L.S. Lowry (1887 – 1976) is well-known for his stark black-white images of matchstick people and smoky urban scenes. He is closely associated with Manchester, his home city, which takes proud ownership of the artist and many of his works. The Lowry Centre on Salford Quays has a large collection of Lowry’s work displayed in a fascinating permanent exhibition.
Maternal Influence on Lowry
Lowry was born in Old Trafford, Stretford in 1887. His mother, who had hoped for a girl and suffered thwarted ambition to be a concert pianist, struggled to look after him when he was born. She never understood Lowry’s artistic endeavours, asking why he didn’t depict scenes more pleasant than the working-class matchstick people who hurried across his canvasses past factories spitting out smoke. Despite this, Lowry never stopped seeking his mother’s approval. It seems that even when he received critical acclaim for his artwork, and staged his first solo exhibition in 1939 at the Lefevre Gallery, Lowry longed for appreciation from his most difficult critic: his mother.
When Lowry’s father died in 1932, leaving large amounts of debt, his mother became bedridden. Lowry cared for her until her death in 1939 and used his work as rent collector to begin chipping into the debt his father left behind. The paintings Lowry produced during this difficult period are tinged with sadness. Alongside working and nursing his mother, Lowry coloured canvasses with his sense of sadness and desolation. The Lake, for example, painted in 1937, depicts a harsh and lonely landscape. Lowry’s interest in expressionism can be seen to bleed into this work. Telegraph poles become sacrificial crosses, red-stained posts turn to jagged tombstones, rusting fences make prison bars. Desolate scenes like this also foreshadow Lowry’s work as a war artist, which he would begin in 1943.
Lowry: A Trained Artist
Although it is tempting to view Lowry as a self-taught ‘naïve’ artist, he was actually trained at Manchester Municipal College of Art and Salford Royal Technical College. French Impressionist artist Pierre Adolph Valette taught Lowry at the College of Art and proved very influential. Some of Valette’s scenes of industrial Manchester such as York Street, Manchester and India House, Manchester, seem to, like Lowry’s work, encourage a fresh look at the urban landscape. In these paintings Valette turns a cityscape taken for granted into a hazy scene dipped in blue and glittering with factory lights. Famously, Lowry said of his tutor: “I cannot over-estimate the effect on me… of the coming into this drab city of Adolphe Valette, full of French Impressionists, aware of everything that was going on in Paris. He had a freshness… that was a very wonderful thing… I had not seen drawings like these before.” Lowry’s art was so unique that it resists being squeezed into a label, but certainly we can see the influence of Impressionism on his work through the influence of his tutor, Valette.
Lowry’s Inspiration from the Theatre
Lowry had a life-long interest in the theatre. The composition of some of his paintings such as Coming from the Mill, The Steps, Irk Place and Street Scene, Pendelbury disclose his love of the stage. Here we see Lowry position his buildings so as to carve a performance space for his faceless characters. Costume only tells their stories. In Coming from the Mill, the mill itself, like a painted flat on a stage, creates the fading urban backdrop. Interestingly, although Lowry’s depiction of simple urban scenes seems interested in an honest representation of truth, of how things really are for the working people of Manchester, many of his city paintings are actually a composite image of different locations. Like a stage designer, Lowry would copy and paste mills, churches, houses, towers and chimneys across the city until he had created a collage of city architecture fitting to his vision of Manchester. Like an Impressionist artist, he sought to create an image oozing with the essence of Manchester and of city life.
The theatre did not only influence the composition of Lowry’s work, it also seeped into his thinking about art. The play Six Characters in Search of an Author, written by Luigi Pirandello in 1921, explores ideas about the role of authorship. Lowry saw the play performed and was interested in what it has to say about creating art. In Pirandello’s experimental, nihilistic drama, six characters fumble through life, desperate for an author to ‘write’ their lives for them. Lowry’s The Funeral Party, shows a similar interest in characters and the artist’s control over them. In Pirandello’s play, characters struggle with the perceived necessity for a realistic setting that the invisible author will not grant them. Similarly, the funeral goers in Lowry’s painting are lost in a nihilistic white-grey background. The nameless family members stare pleadingly at us, as at their creator, Lowry, pleading with him for a story.
A Private Life – Lowry’s Mysterious Ann Paintings
Lowry’s depiction of ambiguous characters and his interest in the invisible, mysterious figure of the artist can be linked to his desire for privacy in his private life. Lowry’s Ann paintings are a good example of this. They show a young woman, as much a composite image of women in his life as his Manchester paintings are composite images of different buildings from the city. Lowry said that Ann was local 25-year old Ann Helder who sat for him, but it seems that no such woman existed. It has been suggested that Ann is made up of several women, including an art school friend and his looming mother figure. Certainly, the ambiguity provokes interest in the private life of a man who, it seems, relished privacy, and perhaps sought to create a clouded image of the mysterious artist, invisible within his own paintings.
Kate Johnson - I grew up in Rainford, St. Helens in North West England. After sixth-form, I read English at Mansfield College, Oxford and graduated in ...
