Lowry at Tate Britain: acceptance at last?

Tate Britain has long had a significant holding of works by L S Lowry, but seemingly has been reluctant to show them, prompting the Burnley-born actor Sir Ian McKellen to demand recently that either Lowry gets greater acknowledgement or the collection should be given to Manchester Art Gallery. Given the time these things take, the current major retrospective cannot be a direct response, but it was about time the Tate overcame its lack of enthusiasm, no doubt helped by the recent reassessment of 20th-century British painting (see previous posts). I went to the last major London show, as long ago as 1976 at the Royal Academy - I remember chatting to an artist (not an Academician) who was rather dismissive of Lowry, a common metropolitan view then, though then as now Lowry was highly popular with the general public and the RA show was a great success. No doubt to balance Lowry's populist reputation, the Tate show's intellectual chops are maximised by being curated by the heavyweight Marxist art historian T J Clark and his wife, in spite of Clark's major work being on Manet.

So is the exhibition turned worth the wait? On the whole yes, even though I'm not Lowry's greatest fan. It starts with a roomful of what are claimed to be among Lowry's strongest works; I'm not sure I agree, as eight of the eleven works are post-WW2 when I feel his work was beginning to decline. The blurb claims they show Lowry's "appetite for the life of the crowd" - well, yes, maybe, but this was mostly participation at a distance, more interest in the crowd as a crowd, not as a group of individuals.

The next room emphasises Lowry's links with France. His tutor was a talented French Impressionist, Alphonse Vallette, who wanted to take Impressionism to industrial Britain and taught in Manchester for many years. (I recall seeing his works for the first time in Manchester Art Gallery, and being disconcerted by his Impressionistic images of Manchester - very different from the more familiar Paris of course.) Lowry also exhibited in Paris more than in London in the early part of his career, and paintings by French artists are shown as points of influence - I wasn't entirely convinced except in the case of the two Utrillos, which were well worth seeing in their own right (La Porte St Martin  and La Place du Terte, both from 1910). Clark makes a direct link between Lowry and 19th-century French art's interest in modern life, via Vallette, but the chronological chart outside the exhibition says that Lowry himself said it was after seeing the play Hindle Wakes in 1912 that he "first saw beauty in the industrial landscape". I think Clark is being too Francophile: no doubt Lowry was influenced by France, but I think his real starting point was British.

For me, the following rooms showing Lowry's streetscapes of the inter-war years were the real meat of the show. Lowry was famously a rent collector in poor areas of Manchester until his retirement, and, as someone who knew him has pointed out, his was the viewpoint of the rent man - always in the street, never over the threshold. But there was plenty going on in the street, including evictions, suicides, fist fights and sickness, as well as in public areas like football fields, fairgrounds and factory gates. Later, his depictions of these scenes tended to repetition and exaggeration, but the paintings of this period depict working class life truthfully, unsentimentally and with flashes of humour. This is what makes them such a vibrant record of a way of life and a landscape which has now vanished. These rooms also demonstrate Lowry's drawing skill - he is no unskilled naive as has sometimes been thought.

Lowry painted other subjects, which apparently show him in a different light, but the only aspect of this shown here is a group of landscapes produced in the 1950s; these are impressive but not in my view outstanding.

Before I visited the show, I was in a commercial gallery which was selling works by Lowry (mainly prints), and a salesman was assuring an Antipodean visitor that the Tate exhibition had attracted international attention and raised prices. I suspect he was right and that Lowry has attained secure mainstream status; he will join the other 20th-century British artists who have been accepted on their own terms at last, their failure to embrace abstract modernism now forgiven.

The Fever Van,  1935