by Paul Morley
In 1909 Lowry’s parents slipped from genteel Victoria Park to dingier, earthier Pendlebury, in the north-west of Salford, an area filled with the thumping industrial buildings that would infect Lowry’s mind. This was a Salford in which you would still see men from the poorhouses working with P for pauper stamped on the seats of their ragged trousers. This was a Salford that hadn’t moved on much from when Friedrich Engels reported it was ‘built in courts of narrow lanes, so narrow that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever seen, in the little lanes of Genoa. The average construction of Salford is in this respect much worse than that of Manchester and so too in respect of cleanliness. If in Manchester the police from time to time make a raid upon the working-class district, close the worst dwellings, and cause the filthiest spots in these Augean stables to be cleaned, in Salford it seems to have done absolutely nothing.’ By 1900, five years after Engels died, much remained in Salford that was fetid.
Lowry’s mother and father felt humiliated by their loss of status, and at first he hated the neighbourhood as much as his mother. However, according to legend, one day when the light was up to a certain north-west something he got a sudden glimpse of a gargantuan mill from a particular position on top of his local station steps, and saw beyond the colourless smoggy grime and unremarkable everydayness into a frail, unquantifiable beauty: ‘The huge black framework of rows of yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp-charged afternoon sky.’ There was an epiphany, and the rest of his life was spent chasing and circling and refining and confirming this bitter impression of piercing absence, this sight of something other in the midst of withering familiarity and stinging deprivation, something in which you could see time itself, not simply human reaction to and human control of time. ‘My subjects were all around me . . . in those days there were mills and collieries all around Pendlebury. The people who work there were passing morning and night. All my material was on my doorstep.’ He could see there was something else, behind, inside, at the very core of his defiled surroundings, and that to capture this feeling and express it required a new form of compositional approach, a new way of aligning subject and form, and locating harmony in unlikely places.
Lowry broke free of restrictive social, institutional and aesthetic standards, and developed his own language, his own symbols and reference points, and this made him completely modern despite his subject matter, which could be archaic, nostalgic, sentimental, romantic, but also cruel, dispassionate, weary, removed. This was where he found himself, and what else could he possibly paint, when there was all this crowded space, epic scale and radiant sadness to consider and contain? To paint a landscape in such an area meant painting deformed, withered post-industrial urban living and the consequences of constant graft that profoundly marked the environment – that was the essential nature he was destined to capture. Perhaps, too, his limited palette, the five colours he mixed to create the atmosphere and detail in his paintings, which limited him yet set him free, contained enough potential for him to capture the various reds of northern Victorian brick, and especially the red of the Stockport Viaduct, produced from a very specific combination of local chemicals and minerals at a certain temperature in the kiln where the bricks were baked, allowing him to get inside how that colour had been greyed, marred, soiled by smoke and wear.
He got a job as a rent collector in 1912, which also seemed to influence his painting, his perspective on people. He got into their homes, close to the faces, bodies and even souls of the kind of people who would populate his paintings. He could examine how they moved: with a limp, a little skip, a weird little shuffle, an ageing hobble, a youthful twitch; he could see what clothes they wore, they huddled inside: the holes in the material, their ratty shoes, the mufflers around the men’s scrawny necks, the shawls the women wore on the shortest of journeys; he could examine the weariness in their faces, the mouthfuls of rotten teeth, the silly things that made them laugh, the nitty-gritty of their speech and gestures, the meat and potatoes of their daily grind. He watched them play, heard them gossip, moan, scold, shop in the markets, inside their world but on the outside. He could reach inside people, but not to paint them exactly as they appeared, but as he remembered them, as he was already starting to forget them, because there were so many of them, and they were all the same, and all different, and all living on streets that were all the same, and all different. ‘Something’s gone wrong in their lives,’ he once said with a little sad chuckle.
He studies art until 1928. He is a part-time artist, but perhaps only in the way that T. S. Eliot is a part-time poet. Lowry works for a living, but he also records the texture, technicality and magnificent peculiarity of the ailing humdrum corner of the universe where he finds himself. His debt-ridden father dies in 1932, leaving him to look after his ailing, depressed mother, working by day, nursing her in the evening, painting at night. In 1938 he is fifty, and to some extent on his own, in his own world, translating the graceful, grievous north around him through his own obsession with this unique combination of external weight and internal anxiety, of dirty streets and human thought. In the 1930s he develops a fondness for Berwick-upon-Tweed, the northernmost town in England, in the traditional warring border land, on the east coast at the mouth of the Scottish River Tweed five miles north of Holy Island. Both English and Scottish and yet in some ways neither, switching back and forth between the countries, never quite settling one way or the other, achieving such a level of unsettled independence the Crimean War had to be declared on behalf of Great Britain, Ireland and Berwick-upon-Tweed.
In Berwick Lowry sees a Salford without the mills and chimneys, falls for the way the Georgian town-hall steeple dominates the skyline, exaggerating its height when he paints it, admires the seventeenth-century sandstone Old Bridge, stays at the Castle Hotel by the railway station, ponders buying a house on the intact Elizabethan walls of the town, fascinated by how old buildings, crooked lanes, kerbstones, leaning walls, the parish church built in Cromwellian times, and the flights of steps are grimly packed together in gripping geometry by the walls. He once said he always wanted to live near the sea, and crashing, weeping, pounding into Berwick – now a sea-swept Stockport, a Swinton with salty air, reminding him of the summer holidays he took with his mother in Rhyl, north Wales – is the North Sea, particularly eerie and ominous in winter, in which for Lowry there is all the battle of life, the unwavering inevitability, the coming in of the tide, and the going out, the filling up and the emptying out.
His mam, who called him Laurie, dies in 1939, and now he really is on his own. It is suggested he inherited his artistic single-mindedness from her, a lucid tunnel vision, and was distraught she did not live to see the acclaim he received as a painter. In the Second World War he is a fire-watcher, looking out over his city, seeing shapes and fragments no one else can, seeing the world around him fall apart, seeing himself in the ruins, the shabby, melancholy observer watching himself watching the formation of decline and the collapse of greatness.
His house in Pendlebury falls into disrepair and is repossessed, and after fancying a lonely many-windowed house which turns out to be riddled with damp on a hill in Berwick with views of the sea, he moves to a detached old stone house in Mottram, Longendale, near Hyde, midway between Manchester and Barnsley, on the border with Derbyshire. He lives there, putting up with a home he never really likes, for the next twenty-eight years. He keeps visiting Berwick until his final summer. At home he drinks in the Cheshire Cheese pub on Hyde Lane and sets up his easel on the town-hall steps.
He works as a rent collector until he retires in 1952 at sixty-five, wearing the mask of an ordinary man to smuggle himself into the lives of those he is very different from. His world unlike theirs is made of paint and flat surfaces, and he imagines a reality influenced by what he remembers as much as what he sees. He is motivated by how he can organise and articulate his thoughts and feelings by combining, smudging, scratching, fingering, massaging his favourite colours, his vermilion, ivory
black, yellow ochre, Prussian blue, flake white – so therefore black, white and three basic tones – on to flat surfaces in ways that record the ornate, decaying atmosphere of where he lives, and the run-down, pragmatic, defeated and/or defiant people he happens to live with and beside.
He is like Edgar Allen Poe’s man of the crowd, drifting through the teeming city, or through the dream spaces in his mind, trying to understand and appreciate everything that happens. He inhabits a dilapidated Pinteresque universe rather than a hokey Formby town. Factories are to Lowry what the motor car was to Filippo Marinetti of the Italian Futurists and fame was to Andy Warhol. He creeps through his own life and the lives of others, compiling fragments, morsels of experience, searching for answers about death, disappearance, the past, why we live, why we die, where we go, where we come from, the oddity of everyday life, the pinched dead-eyed ordinariness. He watches, and turns that watching into his paintings, which don’t really belong to any school, and aren’t as naive as some say, or as primitive, or as simplistic. They are described in condescending ways as being childish, but you get the feeling Lowry was never childish even as a child. Using the minimal means he has decided upon, the limited palette, the stylistic repetitions, the constant dazzling pulse of isolation, he is nevertheless an experimental artist, turning coarse truth into something unworldly, interpreting northern life as something more nihilistic and surreal than cosy and quirky. He is Baudelaire’s dandy, with a burning desire to create a personal form of originality within the external limits of social conventions: ‘Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy.’
Lowry has found something to do that forms an escape from a chaos of imponderables about existence. He has found a way to pass the time and shield himself from sinking into an eternal depression. He paints what he sees, and feels, leaving a tinge of himself, his curiosity, haunting his pictures. He paints to preserve things he has seen, not necessarily for his sake or those of the viewers, but out of a commitment to the essence of the experience itself, to keep it from oblivion.
He paints the fallout of the Industrial Revolution, its sights and splendour, its brutality and brilliance, its beginning and end, often in the same painting. He paints views of strapping distant mills topped with smoking chimneys with high floors full of alive-looking windows among hilly backgrounds that could have come from etchings of Oldham and Bury in the 1860s, but with the addition of people who came later, when these buildings were the new nature, the slipping of the once future into a present slipping into the past. He is reading the past while existing entirely in the present, colouring the landscape with elements of his own psyche, so existing at the centre of a web of contradictions.
He paints the impact of the Industrial Revolution on communities that were once villages but are now something bigger, stranger, ghastlier. He paints as an intruder dressed in clothes that once made him invisible, and now make him stand out, as he witnesses decline, disorientation and devastation, and wit, loveliness and strangeness, with no interest in what is coming next, in how the slums and poor are being replaced with something new, but possibly new slums and new poor as sighted on the wasted streets of Brinnington. Northern regeneration and the recovery, or not, of pride and motive shattered by war and unemployment are outside his remit.
Lowry never married, never went abroad, never had a car, never had a telephone. He was middle-aged before there was any recognition of his work, so that he never really took the respect that did come too seriously. Colossal, tender, he remained all his life encased in the sort of grave dark-grey clothes someone would have worn in the 1890s. ‘I keep on working and wondering what it means and it goes on and on and there you are.’ A yawn that stretched as wide as a viaduct was his response to those who bored him and separated him from his preferred state of solitude, his retreat into himself – maybe another reason for his fascination with the Stockport Viaduct, the way it announced its own yawning boredom with the land, time and space around it, showcasing its own preference for isolation. Look at that graveyard, he would say; nobody there is complaining – and the viaduct is a giant headstone perhaps, happy in its motionless permanence, a memorial to itself, which doesn’t need to do anything any more, but be itself.
He was not interested in the latest representation of progress. He was interested in what had happened to people and their surroundings because of the progress that had begun in the decades leading to his birth: people coming in, people going out. If he saw people as grotesque caricatures adrift and stunned in a hostile universe, in flight from stability, that was because the Industrial Revolution had itself turned them into such and produced that universe. He didn’t do it; it had been done to them. He didn’t create their helplessness; he witnessed it. Then again, it might be that all those strangers, locals, beggars, pedlars, cripples, neighbours, passers-by, Alberts, Franks, Harrys, Arthurs, Georges, Gilberts, Samuels, Ivys, Irenes, Ednas, Maudes, Gertrudes, Netties, Norahs, Winifreds, Violets (with surnames that survive for centuries without suffering as much from age, wear and tear) pouring in and out of his paintings – and sometimes not there at all, out of sight, gone for ever, leaving behind isolated sea, barren moor or iron-grey sky gravely stacked on the inflamed rim of infinity – were simply shadowy versions of himself, looking for a way out or a way in, painted into the world he was of but deliberately removed from. His characters, as versions of himself, of all the shadows that surrounded him, stalked his consciousness. They were ghosts from his past that would not leave him alone, looking for home, sometimes finding it, but it didn’t really feel like home, but that’s all they had. It’s all he had – a home that is not a home on the way to a forever home that he will not be able to paint, where all he will have is his thoughts and not even those. His paintings acknowledged a world of other people, but he stayed on the outside, an artist, a dreamer, a fugitive from responsibility, a detective in search of a body, sifting facts for evidence, in this case evidence about the point and purpose of existence. A detective who had his own little jokes, which were more amusing, perhaps, to him than to others.
Take a Lowry painting, filled with splinters, smears and smudges representing fleeting souls, thin-lipped strivers and drifting humans, people finding themselves within Stockport, Stretford, Glossop, Swinton, working their own way in and out of their own dreams of existence, and imagine that some of the characters, present and disconnected, have names and histories and even reputations, that as much as they are nowhere and no one, they are somewhere and someone. Who are those people going to the match, at the fairground, milling about in a street scene, hanging around the barred factory gates, yearning for freedom, remaining imprisoned? Imagine this selection of people, verging on the anonymous, sinking into obscurity and heroically rising from it like the faces and personalities lined up on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album; some of these empty vessels, these featured featureless ones, with the world and nothing more at their fingertips, have names and biographies, crossed the cobbled street, climbed the railings, opened the gate, left the frame, made their fortune, got themselves noticed, changed their minds and then the world. Imagine that in a Lowry canvas, amid that fretting static crowd, there are people who were more than they seemed, who staked claims to attention, because even if Lowry fixed you, trapped you in his world, you still did this, and you did that, and you made a difference in an indifferent universe. Crowded into Lowry’s mind, underneath an erect chimney reaching into the foul, livid clouds, on to a page or two of history, into an empty clearing between where you were born and who you become:
John Bradshaw, born in Stockport on 15 July 1602, the younger son of landowning minor gentry, was educated at Stockport Grammar School. He went on to excel in law, and was mayor of Congleton in 1637 and chief justice of Cheshire and north Wales in 1647. As reluctant lord president of the High Court of Justice he pronounced the death sentence on King Charles I in 1649 – ‘even a King is subject to the law’, his forty-m
inute statement concluded. Bradshaw was rewarded by Oliver Cromwell: appointed permanent president of the Council of State and chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Supporter of a democratic republic, he came to oppose Cromwell’s authoritarianism. When Bradshaw resisted Cromwell’s dissolution of the House of Commons in 1653 – ‘Sir, we have heard what you did at the House this morning, and before many hours all England will hear it. But, sir, you are mistaken to think that the Parliament is dissolved, for no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves. Therefore take you notice of that’ – he lost his post as chief justice of Cheshire and North Wales.
Bradshaw was baptised at Stockport parish church, where ‘traitor’ has been added against his name in the parish register. He died in October 1659 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. After the Restoration he was posthumously tried for high treason – alongside Cromwell – for his role in the death of Charles I. His body was exhumed in 1661 and hung in chains on a gibbet at Tyburn.
Admiral Sir George Back, born in Stockport, entered the navy in 1808 at twelve, served in the Napoleonic Wars, spent five years in a French jail, then became a pioneering Arctic navigator. He gave the name Stockport Islands to a couple of pieces of wilderness he discovered in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago in the territory of Nunavut.
Sir Joseph Whitworth, born in a tiny house in Hillgate, Stockport on 21 December 1803, was one of the great entrepreneurial Victorian mechanical engineers alongside Stephenson and Brunel. By 1878 Sir Joseph owned many patents including ones for knitting machines, road sweepers, steel manufacturing and twenty for armaments, even though he was a pacifist. At the 1851 Great Exhibition he exhibited a machine that could measure to a millionth of an inch, and he won more medals than any other exhibitor. Whitworth was deeply concerned with working-class poverty and donated large sums of money to educational organisations.