Exhibitions
L. S. Lowry: A Centenary Tribute (Crane Kalman, till 28 November) A Tribute to Frances Hodgkins (Gillian Jason, till 5 December)
A pair of loners
Giles Auty
Laurence Stephen Lowry, whose name is well known now way beyond the bound- aries of the art world, had to wait 35 years for his first one-man exhibition. In later years, when asked about the increasingly high prices his paintings were beginning to fetch, he remarked: 'They didn't want them when they were cheap. Why should they want them now they're dear?'
The question seems a reasonable one. Examining the back of a Lowry painting the other day, I noticed a price written in the artist's hand: £31.10. As the time was pre-decimal, the '10' referred to shillings — or 50p in current money — but the price still seems wonderfully arbitrary until one remembers guineas. Even at 30 guineas a small industrial landscape by Lowry was a snip unquestionably, and it is interesting to note that many of Lowry's earlier patrons came from an insecure profession them- selves. Howard Spring, J. B. Priestley, Graham Greene and Rebecca West spot- ted a certain poetry in the paintings of the solitary, gangling, middle-aged figure.
L. S. Lowry was born on 1 November 1887 at Rusholme in Manchester, but in 1909 his family moved to the more indus- trialised area of Pendlebury in Salford. The young Lowry took years to accustom him- self to the grimness of his immediate surroundings and to realise that his major future source of subject matter lay all around him. To find a parallel with Lowry, one needs to imagine an artist such as Courbet spending not just his youth but his whole life in an obscure provincial setting; Courbet was in his twenties before he saw the sea for the first time. Lowry knew the sea from an early age yet never once travelled abroad, flew in an aeroplane, drove a car, formed a romantic attachment or drank alcohol. Slightly more under- standably, he did not smoke, marry or own a television set, and had a telephone installed only when in his eighties.
The city of Salford is celebrating its eccentric son's centenary with a very large exhibition of his paintings, supported by a display of photographs and other memor- abilia. The ramifications of the so-called Lowry Festival also include pop, dance, theatre, cabaret, opera and even a ballet, presumably with the purpose of fleshing out the life of this private, solitary and often seemingly two-dimensional man. I cannot imagine the subject would have recognised himself or taken any great pleasure in some of these activities and suspect strongly that his life held sadder secrets than many now surmise — but this is simply conjecture.
Because I saw the greater part of his work at the retrospective exhibition held at the Tate 20 years ago, I am content now with the reminder provided in London by the artist's former friend, commercial deal- er and enthusiastic promoter, Andras Kal- man. Mr Kalman has shown initiative in getting together an exhibition of 30 signifi- cant works, many on loan, for his gallery's show (178 Brompton Road, SW3) and in preparing a pleasantly understated tribute 01110*004401.401111111111111i `Still Life Self Portrait' c. 1933, by Frances Hodgkins through the pages of a catalogue. In Britain, commercial dealers sometimes set a good example to those empowered to entertain and enlighten us in our public exhibition spaces.
A remarkable example of this thesis is provided at the moment by Gillian Jason, who runs an attractive gallery in artistically unfashionable Camden Town (42 Inver- ness Street, NW1) and acts, on this occa- sion, with Diana and Lance Crawford. While Lowry is known even to the other- wise uninitiated, the name of Frances Hodgkins probably signifies nothing at all to the younger breed of art lover in Britain. Hers was a first-rate talent nevertheless, and widely recognised in its day here and abroad. The artist was born in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1869, an exact contem- porary of Matisse who had survived her by a mere seven years when he died in 1954. Although she spent much of her working life and ended her days in Britain, Frances Hodgkins's place of birth explains the posthumous neglect her work has suffered. Her art has been the subject of only two exhibitions in Britian since the year of her death in 1947, largely because much of the best work has been bought by now for collections in New Zealand. Mounting the present show represents a triumph of perserverance. The artist picked her way patiently through a background of academic tradi- tion and found release later in a fluid, intuitive style no matter what the medium. At times her paintings resemble those of David Jones, yet always retain a distinctive edge. Although influenced by cubism, Frances Hodgkins's debt to surrealism remains less than that of other artists such as Paul Nash and Sutherland working here in the Thirties. Hodgkins belongs properly to the group of artists who sought the poignant, dramatic and lyrical in their re-discovery of nature. Like her junior, Lowry, Hodgkins was something of a loner and never married. She loved cats but dreaded the excessive intimacy many hu- man relationships entail. Her solitariness, like that of Lowry, preserved the essential innocence of her vision. As the current exhibition makes plain, she was not only an idiosyncratic woman but also a singular artist.
Previous page
