Forget the matchstick men

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.