Were Lowry’s pictures the story of his life?

Press, 18 December 1976, Page 16

Were Lowry’s pictures the story of his life?

The enormous L. S. Lowry exhibition which has been on show at the Royal Academy, London (334 oil paintings and drawings), was planned as a living tribute to one of Britain’s most original and extraordinary artists. But Lowry died on February 23, 1976, in his 88th year, so what was to have been a celebration of his seemingly in= exhaustible creativity became a monument to a long, strange but ever productive life.

The heart of Lowry's vision was England’s industrial north, composite scenes partly based on reality, partly heightened into fantasy. There is a deceptive air of naivety and unworldliness about these studies of belching factories or tiny working glass houses, teeming with matchlike human figures.

Lowry rarely painted a specific scene or a particular street. From tiny sketches on cigarette packs or the backs of envelopes, and from memory. he would create a world which, while impressively fashioned on a real industrial townscape, was nevertheless the expression of a highly imaginative, poetic sensibility. He once described his method of work: “This is a composite picture, built up from a blank canvas. I hadn’t the slightest idea of what I was going to put on the canvas when I started the picture, but it eventually came as you see it. This is the way I like working best.’*

Analysing the unreal, dreamlike character of what is after all so powerfully connected with reality, one becomes aware of a relentless obsession in the repetition of comic, almost dehumanised figures, the cubistic structures of factory buildings, belching chim»

neys, railway bridges, viaducts and squat dwellings, but above all in the amazing use of white. The skies and foreground are invariably depicted as creamy white, almost translucent, with pink-white walls, yellowwhite atmosphere, greywhite roads, in rich and sensuous texture, and touches of warm blues and reds in the clothing of the figures.

Lowry seems to be saying that his pictures while based on real life, are dreams, filtered by memory, and indeed more expressive of the personality and strange life of the artist than the history of industrial England.

I. awrence Stephen Lowry was born in Manchester on November 1, 1882, the only child of an estate agent; his mother was a trained pianist, a collector of antiques, and artistic — talents which she passed on to her loving son.

Thus Lowry did not belong to the industrial working-class which was to become his principal subject matter, and indeed a close study of his work reveals elements of class distance, certainly in the comic, even cruel depiction of poverty, infirmity and old age. Recognising the boy’s artistic talent, his parents arranged private lessons; and although he started work as a clerk in 1904, and later held a variety of jobs, he was a serious art student for more than 20 years.

At the Manchester Municipal College of Art he came under the powerful influence of Adolph Valette, an exponent of the Impressionist manner, and from 1915 to 1920 attended the Salford School of Art.

Although he enjoyed a sound foundation tn acade-

mic drawing and traditional oil painting he did not pass a single examination.

It was the family’s move to Salford, a more industrial area, which led to the discovery of the subject which was to occupy him for the rest of his life.

Lowry himself explained the transition: “When I was young I did not see the beauty of the Manchester streets. I used to go into the country, painting landscapes and the like.

“Then one day I was with a man in the city and he said ’Look ’; suddenly I saw the beauty of the streets and the crowd. I felt impelled to paint it. I painted what I saw; that’s all it is really . . .”

The industrial scene became a passion with Lowry; he visited England’s principal cities, walking the streets, making rapid sketches, usually in the older and poorer parts.

Back home, his notes would be expanded into full-scale drawings and only when these impressions fermented in his mind did he feel the compulsion to create his remarkable oil paintings. Lowry lived with his parents'until they died — his father in 1932, his mother in 1939 — just before his first important London exhibition.

Previously he had taken part in mixed shows until, in 1938, the director of the Lefevre Gallery saw some of his work at the framer, which led to a lifelong association with the well known London dealer.

Up till then Lowry had sold little of his work. The family supported his artistic efforts, but he worked as a rent collector for a Manchester firm from 1910 to 1932.

From 1939 Lowry lived alone in a stone cottage outside Manchester, the sitting room a replica of his parents’ home, his pencil portraits of them on the walls.

He occasionally painted family groups, even scenes of fathers and sons arguing; these were invariably dark, gaunt and depressing, but he always insisted they were not autobiographical. One strange image, "Head of a Man With Red Eyes’’ (1936) was, he admitted, a description of the emotional stress when his father died and his mother became seriously ill. But there remains something inexplicably lonely and misanthropic about his work. “I have been called a painter of the Manchester workpeople,” he once said, “but my figures are not exactly like that . . . they are symbols of my own mood — they are myself." That is the clue: for some reason the gaunt, ugly urban landscape and the sad. misshapen, isolated figures reflected the artist’s own situation. On another occasion he admitted; “Life is a funny thing, I can’t get used to it . . . Had I not been lonely I should not have seen what I did.”

And yet again; “Strange thing, life; why are we doing it, what’s the point of the whole thing? Why? Can you answer me? What is the purpose of it? Everywhere you turn is suffering . . .”

He faced this dilemma with quizzical humour and old fashioned dignity, never talking about his own life and problems, sublimating his loneliness and isolation into works of art which are entirely original and always poignant in their profound acceptance of the human tragicomedy. j