ARTS GUARDIAN
Tuesday February 24 1970
A tribute to L. S. Lowry by some of his friends
Surprised by Life
Surprised by Life
THE TENACITY with which L. S. Lowry preserved his private life was matched only by that obstinacy by which he kept on painting unwanted pictures until he was almost 60 - "Van Gough? He was an impatient man."
Those who were accepted beyond the defensive barrier into his private life found an eccentric though lovable, generous and loyal friend. With a few close companions he enjoyed lengthy dinner parties; he joined into the spirit Of the company, contributing his opinions and experiences - he must have been one of the last men to recall meeting Holman Hunt. He would listen with wrapt attention to the views of others and, as so often happened with his enormous capacity for fun and surrealist sense of humour - he greatly admired Lagritte and Delvaux - he would laugh until the tears ran down his cheeks.
He was shrewd, aware when people were taking advantage of him but never bearing resentment and with young artists - he financed the training of several - he was unshockable and, with his objectivity, seemed so much younger than his audience. He was modest and never demanded the respect that was his due and from his friends he demanded a sometimes uncomfortable but uncompromising and ruthless honesty.
Ronald Marshall
Director, Stone Gallery,
Newcastle on Tyne
EDWIN MULLINS said yesterday:
"I'll just tell you a little story. When I wrote the Tate Gallery catalogue note for the Lowry exhibition I got very roundly attacked by John Berger. I think I described Lowry's men as pea-brained homunculi. Berger attacked me on the grounds that working men were not homunculi. And I think he missed the point. Lowry was not a working man. He was a white-collar worker. I knew Lowry very well: he was a lovely man, but he was a great snob. He always wore a white collar and black tie. His view of the world was very much looking down from a misanthropic height.
"Mind you, he was not really a misanthrope. He was the funniest man I've ever known - funny and witty. A lot of his paintings reflected that odd view of life. I think it is a pity he has not been appreciated more widely. He has been pigeon-holed as a Northern eccentric painter but really he was the last of the Victorians and in 100 years' time he will be recognised as such."
Edwin Mullins is the author Of the catalogue introduction to the Tate's LoWry retrospective.
A TALL, SLOUGHING figure came to my gallery in Manchester 27 years ago. He shot from one corner to another, then he settled down. I knew it was Mr Lowry - the hat, the walking stick and the raincoat was I think, the same as he wore two months ago, the last time I saw him.
He bought an awful painting from my gallery on that encounter - I think to lift my morale. He went on doing so until the very end - buying paintings from unsuccessful artists (never needing or hanging these pictures, but just to make them feel better). He never forgot that he was well over 50 when through a chance, and it should be repeated a chance, encounter that his paintings were exhibited in London.
My wife being a Bolton girl I think helped him to be closer to us and our children. He always asked after them and even in hospital I was touched when he mentioned the Christmas card my little daughter had drawn for him some six years previously and which he had always kept on his mantelpiece.
Untidy and shabby as he appeared and liked to appear I do not think that he had ever done a shabby thing in his life. I did not like to treat him as a grand old man. I used to tease him in Manchester, saying "Come on Mr Lowry, let's go to Fullers cafe and see the beautiful women." His reply was always : "Oh you are a one". I liked his old fashioned courtesy and his beautiful use of the English language, his meticulous polite letters and when he was in form, his humour and chuckling laugh.
Some years ago on a Saturday afternoon he suddenly called on us in London. He stayed until evening came. We had a dinner arrangement with Christopher Bibby and his sister and some other young people. "Where shall we take Mr Lowry ? " thought of somewhere old fashioned and spacious. "Lets go to the Ritz." It was quiet and the service excellent. Mr Lowry gazed with delight at the perfectly cast head waiter. When he had taken our orders and left he turned to me and whispered: " What would he have said if we had ordered egg and chips and peas?"
Andras Kalman
Director, Crane Kalman Gall., London
"MY THREE most cherished records," said Lowry, "are the fact that I've never been abroad, never had a telephone and never owned a motorcar." It would seem that he was a recluse from the 20th century. Yet in 1965 a Government report on the North-west raised the question "whether the turn of another century will find Lancashire still struggling under the grim heritage of the industrial revolution." This heritage, still existent, was the stuff of Lowry's art.
He, however, had his own reasons for painting what he did. He painted what he felt at home with, in order to keep himself company. "You know," he said. "I've never been able to get used to the fact that I'm alive. The whole thing frightens me. It's been like that from my earliest days. It's too big, you know - I mean life, sir." Now he is dead, I would like to think that everything surprised him until the very end. Because he was always surprised, surprised by what people saw in his paintings, by the familiar and the unfamiliar, by himself, his success and his survival.
This was not because he was naive but because for him a contradiction was something to notice and remember rather than resolve. He had a wisdom which never gave rise to proverbs or precepts. He was wise enough to paint without asking why. If he could have known that historians of the future will find in his work a unique visual testimony of the decline from 1914 onwards of British capitalism, he would have been as surprised - no more and no less - as when I once told him that Tintoretto was 80 when he painted a portrait we were both looking at. "Ah," he said. "I'm not quite as old as that yet. There's still a little hope for me."
His ambitions were both proud and modest, for they included nothing which concerned power. And you could see in the careless, unanchored blue of his eyes that power was a phenomenon of which he was totally ignorant.
John Berger
Art critic and writer
WE HAVE LOST a man as unique to art in England as Constable. He was also unique to the world. I began painting before I had seen Lowry's work but from a different approach. The same thing appealed to us both. People pushed and crushed by the very places they kept going. The mills and all that is entailed. Lowry was not political in a conscious way but his very austere approach did not need a political explanation.
I think it was the beauty of the functional that was the important thing. In Lancashire he was, as they say, a very dry man. He could have been a man flying pigeons. He used to say to me when I met him: "Are you making any money, young man?" Although he never left the country he knew a great amount about other artists. These were mostly French at the time and some Americans, Andras Kalman, he and I would sit in the Kardomah in Manchester, and talk about paintings and painters for a long, long time.
Northern people don't go much for eulogies but I think he should be buried in Westminster Abbey. He will be remembered when a lot of the soup tins of today are forgotten. Once I went around a show of the chimpanzee paintings with him. We did not say much. At the end he said: "Well, they have a good sense of balance, but they have to." Rob Wilton could not have put it better.