Joan Bakewell: A poke in the eye of London's art establishment
Lowry is now a name in a global market unswayed by the snobberies of our cultural establishment
Friday, 16 March 2007
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Paintings by LS Lowry could be bought for modest sums in the 1950s. Where I lived, in the outskirts of Stockport, he was thought of as a local artist. Among his more gloomy industrial landscapes is one that celebrates the grandeur and scale of Stockport's great viaduct. Much of his work shows the lives of the working classes between the wars, living in the shadow of gasworks, factory chimneys and gloomy churches.
His little figures with big feet shuffle in crowds from football stadium, to terrace homes, featureless except as the great moving mob of the industrial north. My parents were born in such places and climbed by their own efforts to enjoy the lusher pastures of golf-club Cheshire. When offered the chance, later in life, of buying a Lowry, they didn't hesitate: "Oh, no, no thanks. We know what it was like living there: we don't want to be reminded."
Now no one lives there any more. The factory smoke was banished in the 1960s, the factories themselves went not long after. The terraces were demolished and the warehouses converted to car parks and business units. Only the bridges and churches remain. The people have gone too. Now Manchester is full of wine bars, media companies and a thriving gay culture. Salford has a museum by Libeskind and will soon have the new BBC. And, of course, the Lowry Centre. What would the rent collector of Pendlebury - that's how Lowry earned his living - make of it?
Something else is happening that might have pleased him a good deal. His work, for so long either ignored or patronised by the artistic establishment, is coming in from the cold. The evidence is not measured by any grand retrospective at Tate Modern or White Cube. The measure is money. In June, six Lowry paintings come up for auction at Christie's in London. One of them, - Good Friday, Daisy Nook - is expected to fetch £1.5m. A Lowry first tipped the million mark in 1999, when one went for £1.9m. Last June one went for £1.4m. He is now increasingly a name in the international market that is unswayed by either the social snobberies of North/South Britain or the aesthetic snobberies of our cultural establishment.
Lowry has always been a popular artist. And that almost serves to damn him. His work hangs in many provincial art galleries, which conspires to label him a "provincial" artist. But was Gauguin a provincial artist, was Van Gogh? Come to think of it, they didn't sell to the establishment of their day either.
As someone explained to me, "Lowry has never fitted the intellectual schematics laid down by the art academics." No, indeed not. He did what real artists do: he followed his vision, honed his talent, and left a consistently interesting body of work that reflects his culture and his times.
He has, my parents excepted, always been loved on his home patch. Manchester named its glamorous theatre complex after him: the Lowry Centre. Tate Liverpool recently held an exhibition Lowry in Liverpool. But he never really made it South. He didn't belong either in the school of Camden realism, nor among the ruralists. He was out on his own, uncategorisable, marginal.
But nowadays things are different. Manchester and Liverpool are the coming places. Manchester made it with the Commonwealth Games, Liverpool is the next City of Culture. Their streets bristle with impressive concoctions of glass and steel. Thomas Heatherwick's towering sculpture The B of the Bang stands where Manchester's grand new casino will rise. Antony Gormley's male figures, along the shoreline at Formby have just been granted a stay of execution. LS Lowry is riding the same tide.
So is the reputation following the money or the money following the art? Which is the engine that propels taste, judgement, cultural rise and fall? Romantically, we like to think that talent - however obscure - will one day make it to the pinnacle of acclaim, be recognised by its peers for its true worth. But it takes more than that. There has to be a confluence of decisions, between by those who buy and collect, and those who write the critiques and curate the exhibitions.
Jack Vettriano is a classic case of someone who makes it with the first group, not the second. He's a success in the marketplace but doesn't cut it with curators. In 2004 his Singing Butler sold for some £750,000. But his paintings hang on the walls of Madonna and Jack Nicholson rather than the Tate. There is a sleazy kitsch to his work that suits the milieu of greetings cards but lacks the mark of individual vision.
Lowrys are now both selling well and beginning to earn the recognition they deserve. His moment has come. Those who know the paintings that hang in the Lowry Gallery will realise that his take on the world is unique: within his townscapes each individual is given equal worth. Old women in hats, hurrying football fans, boys kicking balls, all come and go, hurry and pause within the vast industrial setting which for them has the comfort and familiarity of home.
I myself can taste the smog, can feel the soft persistent rain, and can't wait to get indoors for the welcoming warmth of a coal fire. Perhaps we had to wait until all trace of such a world had gone for good to recognise how vividly Lowry conjures it back into being. His vision of Lancashire has all the authenticity of Gauguin's Normandy and Van Gogh's Arles.
