Unfamiliar connection

It was a dark and stormy night when I got to Liverpool and, on my way to the Tate at Albert Dock the next morning, a gale-force wind nearly propelled me into the Dock’s murky, choppy waters before I reached the sanctuary of the museum. Here, on a quiet lower floor, there’s a small but revelatory exhibition of little-known Lowry paintings and drawings of Liverpool. Revelatory because, while everyone is familiar with his endless explorations of Manchester and Salford, his Liverpool connection was, to me at least, unfamiliar.

The pictures are housed in what Tate calls a Focus Room, an intimate gallery which, when I was there, was full of small, attentive school groups making notes and talking quietly among themselves. This brought home to me, not for the first time, that, while Tate Britain has a superb reserve stock of Lowrys, I haven’t seen one of his paintings on the walls at Millbank for years now. Surely a British artist of Lowry’s importance cannot have been relegated to the ranks of the regional painters, fit only for Tate’s provincial outposts and the purpose-built Lowry gallery in Salford?

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Be that as it may, the Liverpool display is immensely instructive, even if the catalogue uses those weasel words ‘matchstick men’ to describe Lowry’s tiny human figures. Whatever else they are, they are not matchsticks, which, being made by a crude industrial process, are both uniform and without character. The essence of those painstakingly crafted little figures is their complete lack of sameness, their almost wilful individuality, shading over, whenever Lowry makes them more than a couple of inches tall, into grotesques and Al Read-type ‘characters’. They represent Lowry’s feeling for the halt, the lame, the eccentric, even the crazed, an embodiment of the extreme variety of humankind, and in the mid-century industrial wastelands of the north-west that Lowry recreated with such skill their impact is awesome.