Matchstick Man
L. S. Lowry, Coming Out of School, Tate © Te Estate of L.S. Lowry
As the first L.S. Lowry exhibition to be held in London since the artist’s death opens at Tate Britain, Waterfront speaks to its Assistant Curator Helen Little
L.S. Lowry’s contribution to art history and celebrate him as one of Britain’s most popular 20th-century painters. “Tis is a big moment to get up close to Lowry,”
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says Assistant Curator Helen Little. “We have created what we feel are optimal conditions to look closely at his amazing paintings and think about his work in a wider context. “Lowry’s work is immediately absorbing, touching and singular and his work takes us through an extraordinary period of great social change in Britain. It is a comforting fiction that Lowry’s art is a thing of the past and I feel strongly that his work still resonates today,” she adds.
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unning until 20th October 2013, Tate Britain’s eagerly anticipated exhibition, Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, aims to reassess
Focusing on the best of Lowry’s urban scenes and industrial landscapes, the exhibition of over 90 works includes Tate’s Coming Out of School 1927 and Te Pond 1950 alongside significant loans from public and private lenders. It also demonstrates how, without Lowry’s pictures of matchstick men-filled football and cricket matches, protest marches, funfairs, evictions, accidents and workers going to and from the mill, Britain would lack an account in paint of the experiences of the working class in the 20th century. “I find it extraordinary that there is still an inbuilt assumption that a provincial artist who made the northern working class a subject for art cannot be a serious painter,” says Ms Little. “Lowry was not an amateur. He trained for many years at art school, showed his work widely and in many prominent exhibitions
and in the post-war period became the dominant figure of British art. His is a curious story and there are many myths about him that won’t go away.” Highlights of the exhibition include Ancoats
Hospital Outpatients Hall 1952, painted in the early years of the NHS, shown beside an earlier street scene, Te Cripples 1949, which shows those disabled by war and illness. All seven paintings for Industrial Landscape 1955 are also being brought together for the very first time. “In these works Lowry gives us enormous pleasure in the way he paints and he clearly enjoyed the expansiveness of the canvas which he paints to extraordinary effect,” adds Little. “Lowry’s style is distinct and remained his
own. A key characteristic of his industrial landscapes and urban scenes is a feeling of atmosphere and the closeness and tightness of
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