Page 27 - Studio International - November 1966

deeply compassionate feeling for human beings.
Since taste in England is predominantly Metropolitan
and almost entirely Southern, Lowry has always seemed
outlandish and foreign and, above all, gloomy. People, or
rather people in the South, do not like dark satanic mills
and where there's muck there's brass and ragged children
and unemployed workers and all the other distasteful
things which have turned the placid River Trent into a
terrifying Rubicon from which no sophisticated Souther-
ner could ever return alive. Yet, if the journey is made,
one finds in industrial Lancashire, Cheshire and York-
shire grime and chimney stacks galore, a skyline pierced
by black buildings and sullied by smoke and it is pre-
cisely this that is beautiful per se and whose beauty Lowry
transmutes into artistic gold. There is no meretricious,
flashing gold, but gold there is in the formal precision of
Lowry's composition and gold in the subtle tints of those
ever-changing greyish-white skys. If one looks at one of
his most celebrated works, the Tate's The Pond of 1950,
one sees at once the formal elegance of the painting and
the almost miraculous clarity with which everything has
been packed in. There is all the panoramic sweep of the
Victorian painters Lowry so much admires in their epic
works, with none of the fustian that largely invalidates
them. Herbert Read has remarked upon the poetry of
this part of the world and it is the poetry that Lowry has
seen and recorded, sometimes in the towns and at other
times outside them as, for example, in that breathtaking
Lake Landscape of 1950. This almost monochromatic study
of mountains and water is a work of lyrical beauty and is
one of the few paintings which partly belies what I have
written above about the lack of sensuality in Lowry's
painting. Significantly it is an imaginary work.
Inevitably, however, it is the townscape to which people
turn as being most 'typical' of the artist, because to many
people Lowry spells gloom and what could be more
gloomy than Salford? I remarked above on the inherent
poetry of the sky and of the mills silhouetted against it; a
poetry for which it is actually harder to find a counter-
part in verse than in prose. The prose equivalent one
finds in, for example, Herbert Read's autobiography or
Street Scene 1961 texturally he is a dull painter in that his range of colours the mill scenes in that neglected masterpiece, his novel
Oil on canvas does not give sensual pleasure and his handling of paint The Green Child. It is, of course, a different kind of mill
14 x 10 in.
Collection: T. G. Rosenthal as a medium is such that one does not feel, as one feels in and a different county, but the northern spirit is common
the work of near contemporaries like Hitchens or the late to both and, without sinking into the fictitious glamour of
Matthew Smith, any sheer joy in painting as an end in Granadaland, there is a degree of vitality up there and a
itself. dramatic beauty which is the reverse of gloom. Lowry's
Yet, this drawback aside, Lowry is one of the most teeming townscapes, with masses of people somehow con-
accomplished and talented painters England has ever triving to support the great mills with their towering
produced. It has always been a mystery to me why chimneys, are celebrations of the vitality and of that
recognition should have come to him so late and why it stark beauty. (It is all, I suppose, a matter of taste, like,
is, even today, so qualified. To many people, Lowry is say, preferring the gaunt statuesque magnificence of the
still the quaint old buffer with the endearing North Greek actress Irene Pappas to the conventional, fluffy
Country accent who disports himself for the benefit of eroticism of the average sex-kitten.) These paintings of
television cameras which set out to make of him a northern towns, even the small ones, possess a kind of
`character' instead of revealing the artist in him. Only architectonic grandeur which derives partly from the
John Read's outstanding film has, it seems to me, truly flat, spare, almost diagrammatic way in which Lowry
got to grips with that enigmatic human and artistic applies his paint and partly from the almost visionary
personality, while only recently have people begun to manner in which he designs and composes each picture.
grasp the fundamental nature of Lowry's art; an art The best of the industrial paintings are intensely theatri-
which is rooted quite simply in two things—a poetic cal, without the melodramatic overtones that usually
vision of the topography of the industrial north and a attach to that word; they are dramatic and, in their sense
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