Lowry And The Painting Of Modern Life

Product Description

This book accompanies a long overdue retrospective of the much-loved British painter L.S. Lowry (1887
- 1976) the first show held by a public institution in London since the artist's death. Bringing together around eighty works the aim is to re-assess Lowry's contribution as part of a wider art history & to argue for his achievement as Britain's pre-eminent painter of the industrial city. Although Lowry's most frequent subjects were drawn from a pattern of streets he walked daily he is not straightforwardly a 'realist' artist nor really an 'impressionist' artist though there are few twentieth-century British artists who engaged more fruitfully with the French tradition. For Lowry modern painting needed a mode of observation capable of representing the remaining rituals of public life: football matches & protest marches evictions & fist-fights workers going to & from the mill. Without his pictures Britain would arguably lack an account in paint of the experiences of the twentieth-century working class. Above all Lowry was a landscape painter & wished to show what the industrial revolution had made from the world. Lowry & the Painting of Modern Life will bring together the artist's late urban panoramas where a leap up to 'history painting' size indicates the measure of his final ambition. Written & curated by the eminent art historians T.J. Clark & Anne Wagner this new study promises to be the most fresh & incisive approach yet to the study of the one of the nation's most popular painters.