CityReads│Industrial City Life under the Brush of L.S. Lowry

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Industrial City Life under the Brush of L.S. Lowry 

Lowry captured the Industrial Revolution in art.

T. J. Clark, Anne Wagner, 2013. Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life ,Tate Publishing, first edition.

Sources: https://www.arthistoryabroad.com/2013/08/the-painting-of-modern-life-ls-lowry-at-the-tate-britain-by-helena-roy/

https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/lowry-and-painting-modern-life

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/jun/30/lowry-modern-life-tate-review

https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/work-week-industrial-landscape-l-s-lowry

https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/blogs/think-you-know-lowry-welcome-our-blog-series

Picture source: L.S. Lowry, Industrial Landscape 1955, Oil on canvas, Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1956© The estate of L.S. Lowry

When I was preparing for a class on urban pollution of industrial Britain, I encountered with paintings by British artist L.S. Lowry. I am struck by the chimneys, smog, factories, stations and people commuting to the mills under his brush, which resonate with today’s industrial China. Here I gather what I learn about him mainly from an exhibition held in Tate Britain in London in 2013, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, and a BBC documentary on L.S. Lowry.

About L.S. Lowry

L.S. Lowry was born in Stretford, Lancashire. Many of his works depict nearby Salford and surrounding areas including Pendlebury, where he lived and worked for over 40 years. On leaving school in 1904, he began work in Manchester as a clerk with a firm of chartered accountants, studying painting and drawing in the evenings at the Municipal College of Art (1905–15), and at Salford School of Art (1915–25). In 1916, he joined the Pall Mall Property Company as a rent collector, and remained there until he retired with a full pension in 1952. Lowry’s reputation was slow to be established, it was not until 1930s that he achieved recognition for his work. Lowry rejected five honors during his life, including a knighthood in 1968, and consequently holds the record for the most rejected British honors.

Lowry’s quotes

“My ambition was to put the industrial scene on the map because nobody had done it, nobody had done it seriously.”

“When I started it on the plain canvas I hadn’t the slightest idea as to what sort of Industrial Scene would result. But by making a start by putting say a Church or Chimney near the middle of the picture it seemed to come bit by bit.”

 “What are you doing when you’re not painting?” someone asked Lowry, ‘Thinking about painting.”

"I am not an artist. I am a man who paints."

"If people call me a Sunday painter, I'm a Sunday painter who paints every day the week."

L. S. Lowry, 1964 (b/w photo), Lewinski, Jorge (1921-2008) Private Collection / © The Lewinski Archive at Chatsworth / The Bridgeman Art Library

Lowry’s paintings on industrial landscapes

Lowry is famous for painting scenes of life in the industrial districts of North West England in the mid-20th century. He developed a distinctive style of painting and is best known for his urban landscapes peopled with human figures often referred to as "matchstick men".

On 26 June 2013 a major retrospective opened at the Tate Britain in London, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life. This is the first such show held by a public institution in London since the artist’s death. In 2014 his first solo exhibition outside the UK was held in Nanjing, China.

The 2013 exhibition at Tate brings together around eighty works, the aim is to re-assess Lowry's contribution as part of a wider art history and to argue for his achievement as Britain's pre-eminent painter of the industrial city. The exhibition is curated by T.J. Clark and Anne Wagner, emeritus professors of art history at the University of California, working with Helen Little, Assistant Curator, Tate Britain.

This book accompanies a long overdue retrospective of the much-loved British painter L.S. Lowry (1887-1976).

Although Lowry's most frequent subjects were drawn from a pattern of streets he walked daily (he worked for most of his life as a rent collector), he is not straightforwardly a 'realist' artist nor really an 'impressionist' artist. For Lowry modern painting needed a mode of observation capable of representing the remaining rituals of public life: football matches and protest marches, evictions and fist-fights, workers going to and from the mill. Without his pictures, Britain would arguably lack an account in paint of the experiences of the twentieth-century working class.

Lowry devoted his life to painting the England of the Industrial Revolution and the everyday Salford of the working class. His paintings might seem narrow in range, but they are actually complex records that are hard to pin down. For many, his paintings recall powerful memories of a world that rapidly declined after the Second World War and during the later twentieth century, while for others, they continue to draw out different notions of beauty. His vision might look peculiar, but it was certainly intense.

Lowry was a landscape painter and wished to show what the industrial revolution had made of the world. To see Lowry’s works is to be transported back to aftermath of the Industrial Revolution – from its noisy beginnings to polluted wane.

If Lowry’s paintings do not give a picture of the individual, they give a scenic view of society at the time. He shows the power of industrialization when it has a shot at morphing society to suit its development.

'Oldfield Road Dwellings' (1927) by Lowry

Lowry shows the operatic clash between industrialization’s frantic chaos and the steady British calm: he is at once humorous and bleak, affectionate and despairing. Paintings of churches – such as Saint Augustine’s Church, Pendlebury (1924) – show imposing, Gothic structures masked by industry’s black smoke and dwarfed by factories’ towers, as industrial values dominate the moral: this was the age of business and social mobility.

 'Saint Augustine's Church, Pendlebury' (1924) by Lowry

A Football Match (1949) shows the integral role the Football League played in working class life from the late 19th century, and stooped men file into the stadium as they would the mill or mine.

'A Football Match' (1949) by Lowry

His idiosyncratic ‘matchstick men’ are the stars of his landscapes. He resolutely believed ‘a country landscape is fine without people, but an industrial set without people is an empty shell.’ Lithe, moribund figures are actors on the stage of industrialization. Clothed in gloomy drapes and caps, they walk with a slanting, tired intent, staring downwards as new constructions tower over them. Emotion is near-impossible to interpret, but Lowry admitted ‘they are symbols of my mood, they are myself. Natural figures would have broken the spell of my vision, so I made them half unreal.’

Coming From the Mill, L.S. Lowry, 1930, The Lowry

The Mill Scene, L.S. Lowry, 1965, The Lowry

Britain at Play, L.S. Lowry,1943, Usher Gallery

Going to Work, L.S. Lowry,1942, Imperial War Museums

A Protest March, L.S. Lowry, 1959

Ancoats Hospital Outpatients' Hall,L.S.Lowry,1952, The Whitworth

Waiting for the Shops to Open, L.S. Lowry, 1943, Manchester Art Gallery

River Scene, L.S. Lowry, 1942, Glasgow Museums Resource Centre

Excavating in Manchester,L.S.Lowry,1932, Courtesy MacConnal-Mason Gallery

There is no warmth to be found when a tidal wave of industrial values is sweeping the nation: experiencing at once society decaying and industry thriving.

'Pit Tragedy' (1919) by Lowry

Fun Fair at Daisy Nook (1953) crackles with a staccato of atypical color, and Piccadilly Circus, London (1960) blares the perpetual Coca-Cola logo, meshing the start of Americanization in post-war Britain with Lowry’s recognizable industrialization.

'Fun Fair at Daisy Nook' (1953) by Lowry

'Piccadilly Circus, London' (1960) by Lowry

Elements of this particular panorama are recognizable as real places and in their layered multiplicity create an otherworldly, dreamlike composition. Smoking chimney after smoking chimney sit atop of factory after factory, flanked by road after road. None are based on one location, but rather are amalgamated fragments of Lowry’s memory and imagination. This isn’t the history of one place, but the backdrop of all society. With soaring, stretching perspective they compound waste ground on bustling streets and industrious factories. Britain was an ordered wilderness of a society, thrown by the new industry thrust upon it.

Lowry’s retrospective imparts not only artistic spectacle, but an enlightening economic and social commentary. He was fascinated by the ‘battle of life’ and urban fabric. His vivid picture of the Industrial neglected. No other artist faced the social change so persistently and characteristically. He interpreted the change that swept over the nation in a way photographs cannot.

Lowry captured the Industrial Revolution in art, whilst others – most notably George Orwell – did so in other mediums. Boldly printed in the Tate’s rooms is this extract from The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), by Orwell. It describes the bleak, frigid, apocalyptic environment Lowry painted:

 ‘I remember a winter afternoon in the dreadful environs of Wigan. All round was the lunar landscape of slag heaps and to the north, through the passes, as it were, between the mountains of slag, you could see the factory chimneys sending out their plumes of smoke. The canal path was a mixture of cinders and frozen mud, criss-crossed by the imprints of innumerable clogs, and all round, as far as the slag heaps in the distance, stretched the “flashes” – pools of stagnant water that had seeped into the hollows caused by the subsidence of ancient pits. It was horribly cold. The “flashes” were covered with the ice the colour of raw umber, the bargemen were muffled to the eyes in sacks, the lock gates wore tears of ice. It seemed a world from which vegetation had been banished; nothing existed except smoke, shale, ice, mud, ashes and foul water.

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