There are other Lowry’s, yet it seems Memes never die. With the Press Accidently repeating exactly what T.J.Clark and Wagner

Want to get the public away from. T.J.Clark, one of the most highly regarded Art historian’s suggests that though the shift in perception in Lowry may not be the leap that he hopes, it is still hoped that a shift is still made to his perception and regard. This show Lurches far away from the Lowry you think you know. Giving new contexts in which he deserves and is desired to be seen in. Contextualising Lowry in his time and key the influences of his tutor, his relatiohship to old masters, Symbolists and Expressionism, the light social eye of impressionism are charted.

The different Lowrys and their purposes emerge in this show. Perhaps talking about Andrew Motion’s poem, My Madonna is useful new way into Lowry. The poets interest is not in the full bodied figure portrayed up close, but the lives of the many in the distance. The lives of those who make things, whose lives have changed the land. It’s there where the horizon of reverence and the sublime is located for the poet. So it is for Lowry, perhaps also the effect of the scales of industry. It feel as if Lowry was only ever intereted in that mystery, of the figure working in the distance, the life less attended, so less observed, the life active in making. Played out. His scenes are the scenes seen from the corner past out onto the landscape. Past, what is meant to be the main event. All is in movement, all is conscious. Brugel like…The Hunters Winters day. Belongs to that traddition of looking, of seeing a world full of prizes and knowledge and rythms to be found. One feels Lowry was most comforatble at a distance, a slightly ejected slightly out of time witness, capturing man and Lending this rare overview on industerial Landscapes. At a remove from social involvement, of being busing and rushing around. Clockwork like lives hardly departing from script. Quitetude and art, allowed him to be himself, to find a peace, allow his ways of seeing to flourish and find depth. The secrets of looking, of captured gestures now lost. All of which scant records remain of an England beggining to fade from memory. Like an Ishmeal aboard the Peqoud, Seeing the good of it all, recording with marvel all that he saw of life and industry.

Another mode of reflecting on Lowry is hrough the tensions, where painting, manufactoring industry and the hand, are all linked. Amongst the first, to look at work, industry and the phenomena of mass populace. As Turner made a new art of previously unregard landscape. Now Lowry’s cityscapes are evermore disappearing. It is timely to ask what is the legacy of Lowry. What does he transmit from the past, it’s intent and character.

The Vanishing hand, from contemporary society. This exhibition is heartening, anything goes in art Schools except portray anything, that looks like work, craft or industry. A blind panic, a contempt about anyone from the art establishment, who can paint modern postmodern or anything, so alien has this modality become. Unless a work is literally translated into a text, it is invisable. So that the attitude expressed towards Lowry, is what is in fact becoming much of the attutude towards painting. Rodger Scruton and Camlia Paglia have voiced growing wide spread concerns. That post-modernist curents have affected in art colleges. Very few schools teach any techique now. Few could paint like Lowry, if they wanted to, with his purpose, vision or intent. The irruducible nature of the hand and paint, passing through space leaving its mark making and trace gesture ans grammar. The clear sense of choices of effect of thinking through making.

Then I also think of the effect of the exhibition reminds me of the Modeligani at the RA 2007. The instant feeling that these painting have been loved and do inturn radiate love. For many he is a real opening into British life. I’m immediately plunged into childhood, of fogs eighties, when plenty was about regents canal. Few works let you get a sense of the spirit of a place.

The materiality of his painting offers tantalizing traces of their making and emotion. A senous instinctive painter. As a Master of Body language, there is much ‘embodied simulation’ experienced with Lowry his attention produces a very Connected feeling. The paint dense, like honey tones, ever richer like Rauschenberg”s Flags, scumbles intently worked on. Various differing gestures, directed toward against each other to greater effect. In Lowry Everything is in the touch and gesture. Humanity and material honesty, presence and history of use in the material. In the first instance imperceptable. Then, noticable, everything has been worked. There is no swath of one colour filling in. Increable amount of attention, detail, and subtle gradation, light tone, texture are important to this Master of light.

Lowry is mysterious.A life long disumlator. Who hid much of his process, including his Mastery of the academic, theory, purpose and affects of light. Lowry went to painstaking Democratic lengths. To prevent tecnique getting in anyones way or access. Democratic, Clark, agrees is a good word to discribe Lowry

Clark agrees that Lowry is an artist that ingests a great deal of other art and makes it his own. I suggest Lowry has the mark of a Master, in that one has to dig very deeply to find the traces and the root of what Lowry has looked at. His influences, quite submerged. As he has so fully make everything his own. A profound internaliser, he is capable of intense complexity. Masters have that tendancy or rendering everything they come by a new, unrecognisable and irrudicbly theirs. He is utterly transformational. Lowry is a peculiar artist in that, his work does not belong nor conform to one movement or the other alone. His use of colour is pecilur, detectable are elements of Impersionist, Symbolist, and expressionist schemes, not one or the other, all filtered through an English temperament. I offered that Lowry was interested in the unreal, in much the way that he would play with is image, not wanting to be pinned down, resisting being named, or easily grasped. Aids the subject from being totalized.

The overiding feeling is that clarity was of the most importance. Nought ought to get in the way of that, nor should ever the need of comprehension nor any sense of an approved understanding crop in.

I wonder, if Lowry ever was capable of leaving his Beloved England, and travel, he would have made a bee line for China, seeing as they’ve got all the factories now. Indeed,what would a Chinese Lowry look like? And more to the point, Lowry no longer belongs just to the British. We have to ask do we really deserve him? What will Lowry mean globally as he becomes ever more associated with the effects of nature and industry on man. How nations brings into focus its nature as the examining distance of time arrives ever more into the present.

Lowry very much wanted to get away from all that pomp. Turning down a Knighthood, on this very same point, that of a profound dislike of social distinctions of any sort. Nothing should get in the way of the artist and the viewer, in that sense he is an absolute and intimate democrat. Freedom, is the subjcet that never arises when discussing Lowry, it’s that which he protected so much in his life, compartmentalising his friendships so that one may imagine him like a cat appearing in others lives in the rounds of the greater circuit he conducted himslf through. Lowry walked nearly everywhere. Something that many great artists, like Van Gogh and the surrealists. Seeing much of the city this way, as he did the rounds of the houses collecting rents. He had a real and in depth knowledge of the city, its detail and its inhabitants. Each person in a Lowry is a real portrayal of person that at a distance he knew or had seen in their neighbourhood context. Looking you do feel each persons individuality. Their outline in the hands of Lowry feels more like a flickering trembleing flame. He truly was the master of Salford, for whom each person mattered. His complex composed tableuxs, weaved together the vignettes of individual lives and the phenomena of mass existence. That other world Andrew Motion spied, here multiples out, chased by Lowry. It is in this that he is unique and uniquely successful in dealing with the visual and spatial problem of protraying the phenoma of mass existence and it’s consciouness.

His Epiphany, Panoramic, Pendlebury. everthing and everyone is important,

Clark coments, it has been pointed out that the geometric building of Lowry’s are reminscient of the Italian Primatives of the Early Italian Renassiance.

Much is still to be made, of the impressing crystalisating consciousness shared with Brugel. Awarness of Mediveal composition, littered with different sites of consciouness.

Everything Floats like a Dantes Paradiso, everyone is sort of dancing, bathed in a warmth.

Hoped to see a world of wonder, filled with wonderment in people. There an Anthroplogy, all that life, all that movement, all that world coming alive. Filled with Snapshots of connectivity and community.

There is plenty of wry observational satire, in keeping with Brugels trait of displaying all human behaivour good and bad. Later in old age he would manifest his studied inscruities and vulnerablity.

Poussain for the programing and activating the spaces of landscape, or control, invention. Not altogether unlike Canelleto, recomposing the city before him till the most suitable reality is formed, often the city is a dreamscape, moving through it is increaily filmic.

Everything was possible as subject, the unimporatnt, the waste, the modern industerial landscapes. The web of interdependance that is modern life.

Historically that mass abandonment of comunities are rare. Lowry shows this very deep attachement, that is much in evidence. Professor Valerie Walkerdine School:Social Sciences. Cardiff Uiversity The existential crises, defence communities undergo.

Indusrtial towns, coal mines, were built on farming towns. Places in which roots go as deep as time immemorial. Questions remain New employ and regeneration. Sums up when history disappears from sight.

His paintings resemeble, shores, so much change and shifting enterprise economy. The scale and the sense of masses and mass forces, the automated gesture, production, computing vastness, The work shop of the world, Second world war, that modern life was unleashing, run through Lowry.

It’s possible to imagine he followed the city like a curious dectective. The comic story of Lowry folling a man on a pedalbike, where like Sofie Calle.

The details certainly slow our movement throughtout the work. Movement is very important to Lowry, as not a single person is still in any of his works. At times seeming disburst by A sea tide. Suspended between places or with directions in mind, not yet complete, unguarded, un-selfconcious – between things. Lowry is very much interested in celebration and the unreal. The micheviousness Dutch way of looking, Brugel formally arranged everyday village scenes, there’s plenty of humour and insight, and a generousity, he loves his charcters, the naughty and the pious.

Lowry Contains such an expansive reptore of recorded. Actions activities, actations, condensing of time, observation, memory. Acting of life, observating, people learning the deep patterns, recogniseable from profound store of memory and earlier life experience. Theres an orchestration of unity and a boiling down to the essence of a scene.

You feel it, when you see the figures in the stance stooped and crumpted, grabing into themselves to fend off the cold and humidity. Lowry excelled in communicable feeling. His painting are far away from simple strutures of signs. On the occasion of Seeing one of his rare close ups, the magifide figures, shocks, we’re not used to seeing these folk, up close to their predicament in a Pre-NHS waiting room. these are the realities Lowry depicts in his panoramic works.

imagine taking in the stir of all those faces. A mass event, like Oxford Street during sales, Match days (Rare fusion of art and sport), Longing to take them all with you, and the the inablity of memory to keep them all. Perhaps they populate dreams, suppled as strangers. Noel Gallergar mentions, trying his hardest, unable to remember anything of playing on stage at Knebworth.

So private that once, a fan had tracked him to his home, Lowry was too nice to tell him that he didn’t want to talk, so said he had to catch the train, the young man eggerly accompayed him to the station at which point Lowry was obliged to by a ticket to the next station so as to spare the poor mans feelings.

Lowry is bigger than Hockney and the Hirst combined.The only question, that remains, when perment will a pemant Lowry room Happen?

Though not a remit of this comptempory show at the Tate Britian, readies Lowry to be seen with artists working today.

I leave the suggestion, that Lowry would profit from dialogues, kinships and resonaces with artists who have the made the industrial landscape has their subject. Burtynsky, recently exhibiting OIL at The Photographers’ Gallery, The objectist photographers the Beckers, Andreas Gursky. In Burtynsky’s case the differnce is that there’s a place for the human body in Lowrys paintings, this vast gobal making is beginning to eject the human figure. Diego de Rivera, Legger, Greyson Perry. Japanese prints in the British Museum. Or the Italian Divisionists painters. Kirchner fast drawing. Sicket’s Music Halls.