There seems to be something of a Lowry moment occurring in London, with the recent seven-figure sales at Sotheby’s and now Richard Green inaugurating a grand new space with an exhibition of 38 of his works, including some judicious loans. There are even rumours that Tate Britain, after increasing pressure from Lowry’s champions, may capitulate and announce a retrospective – their failure to do so sooner having often been interpreted as a kind of cosmopolitan, elitist, art-establishment snub to this most popular, most indelibly northern of British artists.
Yet, in truth, this notion of Lowry as an inherent outsider has always been something of a myth – one of several that this exhibition manages to subtly undermine. For a start, he was very far from the naïve Sunday painter he was often stereotyped as being – rather, his naiveté was a conscious stylistic choice, and in the early works from the late ’30s and ’40s you can see him experimenting with various different, primitivist modes, figuring out the best way to capture the raw, spectral energy of Salford’s industrial landscape, its towering smokestacks and huddled terraced housing. And as for the ‘matchstick men’ label – well, there’s enough individuation in his figures to put that lazy stereotype to rest, with the clearly discernable miniskirts and bobbed hairdos of ’60s women’s fashions, for instance, or the heavy boots of Glasgow dockers (in one of the very few works not set in his native Lancashire).
On the other hand, it’s clear that Lowry lacks the visionary intensity of fellow top-sellers such as Freud and Bacon – particularly judged from today’s perspective, when his vision of industrial alienation feels rather nostalgic, almost quaint. Only in a few, late portraits does he achieve anything genuinely startling – when he allows the distinguishing, all-encompassing whiteness of his backgrounds to seep into his figures’ faces, lending them a weirdly sepulchral, almost gothic sense of isolation.