L.s.lowry: the Detached Realist

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¡YEAR OF EQUALITY':

L.S. Lowry passed his first thirty years as a painter more or less in obscurity as a 'local' Manchester artist with little national reputation.

But since the end of the war, and particularly in the last ten years, his paintings and drawings of industrial scenes have become both acceptable Popular and culturally enormously Lowry's death earlier this year came in the midst of preparations for a Royal Academy exhibition of his work, the largest which has ever been held anywhere.

The preparations continued however, and the exhibition is just about to end at the Academy. It was a jumbo extravaganza, with acres and acres of wall covered with Lowry's little hurrying figures.

The exhibition's success has been proof of Lowry's popularity; an aerial view of the Gallery would look like a Lowry scene, with tiny men and women knocking into each other as they struggle across vast white expanses of Gallery. Only the dogs are missing, and the prams, and the smoking towers.

Lowry's popularity is connected to the factors which isolate him from the mainstream of twentieth-century British and American art.

EDUCATED

Like Marc Chagall, another extremely popular painter, Lowry an educated 'primitive': in 1919-20, after years of academic painting, he turned from realistic portraitures to a kind of Lancashire impressionism.

But, unlike Chagall - and perhaps uniquely among major 20th Century artists - Lowry's paintings are rooted in their locale, Josely attentive to the details of the northern cityscape in a manner that engenders a peculiar sense of confidence in those who see them.

In many people unfamiliar with the actual look of Lancashire mill and factory towns, a phrase like "the industrial north" produces an instant mental image composited from two or three of Lowry's more famous paintings.

So few painters have dealt seriously with working-class life that it might seem a little crabby to quibble with the work of one who bas.

CLERK

Especially Lowry, who was no mumning voyew, but in some sense a pari of the life he depicted, working as a clerk all his life in the otfice of one of the mills whose workers he painted over and over again.

Lowry preserved himself against criticism even more by remaining completely unpretentious about the work he did in the evenings, his painting, even after-his success.

His answer to an interviewer who questioned him about the 'significance' of his figures ("You can call them matchstick men if you like, they just turn out like that. I see them like that.") has been widely quoted.

Lowry's group scenes of industrial life - his most famous and popular pictures, though they make up only a part of his work - seem to be offering themselves as simpat straightforward • depictions simple, straightforward lives, cheerfully merging into anonymity on their way to and trom work ot play.

Francis Terrace, Salford

The group scenes are mingled, in the exhibition, with paintings of what Lowry referred to as his "down and outs" - criminals, drunks, cripples.

This spices the simplicity so that the exhibition as a whole produces a pleasing sense of having been of moral benefit.

There is a faint air of reverence among the visitors, due in part to the surroundings and to Lowry's recent death, but due also to a feeling that it must be good for a middle-class art critic to have to look at so many poor people at once.

There is in fact a real ambiguity about Lowry's portrayal of working class life: the reduction of his figures to anonymous, repetitive little squids, is in part a sharp perception of the ellects of industrial life.

REALISM

Lowry's grasp of the way in which these conditions are made, in daily life, in going to work and school and coming home, to seem normal, ordinary, even cheertul -this is extraordinary, the deepest kind of realism.

Liberal critics who try to find an "anti-capitalist" in Lowry, and so on about the "monstrous, looming" qualities of his factories, precisely miss the point: the factories in Lowry's paintings are big and black and ugly, they belch smoke which blackens people's faces and hands and lungs, but they are not seen by Lowry or his people as 'monstrous' but simply as part of life.

Lowry's paintings are not trying to launch an attack on capitalism. but simply to record a part of the process of life under capitalism: the systematic reduction of men and women so that they appear to be mere objects.

But Lowry, too, capitulates in the process, so that his work makes a permanent equation between men Collection: City Art Gallery, Salford and objects.

In the sea-scapes which form an important, though neglected section of his work, the ships stand in relation to the sea as the men and women do to the city: knocked and tossed about, or brought into line by an external control; incapable of action or understanding.

ALOOFNESS

And Lowry observes this process with the same aloofness, the same stubborn naivete with which he fended off discussion of his paintings.

This stance of the detached observer produces the stiff and stylised qualities of the paintings which try to move closer in, to show life as larger and less anonymous.

In The Cripples, where a couple of children look on while lame and deformed men straggle past them, the painting's quizzical stance -refusing to elicit a reaction from the children, retusing to explore the self-consciousness of the cripples, -makes finally for vagueness.

1976 was hailed by the Social Democrats as the year of women's equality in pay and job opportunity - following the enactment of the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts on January 1st.

However during this time it has taken a bitter 22 week strike for the Trien women to win equal Dav.

Still women are battling to get 70 ґаз. onto the assembly lines in the motor industry and other areas of manufacturing industry's traditionally 'male jobs.

Sex discrimination is still school courses.

WAGE CONTROL

All this, of course, is happening against a backcloth of wage control and massive cuts in public services, cuts which hit women particularly hard both because the majority of workers in these sectors are women and also because women need the and health services to tire socal social and health from the burdens of the home and their traditional role of caring for children, the sick and the elderly.

The Working Womens Charter Campaign (WWCC) has initiated a campaign for a mass rally at Alexandra Palace on February 27th to discuss these questions.

FOCUS

This rally should be supported as a positive focus for fighting for women's rights - but the politics of the Working Womens Charter Campaign stand as a barrier to winning support among the broad layers of The children and the cripples are merely an arrangement of people, a section of a crowa scene, blown up for no reason.

Scenes of violence or potential violence, like The Arrest, The Man Taken Ill, or The Strike Meeting, are drawn as if witnessed from an upper-storey window a few streets away from the action; the distance freezes the active potential of the scene into something static and timeless.

The only action in Lowry's paintings is the ceaseless zigzagging the labour movement.

Trade union branches, trades councils and Labour Party wards must be involved directly in organising for the rally - promises of "sponsorship" or verbal motions of "support are not sufficient and merely provide a left cover for bureaucrats not wishing to appear opposed to such basic questions as rights for women.

The rhartor ramnaian faile completely to give a lead to women issue of tribunals.

position that where struggles are rights.

organised around equal pay ot supported in putting their case.

the bureaucracy TRACK of human objects.

In some sense Lowry's detachment and his lack of interest in the significance of the struggling movements of the world of figures, was determined by his clerk's position on the periphery of that struggle.

That position simultaneously gave him the access to the rich complexities of working class life that offered him his subject, and limited his ability to deal with that subject with anything but practical truthfulness. tags along behind; but where they leave women isolated and send them to tribunals, the WWCC simply accepts this refusal to fight.

We say clearly that the major lesson that must be taken into the labour movement after one year of the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts is that the tribunals must be boycotted, and trade union means of struggle used to force emnlovers to concede eaual richts.

If this stand is not taken, the bureaucracy, who stand as the main The danger is that a campaign on of Abortion, detached from any means of winning this right for women, mobilised 20,000 on one Trina win Far onil now