Lowry Reconsidered

Like a cat grown tired of being petted, winter finally extended her claws at the beginning of the month and nipped us with the first serious snow of the season.

Still, a couple of days later, Sunday lived up to its name and turned sunny and warm; the roads clear enough to set out to catch the last day of the LS Lowry exhibition at the University of Nottingham's Djanogly Art Gallery.

A Lowry-esque Scene: Sledging in University Park, Nottingham

I've always found Lowry's work hard to like, though it's a prejudice that's mellowed with the passage of time. Maybe it's a generational thing for those of us who grew up in the drab austerity of post-WW2 Britain. We wanted to move on and have the good things that the wages of full employment could give us: a life of opportunity, colour, music, sex and fashion. There was little sympathy for the unremittingly dystopian vision of Lowry's art, although it was a world that still existed, at least visually, well into the late 1960's. I remember being in a minibus full of students going to Manchester's Whitworth Gallery to see the Northern Young Contemporaries exhibition, singing Ewan MacColl's  "Dirty Old Town" as we drove through an urban scene that could have been designed by Lowry himself.

That was probably 1966/7, but sadly, the stereotype of the North of England as a land of decayed industrial cityscapes still exists among the ignorant today. Fragments of a hacked conference call between Scotland Yard and the FBI, released by Anonymous and published on the Guardian website earlier this month started almost straight away with a cockney-sounding London copper describing Sheffield as a 'Khasi' (army slang for lavatory). The man has clearly never been to the place if he can describe it in those terms. Coming from the inhabitant of a city once known as the "Great Wen", it seemed particularly ironic.

The Lake, 1937. Oil on Canvas

Lowry's paintings help perpetuate this lazy myth. Given that the reality that inspired his work has largely disappeared, his paintings should perhaps now be regarded as historical documents, symbolic but essentially fictional representations of a social scene that emerged in the Industrial Revolution and which faded at least a generation ago. While urban decay and deprivation are still with us, they now have characteristic forms that were not present when Lowry made his paintings.

I was prompted to see the show by a drawing reproduced in the exhibition publicity. Called "The Supper Bar", it is a busy street scene rendered in pencil outline with minimal use of tone to suggest chimney smoke and other atmospheric effects. My main interest was in his use of perspective. 

The buildings are rendered in terms of their height and width, with only about three places where depth is indicated. Like the figures in the foreground, the buildings are drawn to a more or less consistent scale, irrespective of distance from the viewer. Overall, pictorial depth is suggested by placing the nearest features at the bottom of the picture, rising to the most distant at the top.

The impression of compressed depth this gives is similar to the effect of photographing a distant scene through a long telephoto lens. A good example would be one of Andreas Feininger's early telephoto shots of New York. He was one of the first photographers to recognise and exploit this visual effect.

Although the eye level/horizon line seems to be level with the upper windows in the first row of buildings in Lowry's drawing, this may be because that is the centre of the picture. The position of a viewpoint is purely theoretical in fact because, like an orthographic engineering drawing, the absence of a third dimensions means there is no horizon at all.

The use of a high viewpoint combined with vernacular subject-matter suggests an affinity with the images in traditional Chinese and Japanese art and their distinctive use of axonometric projection as a form of perspective. Japonism was still highly influential in the early twentieth century and one may be certain that it was very familiar to Lowry. Echoes of Ukiyo-e (pictures of the floating world) Japanese woodblock prints can be seen, I think, in a simple watercolour sketch such as "Estuary", below.

The Estuary, 1956-59. Watercolour on paper

Despite the prejudice against Lowry's work that I admitted to above, I found the exhibition a fascinating and rich source of ideas and themes that would repay more detailed study. A more detailed analysis begs to be made of the plotting and placing of the individual elements in his work; the grid like structure that fixes and holds fast the generally busy and chaotic subject matter. There is also the role of satire in his work in the context of early/mid twentieth century social change.

A Fight, c 1935. Oil on canvas

This painting, for example reminds me irresistibly of Joseph Lada's comical illustrations to Jaroslav Hasek's post-WW1 satire The Good Soldier Schweik, even down to the dark horizontal line of the kerb echoing Lada's use of a thick black line to represent the ground plane. This is one of those illustrations, printed on the cover of my battered 1946 US Penguin edition:

I feel it would be of great interest to evaluate Lowry's work in the context of social satire in the early/mid twentieth century, rather than categorise it as an aberration in the development of a modernist movement in the UK.

The work in the exhibition was drawn from the LS Lowry Collection at The Lowry, Salford, on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal. Another place to be added to the list of places that must be seen.