Lake Landscape, 1950, The Whitworth Art Gallery, The University of Manchester, ©The Estate of L.S.Lowry, 2011
“Some critics have said that I turned my figures into puppets, as if my aim were to hint at the hard economic necessities that drove them. To say the truth, I was not thinking very much about the people. I did not care for them in the way a social reformer does. They are part of a private beauty that haunted me. I loved them and the houses in the same way: as part of a vision.”
These are the words of LS Lowry, the Lancashire-based painter whose works go on display at Nottingham University's Lakeside Arts Centre this week and whose enduring popularity is reflected in the crowds of art-minded patrons buying tastefully-bound commemorative books at Tuesday's opening. But before we see the man himself, a companion work by Stefan Boness entitled 'Southern Street' features photographs of 'tinned-up' houses (those boarded up with metal sheets) in one of Lowry's favourite stomping grounds, Salford that serves as an aperitif. Although related and responding to Lowry's favoured urban morass and decay, the banality that comes to life in paint fails to ignite when seen through a camera lens and after a few wrong turns and a pleasant detour through the archaeology room, Lowry finally appears.
The paintings are presented in no real order but the more one sees the more one gets the feeling for what Lowry was looking for and wanted to show his audience. It begins with the more typical works, an isolated house on a Salford street, a landscape framed by imposing industrial chimneys and swept into expression by grey smoke. The famous 'Head of a Man', used in much of the publicity for the event, depicts an ageing, Gothic figure with trademark bloodshot eyes and enigmatic expression, a wispy beard holding onto a sagging, work-worn face. As with many of the other personal works Lowry created, there is more than a little self-portrait in here, although less pronounced than 'The Fire Watcher' which is an explicit representation of the turmoil and self-examination that the artist put himself through.
Lowry's seascapes are less well-known than his matchstick people but appear as most striking and immediate. Here the solitude that plays some part in all his work is the dominant note and the stark white and grey colouring is broken into by a thin horizon, giving the pictures a Rothko-esque power that radiates out towards the viewer. As mentioned before there are enough surprises here to delight even the most hardened Lowry fan, especially in the second room, which contains a number of sketches and charcoal drawings as well as a entirely beautiful but totally uncharacteristic nude. There is also 'The Bedroom', which doesn't fall into either the portrait or landscape category but is an inside-room view, all thick lines and deliberate colour a la Van Gogh's 'Bedroom in Arles'.
Head of a Man, 1938,
The Lowry Collection, Salford,
©The Lowry Collection, Salford.
As challenging as some of the images are, Lowry's subjects never seem totally lost or mechanised, indeed in many pictures they seem full of life and society, particularly 'The Pond' which combines the life of the crowd with the agelessness of the natural surroundings and the creeping death of industrialisation in the background. There is also 'The Cripples', another of Lowry's surprises, which confounds expectations and presents bending, surreal figures and faces of disabled protagonists, creating a nightmarish circus in which the spectator doesn't know whether to smile or condemn.
Thanks to some skilful curatorship and a set
of accompanying paragraphs next to each painting, it's possible to trace the progression the artist found throughout his working life, as well as being able to pick out the influences of expressionism and modernism in the fusion of
figure and background as well as his colouring and geometry.
By bringing such an intelligent selection of works by a world class artist to Nottingham, and presenting them in such a way as to give even the casual Lowry fan a deeper insight into one of the most complex and quintessentially English artists, the Lakeside Gallery has succeeded in presenting Lowry's “private beauty” to an eager public, and anyone that has admired our own dark city and the noble creatures waiting outside of Ladbrokes at quarter to nine on a Tuesday morning should carry themselves over to the Lakeside, to see Laurence Lowry.
Lowry continues at Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre until 5th February
Thumbnail image (The Manchester Man, 1936/7) and main image (Coming from the Mill, 1930) are property and copyright of the ©The Lowry Collection, Salford.
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