L.S. Lowry: The Theatre of Life – an ‘absorbing, myth-busting’ exhibition

There may not be a “more misunderstood” artist than L.S. Lowry, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. For decades, Lowry (1887-1976) painted pictures of the north of England’s “disappearing industrial landscapes”, and crowd scenes of working-class city folk. His “seemingly naive” style earned him a reputation as “a Sunday painter” – a “cloth-capped nincompoop”, as the critic Brian Sewell put it.

This “absorbing, myth-busting” exhibition in Milton Keynes argues that we’re still getting Lowry wrong today. It stresses that, despite his proletarian subject matter, he was from a middle-class family and he was not, as is often assumed, self-taught: he took art classes at the Manchester Municipal School of Art for a decade. We learn that Lowry was in fact “eminently cultured”, an opera fan who incorporated many art historical references into his work.

The show provides “a full account” of his career, from early pencil sketches to portraits and late seascapes, as well as many pictures in the style for which he was best known. Many misapprehensions surrounding his art are corrected, making for a “clever” and “enterprising” show that reveals its subject to be “considerably more than a curious regional artist”.

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The key myth busted here is one central to understanding Lowry’s art, said Laura Freeman in The Times. It’s that the apparent naivety of his pictures – think of his trademark “matchstick men” – “didn’t come about because he couldn’t draw like a draughtsman ought to, but because he chose not to”.

There are more than 140 pictures here – some familiar, some a “surprise”. Lowry has his “tricks and stock figures” but there’s remarkably little repetition. “Crowds mass, loose columns file out of factories yet, among them, are marchers and foot-draggers, doorstep gossipers” and all manner of activity and subtle incident. “This is a show to convert any remaining Lowry sceptics and make lifelong fans double down.”

The exhibition “digs out less well known dimensions” to his talent, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. A 1950 landscape of the Lake District, for example, is an eerie vista of “low curving hills divided by silvery still water”, devoid of all life. And when he paints people close-up, the effect is “disturbing”. His “ideal woman” – an apparent homage to the “red-lipped beauties” of the pre-Raphaelites – is “weirdly robotic”, with an odd “doll-like face”. Yet more “bizarre” is “In a Park” (1963), in which figures with all manner of disabilities wander around a fenced enclosure.

Still, it’s paintings such as “Coming from the Mill” (1930, pictured above) that hold you – an “urban hell” in which hunched, abstracted men emerge from a factory’s prison-like gatehouse. These people are not protagonists, they are “victims”. At his best, Lowry really was “a great modern artist” – the “Franz Kafka of industrial Britain”.
MK Gallery, Milton Keynes; until 28 February.