Selected Essays of John Berger (24 page)

In 1964 the Hallé Orchestra gave a special concert in honour of Lowry’s seventy-fifth birthday: a number of artists, including Henry Moore, Victor Pasmore and Ivon Hitchens, contributed to an honorary exhibition: and Sir Kenneth Clark wrote an appreciation. In it, Clark compares Lowry to Wordsworth’s ‘Leech Gatherer’:

Edwin Mullins, who wrote the introduction to the catalogue of Lowry’s retrospective exhibition at the Tate in 1966, makes the point that Lowry is primarily interested in ‘the battle of life’.

These quotations reveal the submerged patronage found in nearly all critical comment on Lowry’s work. This tendency to patronize is a form of self-defence: defence not so much against the artist as against the subject-matter of his work. It is hard to reconcile a life devoted to aesthetic expositions with the streets and houses and front doors of those who live in Bury, Rochdale, Burnley or Salford.

Lowry has been compared with Chaplin, Brueghel and the Douanier Rousseau. The curious mood of his work has been analysed, sometimes with considerable subtlety. His technique has been explained and it has been pointed out that technically he is a highly sophisticated artist. Many stories are told about his behaviour and conversation. He is indeed an original, dignified man for whom one can feel deeply.

I might add stories of my own, but there is something more important to say. The extraordinary fact is that nobody, faced with Lowry’s pictures whose subject-matter is nearly always social, ever discusses the social or historical meaning of his art. Instead it is treated as though it dealt with the view out of the window of a Pullman train on its non-stop journey to London, where everything is believed to be very different. His subjects, if they have to be considered at all in relation to what actually exists, are considered as local exotica.

I don’t want to exaggerate the meaning of Lowry’s work or give it a historical load which is too heavy for it. The range of his work is small. It does not belong to the mainstream of twentieth-century art, which is concerned in one way or another with interpreting new relationships between man and nature. It is a spontaneous (as opposed to a consciously self-developing) art. It is static, local and subjectively repetitive. But it is consistent within itself, courageous, obstinate, unique, and the phenomenon of its creation and appreciation
is
significant.

Perhaps I should emphasize here that this significance must be considered separately from, though not necessarily in opposition to,
Lowry’s conscious intentions. He says he doesn’t know why he paints his pictures. They come to him.

Even allowing for the simplification Lowry makes in telling this story, it is clear that he works intuitively, without fixed aims. His aim is only to finish the picture. Any wider significance his work may have is the result of a certain coincidence between his own private half-hidden motivations and the nature of the outside world which he uses as raw material and to which he delivers back his finished pictures. On a certain level, he himself is probably aware of this coincidence: it is probably the substance of his conviction that what he has to say as an artist is, in some mysterious way, relevant. But this is very far from implying that he consciously intends the meaning which his pictures acquire.

What is this meaning? I have already suggested that its basis is social. Let us now try to place Lowry’s pictures within a context. First, they are very specifically English. They could be about nowhere else. Nowhere else are there comparable industrial landscapes. The light, which is not natural but which was manufactured in the nineteenth century, is unique. Only in the Midlands and North of England do people live – to use Sir Kenneth Clark’s euphemism – in such a milky pool.

The character of the figures and crowds is also specially English. The industrial revolution has isolated them and uprooted them. Their homemade ideology, except when they are led and organized by revolutionaries, is a kind of ironic stoicism. Nowhere else do crowds look so simultaneously
civic
and
deprived.
They appear to have as little to lose as a mob: and yet they are not a mob. They know each other, recognize each other, exchange help and jokes – they are not, as is sometimes said, like lost souls in limbo; they are fellow-travellers through a life which is impervious to most of their choices.

All this might seem at first to date Lowry’s paintings. One might suppose that they are more to do with the nineteenth century than with today when there are television aerials on the houses, cars in the back streets, hairdressers for mill girls, and a Labour government.

Yet, in order to place Lowry’s work within an historical as well as
geographical context, we must distinguish rather carefully between different elements in it. Most of Lowry’s paintings are synthetic, insofar as they are constructed from his observation and memory of different incidents and places. Only a few represent specific scenes. If, however, one goes to the mill towns, to the potteries, to Manchester, to Barrow-in-Furness, to Liverpool, one finds countless streets, skylines, doorsteps, bus stops, squares, churches, homes, which look like those depicted by Lowry, and have never been depicted by anybody else. His paintings are no more dated than certain English cities and towns.

If one looks more carefully at the pictures one notices that the figures, even in the most recent ones, are wearing clothes which belong, at the latest, to the 1920s or early 1930s: that is to say to the period when Lowry first determined to paint the area where he had been brought up and where he was going to spend the rest of his life. Similarly, there are very few cars or modern buildings to be seen. He says that he hates change. And his pictures, both in detail, as cited above, and in general spirit, suggest an essential changelessness. (One sees this in a different way in his deserted landscapes and seascapes of endlessly repeating hills or waves.) The bustle of the crowds, the walk to the sea and back, the fight, the accident, the once-yearly excitement of the fair, the ageing of some, the crippling of others, changes nothing. In certain canvases this sense of unchanging time becomes an almost metaphysical sense of eternity.

Thus we can summarize: Lowry’s paintings correspond in many respects to existing places: certain details belong to the past: the artist’s vision exaggerates a feeling of changelessness: the three elements combine together to create an atmosphere of dramatic obsolescence. Stylistic considerations apart, there is in fact no question of these pictures belonging to the spirit of the nineteenth century. The notion of progress – however it is applied – is foreign to them. Their virtues are stoic: their logic is one of decline.

These paintings are about what has been happening to the British economy since 1918, and their logic implies the collapse still to come. This is what has happened to the ‘workshop of the world’. Here is the recurring so-called production crisis: the obsolete industrial plants: the inadequacy of unchanged transport systems and overstrained power supplies: the failure of education to keep pace with technological advance: the ineffectiveness of national planning: the lack of capital investment at home and the disastrous reliance on colonial and neo-colonial overseas investments: the shift of power from industrial capital to international finance capital, the essential agreements within the two-party system blocking every initiative towards political independence and thus economic viability.

The argument is not so far-fetched as it may seem if one pauses to consider the circumstances in which the pictures have been painted.
Lowry has happened to live and work in an area where the truth of our economic decline has been far less disguised than elsewhere. His art is partly subjective, but what he has seen around him has confirmed, and perhaps even helped to sustain and create, his subjective tendencies. In the 1920s, Lancashire was a depressed area. (One tends to forget that before the depression of the 1930s, there were never less than one million unemployed.) What the 1930s were like has been described many times. Yet the relevance of their desolation to Lowry is seldom mentioned. Here Orwell is virtually describing a painting by Lowry:

The poverty of the 1930s has passed. But in many parts of the north-west today there is a sense of profound exhaustion. There is nothing Spenglerian about this: it is the result of the scale of what has to be destroyed before anything can be renewed. Town-planners, investors, educationalists know it. I quote from the government’s North-West Study, published in 1965:

In a different way many of the voters know it too. They have always voted Labour, believing in an alternative plan. Today they see Wilson thirty-five years later performing the same role as Ramsay MacDonald and abandoning any possibility of an alternative.

Historians of the future will cite Lowry’s work as both expressing and
illustrating the industrial and economic decline of British capitalism since the First World War. But of course he is not simply that, as described in those remote terms. He is an artist concerned with loneliness, with a certain humour – somewhat like Samuel Beckett’s: the humour found in the contemplation of time passing without meaning. He is an artist who has uniquely found a way of painting the character of hand-me-down clothes, the sensation of damp rising from the ground, the effect of smog on the texture of the surfaces exposed to it, the strange closing of distance which smoke and mist bring about so that each person carries with him his own small parcel of visibility, which constitutes his world.

‘My three most cherished records,’ says Lowry, ‘are the fact that I’ve never been abroad, never had a telephone and never owned a motorcar.’ He is a man strongly attached to where he found himself. Everything in his work is informed by the character of a specific place and period.

I have tried to define that character. If Lowry were a greater artist, there would be more of himself in his work. (His ‘naïvety’ is probably an excuse for hiding his own experience.) It would then be far less possible to localize his work, either geographically or historically: emotions are always more general than circumstances. As it is, given his inhibitions as an artist, he intuitively chose correctly. He chose to paint the historic.

1966

To understand the work of Toulouse-Lautrec two current fallacies have to be demolished.

There are those – however surprising it may seem – who still argue that, despite some unfortunate incidents, Lautrec, the illustrious son of one of the noblest families in France, remains a credit to his background.

The second argument has more respect for the facts and the suffering involved. Even Lautrec’s last words on his death-bed at the age of thirty-seven are admitted. They were:
‘Le vieux con’
– and they referred to his father. But this argument maintains that his life was transcended by his art. In a sense this is true, but only if one also recognizes that his work was a direct expression of his life. The only miracle is art; but even in art, the facts count.

Lautrec was born with two terrible handicaps: the family around him and the disease in his bones. His father was mad about horses and women. His mother was a martyr to his father’s infidelities. It was a family of many châteaux, but also of empty rooms and absences. The ideals it instilled in the young Lautrec were exclusively extrovert ideals of physical prowess.

The disease struck when he was fourteen. It is sometimes thought that his legs stopped growing as the result of two falls. But recent medical opinion strongly suggests that this would have happened anyway and that the fractures were the
result
of an inborn dystrophic disease which was probably in its turn the result of his parents being first cousins.