It's not often that I go to an art exhibition and come out liking the artist less than when I went in. But that's what happened when I visited Tate Britain's LS Lowry exhibition a couple of weeks ago.
It was the first exhibition solely devoted to the British artist's works, six rooms of his canvases, ranging from his first paintings of modern life to five large-scale views across industrial landscapes. As many newspaper articles have pointed out, this was a landmark exhibition. For years Lowry has been seen as an artist unworthy of gallery wall-space, for whatever reasons. The only previous show dedicated to him took place at the Royal Academy in 1976 just after his death.
It's certainly a superbly curated exhibition: plenty to see, but not too much; informative descriptions, clearly written; and, most importantly, Lowry's art is well contextualised. I'd never drawn a parallel between the portrayals of modern life going on in French art and what Lowry was doing. Paintings by Van Gogh and Pisarro, depicting the creeping sprawl of towns into the countryside, illustrated that new-found impulse to paint the city in all its ugly, smoggy, unforgiving reality, to document it in some way.
The exhibition has received rave reviews and has sold more tickets than any other Tate Britian exhibition. 'Riveting', says The Guardian. 'The most radical and exciting re-evaluation of a British artist I have ever encountered,' says the Financial Times. And I see their point of view. It's clearly a hugely important exhibition and if, like me, you're interested in 20th-century art, then it's one to go to. But did I enjoy it? I can't say I did. I've tried to pinpoint a few reasons why:
• Am I being a snob? One writer says Lowry had been the victim of a prejudice against overexposure, of snobbery. But actually I've always rather liked Lowry – he's a familiar part of British culture. His evocations of Northern industrial and urban landscapes are ingrained. Really, I couldn't care less whether I had seen his pictures on a place mat or postcard. I still like Vivaldi's Four Seasons. I just don't like hearing it while stuck in an infuriating telephone queue, but that's the fault of the medium not the music. But when you see the original art-work, surely it should be better than the postcard? And the so-called derogatory charge of him being a 'local artist' seems a bit irrelevant. Art rooted in a specific place can still be universal. Sibelius is hugely evocative of Finnish landscapes, but his music speaks universally.
• The Gloominess. Lowry's subject was chronicling the life of the working classes. There's a documentary feel to his work – he was capturing for posterity an age and place. It's a unrelentingly gloomy eye though: an empty house, an eviction, a funeral, a fever house. The apparent objectivity convinces the viewer that this must be reality. Without denying the importance of awakening Britain's collective social conscience to the misery of poverty, can I believe that there was no human warmth, no joy, no hope? I'm afraid not. Was Lowry himself limited in his artistic ability to capture a mood or feeling? It's interesting we rarely see faces and expressions in his paintings. And this objectivity only seems to me to be a half-truth. He rarely painted specific places, instead melding together locations and scenes he'd observed in Manchester, Salford and Stockport and elsewhere. That same distance from his subject – varied scenes all depicted in the same palette of colours, with the same distinctive matchstick figures, and using similar compositions – keeps the viewer at a safe arm's length from the gritty reality Lowry's purporting to portray. Would a great artist flinch from portraying a brutal truth?
• The repetitiveness. It's been described as a dogged loyalty to his subject. The same scenes, chimney towers, terrace houses, factories and mills painted over and over. Yes, the grimly repetitive nature of daily life comes across through this tactic. Monet, after all, painted his waterlilies over and over. Yet somehow, there's a searching quality in the French artist's work that is lost in Lowry. I didn't feel like he was a great artist searching to capture or communicate, merely that he was stuck in a rut. I could have picked pretty much any of the pictures on display and been happy to see just that one. Seeing a hundred or so on display felt like having to eat a whole packet of Jacob's cream crackers.
• Was he actually a good artist? I'm not by any means qualified to answer this, apart from that I like art and like to look at art. I'm sure for myself that he wasn't a great artist. I even wonder if he was a very good artist? His paintings seem flat, fixed, incapable of evoking an emotional reaction, un-yeilding to further interpretation. Unlike the recent Lucian Freud exhibition where you felt like you saw and understood more the more you looked; where the artist didn't merely observe but revealed; and where it was difficult to leave; LS Lowry en masse wore me down but didn't tell me much new about human life.
Funnily enough, while adding these pictures to my blog, I feel affection towards his art again. I can forgive its shortcomings when they aren't compounded through repetition. What I would like to see is a wider exhibition exploring the world Lowry was immortalising: a mixture of photography, art and writing, say Bill Brandt, LS Lowry and George Orwell.
