Ann Bermingham reviews Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life

T. J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner. Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life. Tate Publishing: London, 2014. 224 pp.

22 February 2016

The Removal, 1928, oil paint on canvas, 43.1 x 53.3 cm.

In Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, a catalogue published to accompany a groundbreaking 2013 exhibition at the Tate, T. J. Clark and Anne M. Wagner argue that L. S. Lowry is unique among twentieth-century modernists in that he sought the modern in the physical fabric of the industrial city and never deviated from his mission to represent, what he called, “the industrial scene.” Their title alludes to Clark’s Manet and the Painting of Modern Life, a book that forever changed the way we see Impressionism; like that book this one is similarly transformative. In the Édouard Manet book, Clark observed how Baron Haussmann’s Paris obliterated the working class quarters of the city to replace them with new urban spaces in which civic life was performed as spectacle. As Clark and Wagner show here, Lowry substitutes fog, thick with particulate matter, for dappled sunlight, and mills, canals, and viaducts for the impressionists’ cafés, regattas, and picnics, describing in the process a civic life both vital and deprived. In Clark’s view Lowry’s painterly style is “modest, constricted, monotonous, awkward, ‘obvious’; and world historical because of these qualities. Because they are the qualities of the social order . . . that Lowry chose to confront.”

Lowry was instinctively a draftsman. Not only did he conceive his compositions through drawing but the final results in oil remain monochromatic essays in black, white and, especially, gray. If Franz Hals was famous for his hundreds of shades of black, Lowry should be renowned for his infinite variations on gray. Wagner pays particular attention to Lowry’s drawings helpfully situating them within his oeuvre and using them to illuminate his development as an artist. Her essay tracks his transformation from a provincial artist to “Britain’s most popular painter” observing the irony that no one could possibly belong to the world he paints “except as a cypher.”

Unlike contemporary America urban realists, such as John Sloan and Raphael Soyer, Lowry is never sentimental. A life long Tory, Lowry once confessed, “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.” Through his laconic primitivism we view the pageant of the street from afar watching as his toy-like cities with their tiny inhabitants dissolve into strong graphic patterns. This is not to say that if we look closely enough we won’t find stunning insights into the working life of early- and mid-twentieth-century Manchester. In The Removal the heartbreakingly modest domestic goods of a tenement dweller behind in the rent are set out on the street. In Fever House neighbors anxiously gather in front of their insalubrious row houses to watch the authorities remove a victim. Or in The Empty House, a red brick Georgian ruin recalls the century that brought the industrial revolution to Manchester creating the present-day wasteland. All is depicted with a cool, detached nuance that Clark sees not as aesthetic but as “investigative.”

Thanks to Clark and Wagner’s compelling analysis, Lowry’s industrial scenes must now be reckoned in any account of modern painting.