Diminishing Returns: L.S. Lowry at Tate Britain (2013)

 

I went to Tate Britain's L.S. Lowry exhibition, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, with some anticipation, as I had seen only very few of his paintings in the flesh before. The first picture I saw on entering the first gallery room was quite engaging: a gloomy view of a church standing in a smudgy, bleak landscape, under glowering clouds. It was rather reminiscent of some German Expressionist works.

 There were some quite interesting paintings of hellish, denuded, industrial wastelands, with belching chimneys, and sulphurous pools of factory sludge, which looked like the Somme after a particularly harrowing battle. At first viewing these appeared to be metaphors for the futility and horror of warfare. But on further investigation of the exhibition it soon became clear that Lowry was not interested in metaphor. With Lowry, what you saw is what you got.

 In the same front gallery, was the first of his Breughelesque street scenes, teeming with his characteristic stick figures clomping over the cobbles and going about their cartoony business in their big, clog-shod feet. And then I saw another. And another. And another. And another. I began to resent the fact that he had arrived at this formula, and that he was so willing to continue to churn them out with such alacrity. 

 The predominantly middle-aged-to-elderly audience on the day I attended were all fawning over these particular works. I could see why: they are easy to 'get'. They demand nothing of the viewer. They have none of the troubling undercurrents of allusion or metaphor that usually attend modern art. It's easy, recognisable stuff, and in that sense, Lowry is the Pam Ayres of painting.

 The artist's technical shortcomings were everywhere evident in the exhibition. Clunky drawing marred most of the works on show - whether Lowry depicts architecture, landscapes, or figures - and he seems to have been afflicted with a kind of willful colour blindness: the predominant colour was a dull cadmium red that had been smudged into most of the otherwise monochrome images. That, and the over-use of black - the unmistakable, tell-tale sign of the amateur. One might argue that this was an intentional ploy in order to best illustrate the colourless, grim northern towns - but I think this would be to confer too much reflection and analytical skill on the artist.

 There has been a concerted effort by the curators of this exhibition to elevate Lowry to the status of the Impressionists, which seems to me a very long bow to draw. He simply doesn't stand up to this sort of comparison.

 Interestingly, the best of the paintings in the exhibition are two self-portraits, and the rather hellish 'Man with Red Eyes'. It is in these that Lowry seems to have pursued a psychological byway, which imbues the images with a power that is completely lacking in the endless cartoon-scapes of the Manchester streets.