On Art and Artists by Rosenthal T.G.; & Rosenthal

Author:Rosenthal, T.G.; & Rosenthal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Art, Artists, History, critique, essays, paintings, culture, literature, Britian
ISBN: 1610000
Publisher: Andrews UK Ltd.
Published: 2014-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

A Lancashire Town, 1945, oil on canvas, 54.6 x 64.8 cm.

A great artist. In his way Lowry is that. He has made the harsh landscape of the industrial North take on the beauty which was its ravaged birthright. He has taken the scurrying crowds of the mill towns and turned them into individual streams of the life force and, when his sardonic eye has settled on some wretched derelict or down-and-out, he has extracted from him not only the obvious pathos, but also a kind of triumphant humour entirely lacking in self-pity. Modern art and its presentation always raises a great deal of dust, but Lowry’s has for a number of reasons, mostly connected with his relatively late discovery and the unfashionableness of his work, raised no dust at all, so that one can already see him with a fair amount of clarity and detachment. I think that in fifty years’ time, when all the dust around him has settled, the work of L. S. Lowry will be seen as some of the most original and some of the finest English art of the 20th century.[2] But if that’s too solemn a thought, perhaps we should let Lowry have the last word - provided that we remember that neither the work nor the man is nearly as simple as he’d have us believe.

Lowry: People call me a Sunday painter, well I suppose I’m a Sunday painter who paints every day in the week.

1 It was assumed well into the 1960s and before the first appearance of Shelley Rohde’s biography in 1979 that Lowry had had no formal art education. It is perhaps interesting to note that Michael Ayrton himself was a virtually self-taught painter and sculptor.

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