Page 28 - Studio International - November 1966

of involvement with the human life which they nearly post faintly shrouded in fog. With these apparently artless
always contain, truly moving. devices he has created a whole street corner which he
It follows on from this that the other main aspect of then populates with a group of children or old people and
Lowry's work is his handling of people. For Lowry, there a dog or two, so that one is aware not only of life in general
are crowds, there are small groups, and there are indi- going on but also of the lives of a few individual people.
viduals. All are clearly differentiated and, as a rule, the When Lowry does an actual close-up and concentrates
fewer people there are in the picture, the odder they on a single person he creates the impression, despite the
become. In the crowd scenes we have an apparently end- fact that he maintains that he has actually seen all these
less number of homunculi, each clearly differentiated, grotesques, that these people are only half real, the other
streaming across the canvas; bowler-hatted matchsticks, half being clearly imaginary. Woman with a beard, for
stiff-legged, stiff-tailed toy dogs, long-haired children— example, patently smacks of the semi-mythical bearded
all put on the canvas with, from a distance, a miraculous lady of the fairground; illusion and reality mingle to
sense of detail and, close to, an almost devastating sim- produce a fascinating and compelling image in which we
plicity and economy. These miniature figures strike atti- can only half believe but, such is Lowry's skill and deep
tudes and move about with an abundant sense of life human sympathy that we are wholly compassionate on
but they are, ultimately, decorations on the panoramic her behalf. She, like his cripples, may be grotesque but
friezes of the industrial scenes. she is not funny.
When Lowry, as it were, moves the camera closer to When I last saw Lowry this summer he told me about
The Cripples 1949 reveal a group of figures, he reserves his economy for the the conversations he holds with the dead-beats and dere-
Oil on canvas background, using one horizontal black line to represent licts whom he encounters and who inspire a number of
30 x 40 in.
City of Salford Art Gallery a kerb and a blackish vertical shadow to indicate a lamp- his drawings and paintings. These men fascinated him

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