THE NORTHERN NINCOMPOOP A homage to L.S. Lowry

Homage to L.S. Lowry
Oil on board, 500mm x 425mm 2007/19

When I was a child we'd occasionally have holidays with my uncle Bill who lived in Manchester. This huge, industrial city was a bit of a shock to me. Although my uncle lived in the pleasant suburb of Urmston his chemist shop was in deepest Salford. This was a grimy, working class area full of cotton mills where the sky was a permanent, sulphurous yellow. Manchester was full of smoke blackened buildings, soaring chimneys and stagnant canals. When it rained (which it did, frequently) every drop contained a black nucleus of soot.

In 1959, when I was eleven years old, my parents took me to see the L.S. Lowry retrospective exhibition in the Manchester City Art Galleries. One work caught my attention. I gazed at it for ages and my parents had to drag me away. This was a simple depiction of a brick wall with a man lying on his back smoking a cigarette. His briefcase with the initials L.S.L. and an umbrella leaned against the wall. It seemed a crazy, comic, almost rebellious image.

Man lying on a wall, 1957

407mm x 509. The Lowry, Salford

This was the first one man show of oil paintings I had ever seen and did not know that Lowry was a controversial figure that did not fit into any convenient mould. He was dismissed by academic painters as being amateur or a naïve painter of matchstick men. The younger abstractionists who wanted to dehumanise painting hated the sight of his working class crowds. He was well aware of the snobbery of the art world and kept it a secret that he worked full time as a rent collector for a property company.

He wanted to go to art school but his parents couldn't afford the fees. As well as this his mother was permanently dismissive of his persistent attempts to be an artist. Lowery, however, did not let these circumstances stop him and attended evening classes for twenty years. He must have clocked up many more hours in the life class than full time students attending the professional course. Inevitably, his development was slow. The greatest influence on him was the life drawing tutor, the Frenchman Adolphe Valette. He was an impressionist who painted attractive, atmospheric views of Manchester with the eyes of an outsider. It must have seemed to Lowry that he too, could make something of the Manchester scene.

It wasn't till the late 1980's that I caught up with Lowry's work again. I had a print in an exhibition in Stirling and in the next room was an exhibition of Lowry's drawings.

I really didn't know what to expect but came away very impressed. By labouring for many years in the life class and sketching out of doors he became a master of pencil drawing. He was able to achieve tremendous atmosphere and sense of space, almost a sense of colour by using a soft pencil and smudging. He also worked on compositional drawings. In these we can see his distinctive style emerging. The background mills rise out of the murky gloom and groups of people pour out or assemble on the street. The figures are in a stiff, linear style without tone or shadows. They are not yet mature Lowry's, but the composition is there.

Why did Lowry paint his industrial scenes? Most artists of the era painted immediately attractive subjects like still lives or landscapes while Lowry's paintings of the early 1920's have titles like 'Pit Tragedy', 'The Funeral', 'The Removal', 'The Lodging House' and 'Sudden Illness.' Lowry liked to tell the story of how he had his vision. He had been plodding round Salford collecting rents for several years and was quit used to it, even blind to the place. One afternoon he just missed his train and the guard cheekily winked at him as it pulled away. This made him angry but as he waited a big cotton mill opened its gates and hundreds of workers poured out. He had seen this many times before but this was like seeing it for the first time. He saw the poetry, the strangeness, even absurdity and wanted to paint it.

One day a critic mentioned to him that he liked his work but thought it a bit dark and mucky. Lowry was annoyed  but determined to correct this. He experimented with a technique used by the Pre Raphaelites of painting into a wet, white ground. This became the key to his mature style. He was a great theatre goer and he used the line of a pavement or roofs of houses along the bottom of the picture which acted like the edge of a stage. The actors, sometimes great crowds, go through their ant like routines in front of the backdrop of factories, chimneys, polluted rivers and mean houses.

Lowry was lucky with his friends. After an exhibition in Manchester during 1921 (which sold nothing) he was invited to Sunday lunch by the director of the Oldham Art Gallery. His wife, Daisy Jewel, worked for a picture framing and art logistics company in London. She was able to place Lowry's work in exhibitions throughout the country and several times in Paris. His work was hardly ever selling but was at least being seen. Unfortunately his father died in 1932 leaving large debts which Lowry somehow managed to pay off. Worse was to follow. His hypochondriac mother took to her bed and remained there till her death seven years later. Lowry was at his wits end but Daisy's persistence finally payed off. In 1938 she learned that the company would receive a visit from one of the directors of London's most prestigious commercial galleries, Reid and Leferve. She knew how to bait a hook and left a few Lowry's lying about. He loved the work and offered Lowry a one man show in 1939. Sixteen of the twenty paintings sold.

This was a tremendous boosts for Lowry and he was offered another exhibition in two years time. This was not to be. A failed artist in Germany embarked on the invasion of Europe and the gallery shut up shop for the duration. Lowry continued to paint, plod around Salford collecting rents and at night take his turn at fire watching. Manchester was badly bombed and in 1943 he was awarded some recognition by being created an official war artist.

In the 1940's and 50's his paintings are often larger and more panoramic. He looks down on great swathes of industrial city with the population scurrying about in the foreground. He still had a wide range of ingredients but was beginning to repeat himself. He admitted that his heart was no longer in these big scenes and concentrated on what he called his 'grotesques', unusual characters or groups of figures with only minimal background. Some of these are quite startling.

 His world too, had changed dramatically. The Salford he knew in the 1920's and 30's had either been bombed or swept away by the developers and replaced by high rise flats and motorways. By then, however, the recognition he craved had begun to come. He was awarded various academic distinctions and different British governments showered him with honors, including a knighthood, which he always refused. His main concern in his later years was "Will I live?" That is, would his work survive after his death and still be recognized and critically acclaimed. He needn't have worried for In reality he had become one of Britain's most popular artists. His graphic technique made excellent reproductions and these satisfied an upsurge of nostalgia for a world that was being swept away. After old Salford had been demolished a new art center was constructed called 'The Lowry', with theatres and a gallery containing many Lowry paintings. 

As for the snobbish art world, the critics are still divided. In 2014, thirty eight years after his death, the Tate Gallery in London held a major Lowry exhibition. The outspoken art critic Brian Sewel hated Lowry's work, (including everything north of the Thames) and had previously called Lowry a nincompoop. To be fair, he saw his job as a critic was to attack artists and burst their overblown bubble of reputation. He dismissed Lowry's paintings as being inept, tedious, repetitive, lackluster, and stuck in a rut. Some of this may be fair, but most of his tirade was directed not at Lowry or the paintings but at the two, unfortunate curators of the exhibition who knew nothing about Lowry and also the  blossoming nostalgia cult that had grown up around Lowry's paintings. The art market has no such reservations. Humble lithographic reproductions sell for thousands of pounds and in 2011 the Lowry painting of Piccadilly Circus sold for five million pounds. Lowry would have split his sides laughing if he'd lived to witness that. Not bad for a northern nincompoop!

Douglas Gray, woodcut, 2009
32 x 23 cms.