the quiet celebrations of street life and the murmurs of unease –
sometimes within the same work.
The
early 'Coming from the Mill' (1930, above) might
seem an archetypical clog-footed, chimney-belching Lowry. Stop a
moment and you can see significant formal similarities to George Bellows' 'New York'. The scene is witnessed from the same
elevated, slightly removed viewpoint. There's the same division of
the composition into bands , with lower zone given to an accumulation
of barely individuated figures, figures depicted in a way which could
only be described as figurative. They even share a horse and cart!
Less obviously but still present - both artists were happy to create
from composite, not feeling constrained to fidelity to present scenes
purely as they came across them. Perhaps above all there's the same
sense of painterliness – that we are looking at a painting
of something urban and modern - something we're not used to seeing
painted.
Nevertheless
the differences are bigger, so much bigger that its the similarities
which need pointing out. In Bellows' era it might still have felt
natural to paint rather than photograph the city. But by Lowry's
time, twenty years later even in this early work, it was a conscious
choice. (Check out his quip up top about using a camera.) And not
uncoincidentally the sense that we're looking at an undisguised
representation is enhanced. Bellows work is as dynamic and forceful
as the New York it depicts, whereas Lowry's Northern England is in
every sense an ocean away. The style is more naïve, the palette
paler and more limited, colours often applied flatly. While a large
part of Bellows' composition is the vertiginously receeding
perspective, Lowry effectively resorts to perspective only where he
has to. (In, for example, the stub of a sidestreet.) In the upper
half of the painting he abandons it entirely, painting the equivalent
of theatre flats. As Laura Cumming put in the Guardian: “The surface of his
paintings is wall-like in itself: solid, obdurate, opaque.” He
often painted on panel or board, to emphasise this sense of flatness.
“By
contrast with [the] masters, the mediocrity of Lowry’s painting
technique is blindingly obvious… [he] created pictorial space with
lines, not brush work. He would draw the outlines of buildings with a
straight edge and then colour them in…. But then, Lowry’s
Manchester isn’t a recognisable place populated by real people but
a toy town from a picture book intended for small children.”
Notably,
he specifically compares Lowry disfavourably with Bellows. Its rather
like those elderly relatives you had who’d complainingly compare
the Beatles and Stones to classical music. All they could hear was
what the music wasn't doing. He draws the outline of what Lowry does,
but then fails to colour it in. It’s a description which thinks
it’s a critique.
Lowry
is quite deliberately deploying folk art styles, strongly associated
with the rural past, to depict urban and contemporary subjects. So,
while there certainly is something toytownish about his street
scenes, that should really be seen less as a diss than a description.
At the same time we see those chimneys rise so loftily above the
human figures below, there is something diminutive about the whole
scene. They look like dioramas.
To
quote Laura Cumming again: ““He is never in it, of it, among it;
there is no sense of… his proximity. Everything is tiny,
distanced.” Its like the frame is there so the artist can be
outside of it, so much as other stuff can be within it. Because,
after all, what are dioramas and toytowns for? They're
mini-environments which allow children to make microcosms of the
world, the better to grasp the real thing. The small becomes a
manipulable version of the large, the map a means to control the
territory, art as a form of sympathetic magic.
"We
went to Pendlebury in 1909 from a residential side of Manchester,
and... at first I disliked it, and then after about a year or so I
got used to it, and then I got absorbed in it, then I got infatuated
with it. Then I began to wonder if anyone had ever done it... and it
seemed to me by that time that it was a very fine industrial subject
matter. And I couldn't see anybody at that time who had done it - and
nobody had done it, it seemed."
"At
first I detested it, and then...One day I missed a train from
Pendlebury - (a place) I had ignored for seven years — and as I
left the station I saw the Acme Spinning Company's mill ... The huge
black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the
sad, damp charged afternoon sky. The mill was turning out... I
watched this scene — which I'd looked at many times without seeing
— with rapture...
Moving
house, missing a train... Lowry is effectively telling us his origin
story twice, giving us two separate cinematic-style revelation
moments to pin his art to. And when a man says he was bitten by a
radioactive spider than later struck by a radioactive cannister while
crossing the read – well, we're entitled to feel a little
suspicious. Let's note Wikipedia also describes him as “a secretive and mischievous man
who enjoyed stories irrespective of their truth”.
But
if the tales are too good to be true, that's because they
should be true. Bellows painted the city as a new
thing, sights men had never before beheld as great new bridges and
buildings went up, and which thereby transformed those who did behold
it. Lowry paints the modern too. But he paints over-familiar streets
with which we've become too accustomed, something we've stopped
seeing and need to see anew.
”The
Patterns Those People Form”
I'm
not sure when or how the term 'matchstick men' got associated with
Lowry. Was it another example of a dismissive term coined by some
self-important critic, which later gained general acceptance, and so
had its sting drawn? Or was it a generic term, analogous to 'stick
figure', which just got attached to him? It seems to have been
cemented in culture via the medium of popular song, Status Quo's 1968
hit 'Pictures of Matchstick Men' (though that
really only borrows the term) and 1978's ghastly 'Matchstick
Men and Matchstick Cats and Dogs' by professional
Northerners Brian and Michael.
Brian
and Michael's effort, risible enough to make Don McLean's
'Vincent' seem insightful by comparison, has quite
possibly been more damaging to Lowry than any snooty Southern critic.
But not just through it's naff-ness. The point about the matchstick
men fixation is that it throws the emphasis in the wrong place. Lowry
painted environments then placed his figures within them. If we don't
get that we may as well hang his works upside-down.
Look
back at the figures in 'Coming From the Mill', the
caps and bonnets, their characteristic half-hunched way of walking –
like they're a typeface in italics. They look quite similar to the isotope symbolic figures of workers, devised by Otto Neuwirth only
five years before Lowry's painting. (The examples above designed by
Gerd Arntz and Rudolf Modley respectively.) Yet we should remember
that these figures are coming from work (in 'Piccadilly
Circus' they're not so uniform), and that this this was a
time when people dressed more uniformly, when clothing signified
belonging not the need to stand out.
Lowry commented: “Natural figures would have broken the spell
of my vision, so I made them half unreal.” And the half is as
important as the real. Like Bellows before him, he painted his
figures on the brink of identification. And unlike those isotype
figures, designed to be identical, flickers of individuation run
through them if you look hard enough.
Their
scale can vary greatly. In 'The Football Match'
(1949, upper above) they're essentially ants. What counts is the
shape they make. Whereas with 'Lancashire Fair, Good Friday,
Daisy Nook' (1946, lower above) the foreground figures are
enlarged enough to take on identities, one small girl in a red coat
even gazing back at us. The white ground emphasises the bright
colours of their Sunday best clothes. Yet it's equally important that
they receed into the background, and there be no precise tipping
point where the characterised figures become an anonymised mass.
We're not seeing characters set against a crowd background. We're
seeing a crowd.
Lowry
often uses figures like a musical composer would notes, for example
in 'An Accident' (1926, above). The gathering
crowd serves to obscure whatever's going on with the titular accident
(actually a suicide), they're the title-belying subject of painting.
Which creates a work both euphemistic and allusive. Lowry referred to
“the patterns those people form, an atmosphere of tension when
something's happened”. They're not an anonymous mass, visual
statistics. But they do belong to their environment, like animals in
a habitat, like flocks of birds in trees.
”The
Dreadful Environs”
If
the show perhaps underplays Lowry's portraits, it does show many of his bleak industrial
landscapes. These are almost his other face to the street scenes –
predominantly night over day settings, and instead of the usual
teeming crowds largely bereft of human figures. (I remembered them as
predominantly portrait while the street scenes were landscape, but
looking back it seems there's many exceptions to this.)
They
are if anything more diagrammatic than the street scenes, with what
the show describes as a “sharp-edged geometry” almost reminiscent
of Klee. Sometimes the elements are so iconic they draw their meaning
from context as much as the code they're drawn in, like symbols on a
map.
There's
no human figures at all in 'River Scene (Industrial
Landscape)' (1935, above), but the incongruous cottage
effectively stands in for one, a friendly but faint puff of white
emitting from its chimney amid all the black air. Typically of these
scenes, its reminiscent of Paul Nash's work - though, ironically,
less his depictions of the British countryside than his renderings of
No Man's Land in the First World War. (See for example 'The Menin Road', 1919). There's the same sense of a landscape
simultaneously barren and littered with detritus – an almost
post-apocalyptic sense of nature not just despoilt but
denatured. In fact there's a remarkable overlap
with paintings Lowry made of the Blitz, though this and other works
preceded them.
The
gallery guide quotes Orwell's 'Road To Wigan Pier'
(1937): “I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of
Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag heaps... it seemed a
world from which vegetation had been banished, nothing existed except
smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water.” We should remember
environmental controls were almost non-existent at this time – add
it to the landfill, stick it in a stream, anything went so long as it
went.
The
sheer number of times Lowry painted rivers cannot be coincidental. In
his time, rivers and canals were still workplaces, throughways used
for transporting goods. Though you can just about make out a
direction for the river here, its hard to imagine it flowing. It
simply looks stagnant. There's a connection between the way it seeps
into its surroundings and the way the sombre mood of the painting
infects the viewer.
Yet
for all the ways in which these scenes are like some pollution-sodden
riposte to bucolic Romanticism Lowry finds a kind of poetry even
here; the guide speaking of “a rueful, almost admiring recognition
of the ugly grandeur of the industrial scene”. It's reminiscent of something the Italian director Michaelangelo Antonioni once said:
”It's
too simplistic to say... that I am condemning the inhuman industrial
world which oppresses the individuals and leads them to neurosis. My
intention... was to translate the poetry of the world, in which even
factories can be beautiful. The line and curves of factories and
their chimneys can be more beautiful than the outline of trees, which
we are already too accustomed to seeing. It is a rich world, alive
and serviceable... The neurosis I sought to describe... is above all
a matter of adjusting. There are people who do adapt, and others who
can't manage, perhaps because they are too tied to ways of life that
are by now out-of-date.”
Post
War: Sun Over Pendlebury
One
of the exhibition's main theses is to find a path of development in
an artist often assumed to be uniform and unchanging:
“From
the Second World War onwards, Lowry's art took a different tack. For
all his solid Lancashire Conservatism, he responded profoundly to the
new political and cultural realities of Britain after 1945. The
obstreperous vitality of the working class becomes increasingly a
subject. His style grew more comic and cartoonish. It edged
deliberately towards the 'popular'.”
And
certainly, there's much to this. Compare the illos above, the pre-war
'Coming From the Mill' and 'An
Accident' against the later 'Piccadilly
Circus' and 'Lancashire Fair'. Or look
at the large 'VE Day' (1945, above). Its
composition is similar to 'Lancashire Fair' but on
a still-bigger scale. The horseshoe of houses frames a street party,
while the bunting-decked streets receed on either side to suggest
similar scenes going on throughout the city. In a small yet
significant detail, the foreground figures are slightly cropped by
the base of the painting, almost starting to erode the once-distinct
separation of the viewer from the view. Those chimneys have stopped
belching their sombre browns, bright primary colours are starting to
spark up. Its as if the once-trudging crowd find their own will,
their own collective identity.
There
may be a biographical as much as a social explanation for this. Lowry
spent most of the Thirties caring for his bedridden mother, who died
in October 1939. This was a time where he gained his own
independence, coming out into the world he'd only been able to paint
as his mother slept. And perhaps not uncoincidentally, it also seems
to be during this period his popularity took off. The same year
marked his first London exhibition.
But
there's a problem - this is also what comes to construct the 'beloved
Lowry', the kitsch national treasure. In the distance, Brian and
Michael are starting to don their oversize cloth caps. The show,
however, is keen to point out that Lowry didn't permanently swap to
the sunny side of the street.
Take
for example 'A Protest March' (1959, above). Seen
from an unusually elevated perspective, the figures march in ranks,
largely in funereal black, their enlarged and outstretched feet
marking a heavy trudge. I People come out of their doors but look on
bemused, none joining in. t's definitely a march,
more than a demonstration or parade. Its the protest march not as
celebration of resistance but as obligation, as the rote marker of
something which will inevitably fall upon us. The self-assertiveness
of working class identity is far from here.
Similarly,
'Ancoats Hospital, Outpatients Hall' (1952, above)
is a rare interior for Lowry. The National Health Service was often
celebrated in art of this period, for example by Barbara Hepworth,
but Lowry presents it less as a benevolent institution than... well,
as an institution. The large space, the crowds amassed on benches,
you'd be forgiven for first mistaking it for a train station.
People-free
Panoramas
The
centrepiece of the show, though it comes at the end, is five large
panoramas painted in the early Fifties. Notably, the poster image is
an enlargement of one of these - 'Industrial Landscape',
(1955, above). In a sense they're a fusion of the street scenes with
the earlier industrial landscapes, though they're so grand in size
any sense of the human element is thrown out. They're more
pictogrammatic maps of whole neighbourhoods, sewn together by
stitching flyovers and arterial rivers.
Chance
handed me a way of framing this shift in scale. After the show I took
the coach out of London. At first the windows give you a straight-on,
elevated view of the streets around you – much like the earlier
scenes. But as the coach then climbs up on the Westway flyover, the
immediate environment falls away and the panorama of London stretches
out around you.
The
show quite rightly focuses on the first of these being made for the
1951 Festival of Britain. A seeming pinnacle of post-war optimism,
the event perhaps also marked the point where that world went sour –
creating a mechanised, bureaucratised world where people are almost
incidental.
The
show gives us a long quote from John Berger contextualising these,
let's take a sample: “Their logic implies the collapse still to
come. This is what has happened to the 'workshop of the world'... the
ineffectiveness of national planning... the shift of power from
industrial capital to international finance capital”. But Berger's
quote is from 1966, ten to fifteen years after the event, and
ironically may have become more appealing to us today. Its more
hindsight than insight. As ever, Lowry's response is creatively
ambiguous – more so than Berger supposes. We think of flyovers as
soulless non-places, most probably litter-strewn and
graffiti-covered. But when Lowry painted them, most likely they'd
only been built. (Much like Turner's railway viaducts.) Unlike the
soot-soaked streets of the Thirties that accumulated in earlier
rooms, these scenes are gleaming clean. It's like shuffling through
some mortal coil and arriving at a kind of heaven. As with all
effective dystopias, he has given his creation something of the
compelling pull of utopias.
As
with the change in his Forties work, there may be a more biographical
explanation. And in fact it's almost the same explanation, just the
other way up. By 1951, Lowry was 64. This could be the work of an
older man feeling less engaged with the world. The cartoonist Eddie
Campbell once said of his own youth: “I was more physically
involved in things. I live a more mental life now... My sensations of
the real world, the grass and the trees and the concrete aren't as
sharp as they were”. ('Arkensword' 17-18) It’s
possible Lowry spent little more than a decade alive in the world,
the rest framing it from one angle or another.
