Here at last is a book that takes L. S. Lowry’s art seriously and treats it with the scholarly attention it deserves.
Here at last is a book that takes L. S. Lowry’s art seriously and treats it with the scholarly attention it deserves. Tom Rosenthal has been a life-long admirer of Lowry’s work, spending his formative years in Greater Manchester and even interviewing the old curmudgeon for Radio 3 in the 1960s. One of his aims in this book is to dispel the various myths that have grown up around Lowry and his critically underestimated art. It has become fashionable in the art world to look down on Lowry as a naive painter who could only paint industrial landscapes full of ridiculous scampering matchstick people. Nothing could be further from the truth: actually Lowry was a deeply sophisticated artist with an enviable precision of drawing (if you look closely, his figures are subtly individuated, not generic) and with a far greater range of subject than is generally supposed. It’s high time his work was thoroughly reassessed.
One of the many snobbish prejudices against Lowry arises from his wide popularity amongst people who are not normally considered to understand painting; another is due to the huge sums his works regularly fetch in the auction rooms. Both are ludicrous and contemptible. It is a terrible indictment of the Tate Gallery that Lowry’s paintings are so rarely on view at the museum, and that there has been no major retrospective of his work in London since the Royal Academy’s exhibition of 1976, except for a touring show which came to the Barbican in 1988. The public deserves the chance to see a proper representation of Lowry’s work, sympathetically selected and challengingly presented.
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