A film by Margy Kinmonth
Looking For Lowry will be transmitted on Easter Sunday, 24th April at 22.15 on ITV network
Matchstick Men strike back at Tate – Sunday Times
“Simmering dispute about the critical distain metered out to one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century…”If the Tate did put Lowrys on their walls they’d probably get more people through their doors,”’ says the actor Ian McKellen…
Richard Brooks for The Sunday Times
Erotic secrets prove he was ahead of his time – The Mail on Sunday
“This documentary has brought off a coup in persuading Carol Ann Lowry to speak for the first time about her relationship with the painter… I am reminded of the work of controversial pop artist Allen Jones. Nobody would have thought of Lowry as occupying the forefront of artistic fashion. But in private, he was doing exactly that”
“More complicated and expressive than had been suspected”
“Revealing some private works by Lowry that uncover personal imagery. They are full of desire and pain…sexual edge is clear…downright disturbing, disquieting pictures revealed to the world…He seems, more and more, like a rather interesting artist…
Such artists often have the last laugh”.
Philip Hensher for The Mail on Sunday
Darker Side of the Matchstick Man – The Mail on Sunday
“During her interview for Looking For Lowry Carol recalls her first impression of the artist. ‘He was very Victorian looking, with a waistcoat and big hands. Sometimes, later, he would turn up with white paint on his clothes. She thought him ‘wise, fascinating and interesting’ and a bond between them was quickly formed.”
Andrea Levin for The Mail on Sunday
Tate challenged over LS Lowry ‘exclusion’ – Guardian Newspaper
“McKellen leads attack on ’northernist’ sidelining. Highly critical programme about Lowry’s exclusion…controversy reached crunch point…’Over the years, silly lies have been thrown around that he was only a Sunday painter, an amateur, untrained and naive’ said McKellen in a programme to be screened by ITV1 on Easter Day.”
Martin Wainwright for The Guardian
Sir Ian McKellen challenges Tate over Lowry works – BBC News
“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”
Getting the Lowdown on Lowry – The Lady
“…finely made documentary…convinced me that his matchstick men were real…”
Alexander Chancellor’s Television Week
L.S.Lowry The Original Grime Artist – Guardian.co.uk
“Unforgettable…Lowry is a visionary… Tate guilty of filing away and forgetting him…snobbery towards ‘naiive’ and popular art….Potent – freed to paint without respect for convention…grim beauty…modern primitive, an industrial Rousseau…his exclusion is not about north versus south. But it is about class…”
Jonathan Jones – Guardian.co.uk
What the people think …
The Tate is sponsored by BP. Maybe they won’t let the Tate show pictures of a polluting nature.
Sell them to an overseas collector just like the conservative government handed our heavy industry over to foreign producers.
there are a lot of people in the paintings with damaged arms, legs etc. and the injuries people got from the machinery in the mills meant there were a lot of people in the population who had exactly the injuries represented…the paintings certainly aren’t the quaint sanitized version of mill town life that that dreadful pop song was on about.
Something about this suggests the way in which London hoards the ‘national’ culture
And even better and sadly forgotten British Artist was Edward Burra
They are so popular that I doubt I’d go to see them since I’ve seen prints so many times
The wild outsiders get less attention.
Is the sentimentality that surrounds, for example, Rothko, a different, more sophisticated sentimentality? Absolute snobbery.
Someone not looking at them carefully or intelligently could think they were ‘sentimental’.
Perhaps a better word to assign to his trademark matchstick works would be visionary?
It may be an ‘elitist’ or ‘snobbish’ view, but Lowry is – frankly – crap. Twee, sentimentalist and samey; he’s popular as much for his subject matter and locality as his dubious artistic ability.
It is not necessarily the role of the Tate to exhibit the Country’s most populist/popular artists, any more than it’s the role of the London Symphony Orchestra to bang out Classic FM favourites at every concert.
Send em back north I say, at least they would be appreciated in Manchester, rather than locked up in a cupboard in London.
It was the same with Blake, he was ignored. The British art establishment has always been unable to celebrate ‘local’ art; it has a colonial obsession which still pervades today
I thought I knew what Lowry was all about until I clicked on the link to that extraordinary self-portrait in the article above! Makes me think I know nothing about the guy…
The Tate has 23 works by Lowry but only seven are paintings. There is one unique drawing and the rest are prints
Lowry is the Pam Ayres of the art world
Edward Hopper also got overlooked by one of the Tate directors
You can tell this is an old painting as there are people in the street not getting kettled.
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