Lowry (below, left) and Major: Sad men of art, who fought the inevitable
The population of the earth is three-and-a-half thousand million. The chances of any one person making such an impact that his work becomes a fingerprint recognisable throughout the world is, therefore, vanishingly small. We are honouring today such a man whose work is instantly recognisable whether viewed in London or Tokyo.
- Euolgy to Lawrence Stephen Lowry on his being awarded an honorary Doctorate of Literature. Picture © Brian Duff.
You can look at a Lowry dog and, in my opinion, wish you hadn't. Now what is a Lowry dog? It is a swift horizontal dab, with a smudge on the end, and four vertical dabs for the legs. A quick tick and you have a tail. A Lowry dog is a travesty of a dog, impasto or no impasto; but then, a Lowry figure is a travesty of a figure. Lowry's stick figures and Northern landscapes made him famous; and what, patently, did not make him famous is his early work which is much more to my liking because it is a reasonable facsimile of whatever it is he is trying to portray.
You will understand from all this that I am no painter; but, like most people, I recognise a cult when I see one, and Lowry was a cult. I also recognise an investment, and the world is full of people looking first for the cult, then the investment. It is what soured people like Lowry, because he knew precisely what people wanted of him, and I do not blame him for his perception of them. He was very lonely and frequently miserable.
Lowry was always more important to me as a man than as a painter. He had the hangdog look of someone in need of care and protection. I first stared at him in Sam's Chop House in Manchester and thought be looked enormous, vulnerable, and a little wooden. You could never mistake him for someone else. I had heard that he was mean. Then I heard of the time he arrived home with a friend; neither could find the light switch, and he lighted a five pound note with a match to see his way inside. A woman who bought one of his paintings complained that he had not marked it with the year of creation. "What year would you like?" he said - "1929 was a very good year." Droll face, droll humour, droll paintings, droll home.
L.S. (for Laurence Stephen) Lowry, former rent collector and chief cashier, died in 1976 at the age of 88 after pneumonia and a stroke. If he was a genius, it appeared to have brought him little joy and less comfort. He was a tall, pear-shaped man living alone, withdrawn, without ostentation and for years he had tended to complain about his lack of privacy. In his position, I might well have complained of lack of company, but there you are: every man to his taste. I was to give him further cause for complaint.
He had many callers of the venal variety. When he tired of company he yawned. A Lowry yawn could be prodigious and it was an, unmistakable signal: it meant he was ready to return to his solitude The yawn has been directed at me. Just before the birthday which preceded his death, he emerged from his front door in answer to my knock and his feet scuffed in deep whirlpools of autumn leaves that had gathered in his drive. He was in no mood for birthdays.
"Talk about it?" he said. "What is there, to talk about? I am 88, not 68, you know, and people are still coming; people, people..."
His old house, stone-built and detached, was at Mottram in Longendale, near Stalybridge in Cheshire: to the motorist, the place is just an unmemorable blur between Manchester and Barnsley. Lowry lived modestly, even frugally in spite of his success. No garden at the front to speak of, the lower windows shielded by straggling privet...
He was wearing a clerical grey suit and there was ash down the front of it. It looked like the suit he wore the year before when he was equally impatient of birthdays - "It's a day, just another day. I'm tired."
He was shown an advertisement for one of his prints -
"250 beautiful prints of On the Sands from a guaranteed limited issue of 500. Each print signed by the artist. Signed Lowrys make for a sound investment and have shown sustained profit growth over the years..."
"All art has become an investment," he said. Too right it has.
Lowry had seen the joke, but had not found it funny: yet he could be kind and charming (or distant) according to mood. He could give a painting worth £30,000 to an art gallery (a large amount at the time), then complain about the government taking his money in taxes. He was harder than he appeared to be at first sight; much more. shrewd. He had to be in the early years. Lowry was middle-aged before he achieved any real success. Which is why he complains, "People should have come before; that's when they should have come. They never came to see me than..."
He was an only child, born in Manchester in I887. His father was an estate agent and his mother a talented musician. They were comfortably off. Lowry's teacher at Manchester Regional College of Art painted the industrial scene and showed him reproductions of the work of the Impressionists. The two influences were to shape Lowry's work. He became fascinated by mills and by the people who worked in them. "I could not understand why I had never seen them painted seriously. So I thoughts I'll try and put matters right. I did it, but suffered on the way."
He was selling a painting a year, on average, for around £30. . He would say to young artists: "Give it up before it is too late." To others: "I am incorrigibly lazy - perhaps that is why I have been so industrious all my life."
Or: "Look at that graveyard - nobody there is complaining." Or: "A married man lives like a dog and dies like a king; a bachelor lives like a king and dies like a dog."
He finished with painting more often than some of his contemporaries started. The files were littered with "last" interviews.
He remembered I9I8 to I930 as his best period because he was "fresh to it."
Once, he said: " I suppose if I had my time again I would be a painter, but I don't think much of it as a life. It's a job, like anything else."
There was a single biscuit on a plate in the centre of his table the time I spoke to him. Nothing else. He neither looked at it nor touched it and it appeared to have been there for days.
Lowry was survived by a Lancastrian contemporary, Theodore Major ("Painting is my life and art is my religion") , of whom John Berger, the author and art critic, said, "His best canvasses deserve to rank among the best English paintings of our time." There is not the slightest connection between the two, so far as I can see.
I speak of Major in different terms, because I was glad to have him as a friend whom I have visited often, but not often enough. In November, I989, a national newspaper headlined a feature, "From Mr Lowry's classroom: John Windsor tracks down the other industrial landscape painters of the North." The text declared, "L. S. Lowry... had a close following of about a dozen painters whose work, as a distinct school, has had virtually no recognition... About half his circle of Lancashire industrial artists is still alive. Smog-bound sunsets by Theodore Major, now 8I, and living in Wigan, fetch from £I00 to £I,000..."
It was all news to me. Theo was no more a follower of Lowry, or any such school, than President Clinton. It could. be said that they lived in the same county, and used paint, but nothing more. He was, and remained, fiercely independent and individual and he would rather guard his talent than sell it any day. I can not speak for the others. Lowry was odd and anonymous to look at and he made Lancastrians equally odd and anonymous. Major, by comparison, had a fierce love of ordinary people. For him, painting was not a job: it was total commitment, life, past, present, future, eternity; the hand of God made manifest. If Major's canvasses were not familiar to viewers in central London it is not surprising: they were ranked row on row in a small cottage near Wigan. The painter occupied the adjoining cottage. Art and artist were neighbours. And since he rarely exhibited and not in London, anyone wishing to view his canvas siblings had to make the pilgrimage to his front door. If, upon inspection, he liked the visitor, he was possibly in; and if he did not like the look of them, they were out.
"Go and buy Lowry. You've got enough of mine," he once told a visitor (not, surely, the words of a doting pupil?). It is instructive that whereas Lowry merited an entry in Bamber Gascoigne's Encyclopaedia of Britain, Major did not. I drew his attention to the newspaper's assessment of him and he was subsequently apoplectic, as I expected him to be.
"The Gallery (a gallery in Bristol exhibiting paintings under the title, A Northern School) wrote to me asking for some of my work. I told them I was not interested in showing my work and that I was even less interested in selling it (although I have been offered much more than £I,000 for it). I believe that pictures are for all people to see.They are not there simply be owned and possessed by wealthy people. This is why I will not sell." The exhibition, presumably, inspired the article.
He was grossly affronted by those who asked how much money he got for a painting. To someone who did just that, he said, "How much did Van Gogh get?"
When a friend and I visited, the friend asked whether he could buy a painting. Theo asked why he wanted it. "For my daughter" (she was going to art college). Theo thought about it, but made no response positive or negative. Then, looking quizzically at his visitor, he said, "I don't know how to take you." We left empty-handed. I once asked him, "When somebody wants to buy a picture, how do you talk money?" "I just hope they don't," he replied. .
Major, frail in his later years, was the most intense painter alive and there was a deep mysticism about him. Down the years his canvases depicted flowers, skeletons, glowering skies, stark faces full of character and with staring eyes, crucifixions, nudes. Little of it would be hung on a house wall and so he avoided matching the carpets or the wallpaper. He painted so that the works had to be hung together in large areas, preferably a cathedral.
He worked compulsively, beginning with a stroke of white then waiting for the inner voice that would tell him what to do next. All his work had, in his mind, already been created before he created it. Many might seek to judge him, for that is the way of things, but the only judgment that counted to him was his own. His conviction were strong. His images matched the conviction. His wife, Kathleen, died many years ago. She was a considerable talent in her own right and I have some of her work now - she loved curves. A serious illness in 1965 deprived her of speech and she expressed herself through her drawings. Theodore Major was her greatest admirer.
He could have been rich, possibly supremely rich , but the thought of his art being regarded as decorative or as an investment horrified him so much that lie lived alone and as simply and as frugally as any man could.
His obsession had been with the innocence of children, and the character of age: human beings mirroring, at opposite ends of life's spectrum, a strong spirituality. So deep was the conviction of his own rightness that he subconsciously challenged the world to deny it. Since the world was not particularly interested in the artist judging himself, but only in how it might profit from its own judgment of the artist, Major sat out the majority of his time in isolation.
No car, no phone, no holidays, no travel, no agent; just a few friends who were good friends.
He was vulnerable through his compassion, and perhaps that accounted, in part, for the withdrawal. through which, easily offended, sensitive to atmosphere, he hid his gentleness.
His cottage was the sort that a retired miner might occupy,: the coal fires constant in an iron grate popular in the early years of this century.
Theodore Major left school at I3 and worked in a tailor's shop. By 2I, he had three bouts of rheumatic fever and could not work at all. He was crossed off the dole list because his sisters were working. Painting became a reason for being.
The canvases he retained were so numerous and took up so much space that he had to put his two-bar electric fire on top of them; it heated only the ceiling, leaving his cold feet to their own devices. For exhibitions he has declare his own creed:
"Painting is my life and art is my religion. I see in painting a battle in which the creation of a work of art becomes a symbol of victory over ignorance, stupidity and superstition. I see art as the language of man's spirit. I believe any divorcing of art from the feeling of humanity is both foolish and dangerous, and that such art can only end in pretty surface patterning, or in a delving into the sub-consciousness of the artist's personality, which often proves a messy and unwholesome business."
Sitting on his bed by the old fireplace, he held court and occasionally saw a victory for art over avarice. He was happy to note that Van Gogh's Sunflowers sold for near £25m, a not unjust price to him. "They would not give £25 in his lifetime, and it is only half the price of a fighting aircraft which they scrap in a few years."
Those qualified to judge Major's work were impressed by both strength and vision. Those who were his friends are glad of the privilege. Theodore Major was, then, a gentle man and an ogre, a contradiction. His aims were pure. His application to the task was total. But I dare say he died angry. He was always angry.
