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The new job fair is LS Lowry he will “tell a few tales” about the Mancunian artist, who the show’s co-curator says is still wrongly scorned for being “absurd and uncultured”.
LS Lowry: Theater of Life contains 140 photographs by the artist, who captured the lives of industrial workers in North West England in the early and mid-1900s.
A Guardian review from 1948 described him as “direct, humble and refreshingly honest“, but the removal of his paintings has made his work unclear, according to one of the managers behind the exhibition, which opens on 24 October.
“What we hope to do is tell a few stories,” says Anthony Spira, director of MK Gallery in. Milton Keynes. “He wasn’t an industrial artist, but he wasn’t ignorant or aloof or self-taught, he spent years at an art college.
“He liked to go to the theater, the theater, the movie.” He also collected art, with works by the Pre-Raphaelites, Jacob Epstein and Lucien Freud.
Included in this exhibition are previously unseen footage from the 1932 A Football Match, which depicts a match between two unknown teams. It will be the first time the painting has been shown in public for almost 85 years – the last time it was shown was at the Royal Academy a decade later.
Lowry, who was a Manchester A City fan, he painted his favorite team in action against Sheffield United in 1938, but it was not unusual for him to depict the actual event rather than a piece made up of several pictures put together.
“Maybe it was an event that he saw,” says Spira. “That’s a child’s game… a lot of what they draw is more about the crowd than the actual game.”
Earlier this year, LS Lowry: The Silent Tapes it gave viewers an inside look at the artist through recovered interviews, interspersed with Sir Ian McKellen playing Lowry.
The BBC film is based on a 1972 interview with a young woman named Angela Barratt, who approached the artist and asked if she could interview him. After his death in 2022, the tapes were discovered by his son. The conversation was described by the Guardian as “soft, revealing – and barely moving“.
McKellen scolded Tate in 2011 for not paying enough attention to Lowry. Two years later, Lowry was offered exhibition at Tate Britain consisting of 90 of his articles, which focused on the industrial activities of workers and factories.
Spira said the works, such as Leaving the School and The Pond, are part of Lowry’s signature which could – if presented on their own – be a “bad” version of his output.
“He really did a lot more than that,” Spira says of the company’s activities. “They had a lot of fun, not just people going to the football games, but the beach, the festivals, the happy people, the fun – the old English life.”
His most famous painting, Going to the Matchit was bought for £7.8m in 2022 by the Lowry art center in Salford, saving it from a private collection.
The MK Gallery exhibition has been organized to coincide with the 50th anniversary of his death. Lowry died a few months before the opening of a major exhibition at the Royal Academy.
