Lowry [antikvár]

LOWRY This century has seen a breach open between contemporary art and the general public. Avant-garde, particularly abstract, art has been met with widespread incomprehension and abuse, and the art pundits have done little to allay the public's distrust. Lowry has both suffered and benefited ft-om this division in taste: he has achieved a unique popularity with the general pubUc, while to many in the art world his work still appears crude and vulgar, too easily accessible and spuriously commercial. Lowry stands outside the mainstream development of modern British painting, partly because he had no desire to leave Manchester to work in London, and partly because the art world did not respond to his early overtures. He felt rejected, and his bitterness was perhaps reflected in the dogged way he chose to develop those aspects of his art which were guaranteed to offend refined aesthetic taste, his slapstick humour and his gauche simplicity of design. When in difficulties with a painting, Lowry preferred to ask the advice of someone completely untrained in art, rather than an expert. He gleaned a great deal from the paintings of children and amateurs - even, in one known instance, fifting a composition, Boy with a Stomach-ache, direct from a design by his friend, the amateur painter, the Reverend Geoffrey Bennett. Lowry provides a rare instance of a fully trained artist of genius choosing to develop his art, not in the atmosphere of mainstream artistic debate, but in the no less rigorous climate of popular opinion. Lowr^' had an ambivalent attitude towards his isolated artistic position. He wanted the understanding and stimulus that could be gained from the company of other artists, yet he knew that the true direction of his art lay outside the main current of artistic opinion. After suffering a particularly fierce attack from the artist-critic Michael Ayrton, Lowry had the satisfaction of seeing a painting by himself fetch ten times the price of an Ayrton in the same auction. But popular success was not enough. Lowry's continual concern at the end of his life was 'Will I live? Will I live?' He wished earnestly to be remembered and judged as an artist, to know if his paintings would survive the test of time. The paradox of his position is summed up in his famous statement, recorded by Maurice Collis in 1951: 'My whole happiness and un-happiness were that my view was hke nobody else's. Had it been like, 1 would not have been lonely, but had I not been lonely, I should not have seen what I did.' Predictably enough, commentators on Lowry have viewed him from the popular angle, concentrating on his personality rather than on his artistic achievement. The above quotation has been used, ad nauseam, to prove 'the loneliness of L. S. Lowry', when it in fact refers to Lowry's isolation as an artist rather than as a man. Had the alUteration not been quite so neat, it is doubtful if the phrase would have fingered. Lowry was not lonely, but a loner. He was a passionate individual who came to terms with his experience not by taking action but by detaching himself from life and spreading it before him in the operating theatre of his art. Lowry was born in Old Trafford, Manchester, in 1887, and died a few miles away in Glossop in 1976. The industrial landscape of this northern conurbation circumscribed his whole life, but he lived long enough to see the sights of his youth - the gargantuan mills, the tapering chimneys, the rows of back-to-back terraces - give place to towering office-blocks and dual carriageways. His art can to some extent be