Tate Britain is getting ready for its big summer exhibition of Laurence Stephen Lowry; “Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life” that opens on June 26th, which is the first Lowry exhibition held by a public institution in London since the artist’s death in 1967.
Lowry is famous for painting life in the industrial districts of England, with his matchstick men walking against a background of bleak Northern mill towns. The common theme in many such landscapes is that Lowry’s figures can never quite escape the industrialization that surrounds them.
His paintings have been extremely popular in the British market recently, with auction records going up to 5.6million pounds, when Christie’s sold “Football Match” 1949 in May 2011, and “Piccadilly Circus” 1960 in November 2011, which was one of only five images Lowry painted of London. Richard Green on Bond Street and MacConnal-Mason on Duke Street have also held solo exhibitions this past year.
Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. “Piccadilly Circus, London” 1960
oil on canvas, 76 x 101 cm
Sold for £5.6million at Christie’s London, 16th November 2011, Lot 7
Lowry at his easel
Although Lowry claimed to be a ‘simple man’ who could not understand modern art, he is now regarded as a major artist, with the largest public collection of his work exhibited in a purpose-built museum in Salford, The Lowry, that opened in 2000. He was a notoriously private man who hated publicity, and was secretive about his job at the Pall Mall Property Company, where he worked for decades to support his artistic career. Reading all this, one can’t help but wonder what his reaction would have been to all this publicity and record breaking prices for his work! This summer you can explore Lowry more and see an exhibition that “aims to re-assess Lowry’s contribution as part of a wider art history and to argue for his achievement as Britain’s pre-eminent painter of the industrial city.”
