Lowry – painter and nonentity

These are the gleaming glitzy panels of the Lowry at Salford behind which the cultural legacy of this notorious but much loved curmudgeon has been diligently curated for more than a decade. The building is yet another vertigo-inducing assault on verticality in the interests of making a big statement with attention-grabbing forms served up with a pinch of maritime flavouring. In an irony much remarked upon, Lowry’s tableaux of industrial gloom and despondency have been incarcerated inside a gilded casket alongside a shopping mall that borrows his name to attract bargain hunters to a tedious selection of outlet stores. Despite all this we are repeatedly informed by cultural commentators that Lowry and his work have been unforgivably ignored by the metropolitan art establishment with its inbuilt antipathy to anything that reminds us of the existence of working class life. According to Jeanette Winterson, indifference towards Lowry’s work is tantamount to contempt for working class values. It’s an unsupportable claim but a vital element in a revisionist scheme to reposition Lowry’s paintings in the art historical narrative. Some highly imaginative intellectual archaeology has been deployed to locate evidence of a profound examination of the human condition lurking beneath the surface arrangements of undifferentiated stickmen. An artist formerly regarded as an elective marginal with an anti-modernist sensibility is suddenly revealed as a champion of the oppressed. These exercises in reputational rehabilitation are regular events (the art of the 1980s looks likely to be the next focal point) and while welcoming the underlying spirit of intellectual curiosity the case for Lowry’s greatness seems especially feeble and unconvincing. 

There’s an idea around that Lowry possessed a unique insight into the dehumanising influence of industrial capitalism and mass-production. His tiny figures plod through their wretched and depressing environment bereft of hope or ambition. To me this seems deeply insulting to working class life which was both richer and more complicated than Lowry could ever understand. Humour was one powerful weapon in surviving the tyranny of wage-slavery. Yet humour is completely absent from Lowry’s work. By endlessly portraying the huddled masses as helpless victims, he stripped them of their individuality as characters and personalities and furthermore, denied them any hope of future redemption. 

William Roberts is a far superior artist to Lowry. They shared a preference for self-imposed isolation and a common interest in everyday subject matter. Although Roberts engaged with modernism in his younger days, it was a love-hate relationship and like Lowry, Roberts discovered that modernism was something he could dispense with in later life. His figures were geometrically stylised in a mechanistic fashion ultimately derived from Cubism but they never lost their individuality. Roberts’ 1940 painting, The Munitions Factory is a prime example and can be seen in the nearby Salford Museum and Art Gallery. Unlike Lowry, Roberts was an alert observer of the vagaries of fashion and style and recorded them humorously and sympathetically in his figure compositions. From what we know his political opinions were every bit as reactionary as those of Lowry but his work reflects a lively appreciation of human diversity that can’t be found in the monochrome universe of stickmen. 

Another interesting comparison is with the work of largely self-taught Cardiff artist, Charles Byrd (b. 1916), a selection of his work can be seen here in the care of Cardiff Central Library. Byrd’s paintings of industrial South Wales deal with similar subject matter to Lowry’s but he sought out a wider range of viewpoints and developed a much more adventurous approach to composition. Like Lowry, Byrd employed a limited palette without conveying the kind of terminal bleakness so typical of Lowry. Unlike Lowry, Byrd has never had a West End dealer (Lefevre) nor is his work in any national collections. In terms of quality there is little to choose between them – Lowry may have the edge in evoking a sentimental response but Byrd seems to get much closer to describing the feel and texture of the industrial landscape. 

Part of the case for Lowry centres around the incontestable fact that representations of industry are few and far between in 20th. century British art, leaving Lowry as the undisputed master in the field. A handful of Lowry’s near contemporaries did tackle the industrial scene and in almost every instance their efforts are superior to Lowry’s in terms of pictorial invention and paint handling. The shortlist below can be seen on the BBC Your Paintings website for comparison. 

CRW Nevinson          Any Wintry Afternoon in England (1930) 
                               Loading Timber at Southampton Docks (1917) 
Edward Wadsworth   Top of the World (1942-43) 
Stanley Spencer       Shipbuilding on the Clyde Series (1940) 
Stanhope Forbes       Permanent Way (1924)
                               Sheffield, River and Smoking Chimneys (1915) 

I have a suspicion that the unmistakeable alienation sensed in Lowry’s work is the key to wider acceptance in the art world. Perhaps we should be comparing him with Francis Bacon whose visions of debauchery, dissipation and despair are held in such high regard. Bacon was thrilled by the sheer ugliness of existence and Lowry was equally thrilled by the unrelieved squalor of the industrial North-west. Neither show much empathy towards their subjects and both fastidiously detach themselves as individuals from the world they portray. The singular difference is that Bacon’s paintings make no appeal to sentimentality whereas much of the popularity of Lowry’s work is due to the ease with which it can be absorbed into a sentimental vision of times past. Flat caps and mufflers, whippets and ferrets, clogs and hobnailed boots, pigeon lofts and outside toilets, workhouses and board schools – all gone and never to return but so, so memorably picturesque. Lowry could be a strong candidate for the post of court painter to Kim Jong-un - nuclear missile launch sites could easily take the place of factory chimneys and satanic mills and there’s a generous supply of dehumanized masses to observe and record.

Swing Time

Excavating through the Cheshire countryside to build the Manchester Ship Canal between 1887 and 1894 involved repeatedly slicing through existing lines of communication – all of which had to be maintained. With a need to provide clearance for ocean-going shipping the favoured solution for roads was the provision of swing-bridges to allow free passage with the minimum of delay. In all there were six plus an audacious swing-aqueduct that carried the Bridgewater Canal across the waterway at Barton. The Barton Road and Barton Canal swing-bridges pivot on an artificial island in the canal – all the other swing-bridges pivot on the bank. They are all very similar in design and with a single exception they pivot on the north bank. Designed to prioritise the needs of shipping over those of road traffic, they must be a constant source of irritation to road users kept waiting while cumbersome ships pass slowly by. What we see in these photographs are detached sections of roadway, temporarily devoid of traffic and rotated through 90 degrees. The Barton Aqueduct is laden with some 800 tonnes of water from the Bridgewater Canal. The photographs that follow show all the swing-bridges on the Manchester Ship Canal from east to west, bracketed by a pair of vintage postcard views. 

Barton Aqueduct

Barton Road Swing Bridge

Knutsford Road Swing Bridge

London Road Swing Bridge

Chester Road Swing Bridge

Moore Lane Swing Bridge

Old Quay Swing Bridge

Mister Mailman

If these images are anything to go by, there was no higher calling in mid-century America than that of custodian and distributor of the nation’s mail. Teams of craggy faced functionaries held communities together with benevolence, integrity and kindly wisdom. No mail carrier was too busy to spare the time to engage with the public, offering sympathy, encouragement and bonhomie with every delivery. In today’s world of neo-liberal economic orthodoxy none of this is remotely affordable and if the U.S. Postal Service gets its way the mail carrier’s duties will soon be limited to a high speed drive-by with correspondence stuffed into “curbside mailboxes”. When these images were published the postal service was still the gateway to romance and tragedy, to opportunity and penury and our final illustration shows a hapless recipient of bad news, stunned by what he has just read. 

Solvay SA

This is the Baronet Works in Warrington on the bank of the Manchester Ship Canal. Belgian multi-national chemical company, Solvay is the operator and manufactures industrial polymers on the site. Since the foundation of the business in 1863 it has grown into a company employing 29,000 people in 55 countries. Despite the affinity between Solvay and solvent, the name derives from the founder, Ernest Solvay. Which opens up an unlikely connection between the complex utilitarian manufacturing structures on the canal-side and the refined Art Nouveau aesthetic to be found in the buildings of Avenue Louise in Brussels. Ernest Solvay’s son, Armand is the link – in 1894 he commissioned Belgian architect, Victor Horta to design a large Art Nouveau town house on the fashionable Avenue Louise. No expense was spared in terms of construction materials and interior decoration and after two years of building work it was completed as Hôtel Solvay in 1900. Generally regarded as one of the great exemplars of Art Nouveau architecture at its short-lived zenith, Hôtel Solvay has been designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It could be argued that the exquisite refinement of Horta’s design practice which extended into every aspect of the furnishings, fixtures and fittings has its equivalent in the elaborate computations and formulations that dictate the extraordinary complexity of shapes, forms and volumes required to serve the chemical industry. While environmental concerns proliferate around the production of volatile chemical substances, there is no escaping their ubiquity in our lives as consumers and in the absence of a clear path to an additive-free existence most of us make compromises. Which leaves space to admire the design ingenuity embodied in the industrial process without becoming a cheer-leader for environmentally unsustainable activities. In the same way, an admiration for the beautifully finished craftwork in rare tropical hardwoods in Horta’s interior is not an endorsement of the unregulated exploitation of finite natural resources. 

Groucho Recommends

 

Lending one’s name and reputation to a commercial product was an everyday and lucrative transaction for Hollywood stars. There were several who attained prodigious levels of promiscuity – Arthur Godfrey, Bob Hope, Lucille Ball, Rita Hayworth to name but a few – and there was the inspirational example of Constance Talmadge who endorsed no less than 11 different products in a single issue of Liberty magazine in October 1927. Her indiscriminate approach may have been driven by the impending arrival of sound recording which brought her silent movie career to an abrupt end just two years later. These arrangements were negotiated via agents – it’s difficult to imagine the adman ushered into the presence of the illustrious star to extol the virtues of the very latest twin-tub, carpet-beating, cocktail shaker – and some were obviously more zealous than others in marketing the services of their clients.

 

   

Decisions about which products to favour and which to pass on are lost in the past and the evidence in the form of advertising offers few clues as to the process. What is clear is that for many there was no conflict between protecting their image as a star and associating with some very banal and unsophisticated products. Laxatives and toilet tissue were universally avoided but almost anything else was acceptable. As a master of verbal wit and cynicism, Groucho Marx was certainly fully aware of the idiocy of endorsement but unwilling to reject such a well rewarded proposition. Any damage to his reputation for denouncing human folly was more than compensated for in cash. The famous painted eyebrows and moustache were put to good use on behalf of a wide range of advertisers including General Electric, Rheingold Beer, Teachers Whisky and Skippy Peanut Butter. There was even a little jousting with Tony the Tiger for a serving of Sugar Frosted Flakes. These three examples need little further comment except to observe that the demonic gleam in Groucho’s eye as he inspects his Amana Home Freezer suggests it may be full of deep frozen body parts.

Lucky People

 

The American Tobacco Company (manufacturers of the Lucky Strike cigarette brand), unhappy at trailing Camel cigarettes in public popularity turned to Edward Bernays (nephew of Sigmund Freud and the father of the public relations industry) to revitalise their product and encourage female smoking. Bernays pursued his target with two strategies. The first was to overcome the female inhibition about smoking outdoors by breeding the confidence to light up anytime and anywhere on equal terms with men. In 1929 Bernays hired a small army of glamour models to march in the New York City Easter Parade flagrantly and imperiously smoking Lucky Strikes in full view of the assembled public. The subsequent press coverage of this transgressive event was a classic instance of the publicity that money cannot buy.

 

The second strategy was to promote cigarette smoking on the cinema screen by circulating directors and producers with handy guides to the wide range of dramatic possibilities that can be enhanced by the imaginative deployment of a cigarette in the hands or mouths of the cast. Bernays understood that cinema audiences could be depended on to imitate what they saw on screen and obediently smoke their way through moments of emotional stress and tension. Bernays called this process, engineering consent. This was the era of the green Lucky Strike pack and one of Bernays’s greatest concerns was that the female smoker, endowed by nature with a superior sense of colour relationships, might be put off by the shade of green, finding it clashing with their favoured choice of tones and shades. Much energy was expended on a campaign to persuade the couture industry of the wondrous potential of green as a high fashion colour to little effect. The green neurosis persisted until 1941 when Raymond Loewy designed the white pack with the famous target on both front and back. The advertisers congratulated themselves on having doubled the publicity potential of the pack without spending an additional cent.

   

The services of Hollywood stars were always available if the price was right and copywriters carefully crafted the form of words that would help seal the deal with smokers. The comforting fiction that nationally recognised figures from the movies, with their enormous disposable incomes could find nothing better than Lucky Strike placed them, for an instant, on an equal footing with their audience. Every actor had a similar story to tell – without Lucky Strike they could never have survived their punishing work schedule or maintained the expressive tones of their all-important voices. Most participants cultivated a frosty air of hauteur – only a few deigned to look with favour on their admirers but they all agreed that nothing eased throat irritation more effectively than a cigarette.

Past and Present No. 8: Marseille

I always travel with a small selection of faded vintage postcards in the hope that it might be possible to pair them with some contemporary views. Marseille proved to be intractable – economic forces and the Nazi occupation having obliterated all but the most securely rooted landmarks. The Vieux Port and the docks at la Joliette have been abandoned by maritime commerce in favour of leisure, culture and urban motorways. When I found a potential match I was often at a disadvantage – early postcard photographers being adept in the art of talking their way into neighbouring buildings to obtain an elevated viewpoint. In the absence of a personal drone or cherry-picker these are the best. Most frustrating was the trip to the corniche where I could see an almost perfect match if I had the power to hover in space some 4 metres from the seaward side of the path on which I was standing. It was pleasing to see that a bus passed the exact location of the tram in the postcard as the photo was taken.