By ‘eck it’s grim oop North

I have to confess that I’m not the world’s greatest fan of the works of L S Lowry, which I tend to find tedious and repetitive when viewed in bulk- all these grim northern townscapes with joyless crowds scurrying to and fro under a leaden sky (surely by the law of averages the sun must have shone once or twice in Salford during his long life….).   Perhaps it doesn’t help that he’s become a kind of visual cliché, endlessly recycled on the covers of books with even the most tenuous relationship to industrial England in the first half of last century.   So I hadn’t actually planned to go to the Tate Britain show of his work- except that the exhibition I did intend to go to (one on fashion and art in Tudor and Stuart England in the Buckingham Palace gallery) turned out to be booked solid on the day I turned up and I didn’t want to waste the journey into London.

I’m not sure I emerged a greater enthusiast for his paintings but I certainly came to a greater appreciation of the complexity of the man and his work.   For one thing, it came as a faint shock to discover that his “matchstick men” really were a conscious aesthetic choice.   As some of the graphic works in the show demonstrated, he was a competent if uninspired draftsman of the human body (though he did tend turn faces into something faintly cartoonish- if he’d grown up in France or Belgium one could imagine him  becoming a successful strip canton designer).   It was also fascinating to see just how far he seems to have contributed to his own myth. 

It’s very easy to slip into thinking of him as a self-taught eccentric, a spare time painter with a day job- a kind of English Douanier Rousseau with a much less lurid imagination, consciously marginal to a British art scene which patronised him when it bothered noticing his existence at all.   In fact he had a thorough formal artistic education, mostly from Adolphe Valette, a thoroughly competent second division Impressionist who made a career teaching art in Manchester in the early years of the twentieth century.  Some of Valette’s works were in the show and it was interesting to see how he responded to the same surroundings- in his depiction Manchester became a city of twilights and autumnal mists with edge of slightly sinister romanticism, dark satanic mills looming like castles in the gloom- see below

 Lowry clearly had his ups and downs with Valette and certainly didn’t paint like him (then again he didn't paint much the Pre-Raphaelites, whom he admired).  He  never formally graduated from art school but he was most assuredly not self taught or amateurish.  Nor was he particularly marginal.   In the late 1920’s-early 1930’s he was contributing regularly to exhibitions of contemporary art in Paris, gathering favourable critical views and sales.   Indeed around 1930 he was probably better known in France than many “bigger” names in British art.   He was never short of commissions and became enough part of the British art establishment to be elected to the Royal Academy.   He would have had his knighthood too (offered in a splendid piece of trans-Pennine ecumenism by that professional Yorkshireman Harold Wilson, probably unaware of Lowry’s staunchly Tory politics) except that he refused it, as he refused all honours on principle.    He also turned down job offers from the then-“Manchester Guardian”, which wanted him to serve as the paper’s art critic.    His work even figured on postage stamps during his lifetime.  While it’s true to say that not everybody was happy with this, the hostility appears to have been prompted by a feeling that putting Lowry’s grim industrial scenes on display world wide did nothing for the image of the UK rather than contempt for the artist’s professional competence- I wonder how the critic in question would have responded if he’d known that the Lowry which the Government commissioned in the 1960’s ended up in the British Embassy in Moscow during the Brezhnev era….   This isn’t quite what the myth of the northern painter of the Common Man spurned by a snobbish metropolitan art establishment would suggest.

This isn’t to say that Lowry didn’t potentially have issues with that establishment.   His politics were a bit problematic for a mostly left-leaning artistic world.  His employment as a rent collector was potentially even more of an issue and perhaps helps to explain why Lowry was notoriously evasive and unreliable over details of his biography.    By all accounts he was good at his job and popular with his “clients”; rent collectors were in practice rarely the hated and hateful figures of romantic middle class leftist demonology.  They may not have been part of the community they worked in but they needed to know its ins and outs very well indeed if they were going to do their job effectively.   One gets a sense of that slightly distanced understanding in Lowry’s art. 

 He never gives a sense of belonging to the world that he paints but he knows its codes and concerns and pleasures; the fever van taking a diphtheria sufferer on what was usually a one way trip to hospital (with the consequence that the family’s goods and possessions might well be impounded or even destroyed), punch ups in the streets, demonstrations, funfairs and football matches (Lowry was a football enthusiast but he doesn’t seem to be part of the crowd watched as its members head to the stadium).   

He was an outsider, of course, though the economic distance between him and the better off part of his clientele probably wasn’t enormous (socially matters were rather different in the England of the 1920’s and 30’s with its minutely calibrated social hierarchies).   His family were rather precariously lower middle class.  His mother, to whom he was very close, was musically talented and narrowly missed out on a career as a concert pianist.  His father was an insurance company clerk.   The family’s financial circumstances deteriorated during Lowry’s childhood and they had to move into a barely respectable district only just a cut above the slums where he collected his rents.   One can speculate on how that insecurity may have affected him.  It may well have persuaded him to go on with the rent collecting (a nice secure job) rather than risking becoming a full time artist or even a newspaper art critic for a paper whose overall political line he probably didn’t greatly relish.   It didn’t give him the embittered hatred of the working classes which often afflicted people with his background; he was a high Tory, not a Fascist, and prepared to see the good in people whose politics he didn’t share.  He was, for instance, supportive of the National Health Service when that was largely decried on the right, but never bought into the slightly millennial rhetoric which surrounded much of the Attlee Government’s social policy, suggesting that the people he dealt with weren’t really any happier as a result. 

The sense of personal remoteness and detachment in his work goes even wider, though.   This emerged in the works he painted during and immediately after the Second World War.  Although he was appointed an official War Artist and did his bit as an Air Raid Warden and Fire Watcher one doesn’t have the sense of personal solidarity with the wider national struggle which emerges from, say, Stanley Spencer’s paintings and drawings of workers in the Clydeside shipyards.   Uniforms are surprisingly thin on the ground in his depiction of VE day celebrations, and the joy seems a bit restrained, even in the pub.    

One of his rare works focused on people (rather than people set in and somewhat dwarfed by the industrial environment) was a cruelly Otto Dix-like depiction of disabled men (presumably war victims, judging from the date), which occasioned some negative comment when it was painted.   There are complexities here which weren’t really explored by the show.

Nor did really get into the oddly static and timeless nature of Lowry’s work.   As seems to be the wont of the current Tate Britain management, he was fitted into a discourse of modernism.   This is a bit odd; his artistic training might have looked radical in certain British contexts but Valette was hardly cutting edge by French standards.  I suppose it was his subject matter which sees him cast as a painter of modern urban life.   In a way this is fair enough- but Lancashire in the 1920’s and 1930’s wasn’t exactly the new world which it appeared in the days when Engels knew the city (and went foxhunting in the countryside, though strangely he never appeared in hunting pink in any of the depictions of him in Red Square during the Communist era….).   Even in Lowry’s youth it was already a bit backward looking, not quite the industrial museum it had become by the 1950’s and 1960’s but beginning to struggle in a world powered by electricity rather than steam where other parts of the world were increasingly able to produce textiles at competitive prices.   A genuine painter of modernity in, say, 1935 would have been depicting the new light industries somewhere like Slough or the nascent suburbia inhabited by Richmal Crompton’s William Brown.  To the extent that Lowry ever painted a simple vision of the world that he saw around him (and I don’t for one moment think he did), it was a melancholy depiction of a region which didn’t just have serious social problems in its own time but was also increasingly failing to come to terms with a changing world.

It is noticeable just how far the series of large scale townscapes like the one at the top which he painted in the 1950’s elide out the changes which would already have been visible in the world around him.   Motor cars and power lines are visible but wedged awkwardly in among the rows of terraced houses, scrubbly open spaces, polluted waterways and factory chimneys of the by then traditional northern cityscape.   Admittedly these landscapes are rarely meant to depict anywhere specific (and there are a few sly jokes buried away in some of the paintings which underline their generic nature) but they contain remarkably little visible recognition of the changes afoot when they were being painted.   Slum clearance had begun even before 1939 but became a major preoccupation of post war governments, both at national and local level.   New theories of urban development were given considerable play, not always with happy results.  Lowry’s native Salford apparently had one of the highest levels of demolition and rebuilding of any English city.  None of this is visible in Lowry’s work, which remains resolutely fixed in the 1930’s at the latest (it is, incidentally, intriguing that several of his later large scale works involve depictions of mining villages in South Wales, which almost certainly saw a lot less modernisation than the urban north of England in this period- see below).   Lowry admitted as much in interviews and I suspect it accounts for a large part of his popularity.   One hears a lot about rural nostalgia as a factor shaping appreciation of certain British artists (rarely seen as a positive) but Lowry seems to have become increasingly an artist of urban nostalgia, appreciated (perhaps slightly guiltily) by the upwardly socially mobile children and grandchildren of the matchstick men and woman in his paintings for whom the urban past represents a kind of authenticity.  I suspect the old Tory would be rather amused.