L.S Lowry – Not Good Enough for the Tate?
Now I’ve always really liked those Lowry paintings – the matchstick men; you know & I’m not alone there by all accounts?! I mean they look real don’t they, not like all this modern abstract stuff. I just can’t fathom that at all!
Anyway I was horrified to hear that the Tate gallery owns twenty three – twenty three of his paintings & has only ever briefly exhibited one of them! (Industrial Landscape which he painted in 1955)
Leading figures in the art world along with other celebrities & headed by the actor Sir Ian McKellen are protesting at this state of affairs, & questioning whether his ‘exclusion’ is a deliberate response to what the gallery considers to be unacceptable – not good enough in some way; amateur, northern & provincial are words that have been bandied about.
Lowry repeatedly depicted northern life in his work & though there are many highly acclaimed northern artists none persistently portray the northern landscape & its people as Lowry did.
Referring to Lowry’s work musician Noel Gallagher - of Oasis fame - said: “They’re not considered Tateworthy. Or is it just because he is a northerner?”
On Easter Sunday a programme about Lowry’s exclusion narrated by Sir Ian McKellen will be shown on ITV. McKellen has said: “Over the years, silly lies have been thrown around that he was only a Sunday painter, an amateur, untrained and naive,”
“His popularity needs no official endorsement from the Tate, but it is a shame verging on the iniquitous that foreign visitors to London shouldn’t have access to the painter English people like more than most others.”
While the Tate have denied the claims being made re Lowry’s ‘northerness’ Tate Britain’s head of displays, Chris Stephens, says during the aforementioned television programme: “What makes Lowry so popular is the same thing which stops him being the subject of serious critical attention. What attracts so many is a sort of sentimentality about him. He’s a victim of his own fan base.”
Lowry’s estate is openly irritated by the fact that the Tate continues to store his work & have refused to give the gallery permission to copy Industrial Landscape for a temporary mural they’re doing on the work of landscape artists. His estate has donated a lot of Lowry’s unsold work for the Lowry centre at Salford Quays.
McKellen said: “If the Tate feels no responsibility to give the art-viewing public their favourite painters to view, perhaps they could let their stash go elsewhere. They could pass them on to a gallery like the Lowry, which shares its visitors’ tastes. Or perhaps a touring retrospective, with a twist – the exhibits would be for sale.”
If you ask me it sounds like pure snobbery on the part of the Tate!
