A Peopled Landscape: An Appreciation of L.S. Lowry

33 KLEE EARL KLEE A PEOPLED LANDSCAPE: AN APPRECIATION OF L.S. LOWRY The vagaries of the artistic marketplace should be fit subjects for critical scrutiny. Here in miniature we can see mirrored the predominant concerns of an historic period, and the transformations taste undergoes. It is particularly interesting when an art of rather bleak and thematically narrow persuasion assumes a rising stature. Among the most popular and widely disseminated of British artists in the past few decades has been the painter L.S. Lowry. Lowry died in February of 1976 at age 83. Just prior to his death a major retrospective exhibition of his works was being planned at the Royal Academy of Arts, and it was finally held during the Fall of 1976.! Rather than conferring the stamp of legitimacy on his work, this exhibition simply confirmed the centrality of his labor in the British artistic landscape. Lowry was a reclusive figure who painted with hard work and concentration for thirty years before he had his first one-man exhibition. By the 1960's he was well known, and a major exhibition of his work was held at the Tate Gallery in 1966-1967. Stories about his hermit-like nature abound; but the facts of the case are that he worked for a real estate firm in Manchester most of his life, and led a rather conventional everyday existence. Most of his painting was done after hours, a tremendous tribute to his artistic commitment. Lowry's importance for us is that in his work we see one of the most powerful and sustained portrayals of industrial capitalism yet attained. It isn't by accident that his painting of an industrial town graces the front of the Penguin edition of R.H. Tawney's Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. Therefore, it is important that we prefigure Lowry's imminent American discovery and assimilation by trying to define what gives his vision its power and significance. In his rather doggedly materialist fashion, Louis Althusser argues that works of art (in particular he is referring to painting) make visible the reality of the existing ideology by establishing a distance from it.2 The work of art allows us to clearly see what we take for granted or are blind to. Without burdening Lowry's work with political or philosophical baggage it was never intended to carry, we can justly say that his painting reveals starkly the physiognomy of industrial life in the British Industrial Midlands. Functioning like a contemporary Orwell, Lowry has unwittingly become a shaper of consciousness. For many people his images of Northern working-class 34 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW life are a living reality. We come to see things his way. If a genre must be identified we could term Lowry a "regional primitive," but such a designation reveals little. His is an original vision not easily assimilated into an existing school. In trying to understand his style, names as diverse as Peter Brueghel, Edward Hopper, Edward Munch and even Charlie Chaplin come to mind. Such a recitation emphasizes the fact that elements of their concerns are shared by Lowry. But, beyond suggestiveness, they don't really help to define his work. Lowry could best be identified, in terms of thematic content, as an industrial landscape artist. This concept, particularly for those familiar with the landscape art of a Constable, strikes us as a strange incongruity. But Lowry resolves it by finding interesting tone and color in this man-made environment. Not only is the machine in the garden, but for him its presence is worth our careful scrutiny. The landscapes he seizes upon and works inside-out are desolate. But this shouldn't lead us into seeing Lowry as a Samuel Beckett-like figure, whose personal chill acts to freeze a world he is trying to render. The humanizing force of his art is his consistent portrayal of crowds and human interaction, often with much sly humor and irony of characterization. This helps to highlight the fact that his forbidding world is a product of human relationships , and not an imposed reification. His artistic signature is distinctive. Small dark figures move in ant-like directions amid looming...