This summer, Tate Britain presents a major exhibition of landscapes by the much-loved British painter L.S. Lowry – the first of its kind held by a public institution in London since the artist’s death.

Focusing on the best of Lowry’s urban scenes and industrial landscapes including Tate’s Coming Out of School 1927 and The Pond 1950 alongside significant loans, this timely and carefully selected exhibition aims to re-assess Lowry’s contribution to art history and to argue for his achievement as Britain’s pre-eminent painter of the industrial city.

Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life demonstrates Lowry’s connections and debts to French painting of the later 19th century and its determination to make art out of the realities of the emerging modern city. It reveals what Lowry learned from the strange symbolist townscapes of his French born teacher Adolphe Valette and demonstrate important parallels with the painters of modern life Vincent van Gogh, Camille Pissarro, Georges Seurat and Maurice Utrillo, drawing upon these artists’s continuous search for ways to depict the unlovely facts of the city’s edges and the landscape made by industrialisation.

For Lowry modern painting needed to represent the remaining rituals of public life: football matches and protest marches, evictions and fist-fights, workers going to and from the mill. Without his pictures, Britain would arguably lack an account in paint of the experiences of the 20th-century working class. Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life reveals how Lowry developed his structure of the city based on his personal relationship to social space. Works such as Pit Tragedy1919 (The Lowry, Salford); An Accident 1926 (Manchester Art Gallery) and The Fever Van 1935 (Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) demonstrate Lowry’s unique engagement with street life and his development of a cast of characters portraying the ways in which his subjects’ lives unfold and become unstuck, highlighting the unpredictability and unsteadiness of working-class life.

As a modern painter Lowry wished to show what the industrial revolution had made of the world, yet his dominant status in British art coincided with a disappearance of the industrialised world he engaged with. The exhibition’s final room presents for the first time all eight of his less well known, late industrial panoramas, where a leap up to ‘history painting’ size indicates the measure of his final ambition. These large panoramic landscapes fall into two groups: the first, from the 1950s, are titled, with intentional generality, Industrial Landscapes. The second, less well known group was painted in the 1960s in the mining valleys of South Wales, the heartland of the Labour movement. In both the tone is valedictory.

 http://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-britain

 

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Cast

    To form material such as molten metal, liquid plaster or liquid plastic into a three-dimensional shape, by pouring into a mould. Also see Lost-wax casting.

  • Drawing

    The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Painting

    Work of art made with paint on a surface. Often the surface, also called a support, is a tightly stretched piece of canvas, paper or a wooden panel. Painting involves a wide range of techniques and materials, along with the artist's intellectual concerns effecting the content of a work.