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| L. S. Lowry (1887-1976) and Stanley Spencer (1891-1959) |
Lowry and Spencer came into their own worlds apart from each other: Lowry in industrial Manchester, and Spencer in rural Cookham, a small village on the Thames in Berkshire. Lowry was an only child, Spencer the second youngest of nine children. Both hailed from middle class homes, but while Spencer grew up in comfort and security, Lowry's father was dependent upon loans and borrowed money. Lowry's mother initially encouraged her son's appreciation of the arts, only to denigrate his efforts once he attempted to turn this to practical use. By contrast, Spencer's family actively discussed the poetry of John Donne, the children played musical instruments, and their father read to them from the Old Testament. While Lowry argued with his domineering mother about the benefits of evening classes at the Salford School of Art, Spencer's father would ease his son's shyness by accompanying him on the train to London for his daily commute to the Slade School of Art. These experiences were to fundamentally affect their artistic visions.
As a result of his idyllic childhood, Spencer came to see Cookham as a paradise on earth where everything around him was imbued with a sacred presence. In Spencer's eyes, Christ was baptised in the Thames, delivered the Sermon on the Mount at Cookham Regatta, and the route to Calvary ran through Cookham high street. Remembering his father's bible readings, Spencer portrayed him as St. Francis of Assisi - replacing the saint's humble sandals with slippers and a dressing gown. Throughout his work, Spencer frequently depicts himself as a young man: an obvious attempt to preserve the magical wonder of a child-like vision.
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| "St. Francis and the Birds" (1935) by Stanley Spencer |
Lowry, however, did not initially see what he would later describe as the 'beauty' of the industrial landscape and the quirky figures that would populate his work. That would come at the age of 21, when his family moved from genteel Victoria Park in Manchester to working class Pendlebury in Salford. When interviewed in his advanced years, Lowry would embellish the details of how he came to his artistic vision, recalling it almost as a 'Road to Damascus' experience. The bare facts are stark to say the least. As a rent collector for the Pall Mall Property Company, Lowry found himself becoming increasingly accustomed to the dingy streets and their grimy inhabitants. As this familiarity grew, the thinner his adolescent mask of respectable snobbery became until he realised that industrial Manchester would make a far more engaging subject for his paintings than the pastoral scenes he had previously envisaged.
As he developed as an artist, Lowry began to adopt a wondrous view of these supposedly everyday scenes: like Spencer, an essentially child-like vision.The mills and factories indelibly printed in Lowry's imagination now acted merely as backdrops for the human drama being played out in and around them. In many cases, the importance of the industrial north is completely absent from his work. The 'horrible heads' series he painted in the 1930s are expressionist portraits that exist in a twilight world where nothing is real except the guarded emotions of the works themselves. The derelict figures of the 1950s and '60s are represented in an inverted form of chiaroscuro, where the subjects are shaded against the burning white of the impasto. Despite Lowry's decision to remove all traces of sentimentality from his work, these paintings bare an unmistakable affection for the lost and lonely coupled with a suggestion of 'otherness'. This is an integral concept for Lowry and Spencer and occupies much of their work: the attempt to unlock that which remains hidden.
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| "A Beggar" (1965) by L. S. Lowry |
The emotional frankness of Spencer's work is an essential component of his art. Spencer saw Christianity as a living, breathing experience sharing the quintessential tenet of Orthodox Judaism that the very act of creation is an ongoing process. To this end, sex is elevated beyond a functional or recreational act and becomes a celebration of life and rejuvenation. Nowhere is this more apparent than "The Resurrection" (1924-26), a vast mural depicting the naked dead ascending into paradise. At the centre of the painting, looking over Christ's shoulder, is God; instead of giving Him a face, Spencer depicts what he described as a "never-before seen flower". In classical art, flowers denote the female, and throughout Spencer's work women - in particular his first wife Hilda Carline, whom he married during completion of "The Resurrection" - are often represented holding flowers or wearing floral dresses. By representing God with a feminine symbol and juxtaposing this with the reborn souls of the war dead, Spencer reveals the hidden nature of sex as a form of resurrection in itself. Similarly, "A Village in Heaven" (1937) features the residents of Cookham both going about their everyday business and engaging in playful but nevertheless sexually-charged activities. At the centre of the painting again stands God, surveying the scene with quiet satisfaction.
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| "The Resurrection" (1924-26) by Stanley Spencer |
As a self-professed 'Victorian man', Lowry could never have brought himself to openly express the same sexual abandon, so as always his work exposes what remains hidden and allows it to remain as such. Paintings such as "People with Dogs" (1965), which appears to suggest sexual violation, keeps the identities of the shadowy assailants obscured from view. Only the girl in the red overcoat and the dogs that act as mute witnesses are clearly visible. Elsewhere, "Man Looking Through a Hole in the Fence" (1963), in addition to being a self-reflexive work about artist as voyeur, hints at a hidden world beyond but dares not enter. In this regard, Lowry's work often appears to take the form of an elaborate game of hide and seek in which the artist continually evades being pinned down by the art critic's or psychoanalyst's pen. However, there are a number of tantalising clues placed within his work that allude to deeper, more specific concerns. In life, Lowry kept his religious leanings close to his chest, but a number of his industrial landscapes, most notably "Street Scene" (1935) and "The Procession" (1937), seem to intentionally transform streets into the form of crosses, implying the suffering of the ordinary man.
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| "The Procession" (1937) by L. S. Lowry |
The most revealing works the two artists produced were in the dark years of the 1930s when both men were experiencing considerable personal difficulties. In 1932, Lowry's father died suddenly from pneumonia, leaving behind a substantial number of debts. Lowry, 45, unmarried and still living in his parent's house, found himself acting as both unofficial nursemaid to his now bedridden mother and begrudging guarantor to his father's creditors. As he had not yet made a living from his art, he was obliged to spend more time at the Pall Property Company and less on what he feared the art critics of the day would have dismissed as his 'Sunday job'. At the same time, Spencer's affections for his wife Hilda were starting to drift away towards Patricia Preece, a marginal figure in his artistic circle. After Hilda left him in 1935, Spencer sublimated his love for Preece in a series of sexually charged portraits and sketches. By the time of their marriage in 1936, this promise of newfound love appears to have turned sour. Preece and Spencer never consummated their relationship, and it appears the marriage may have been one of convenience for the homosexual Patricia.
Spencer's nude portraits from this time contemplate the prospect of a loveless future with an unusual and highly disturbing intensity. The most notable of which is "Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife" (1936). In an early sketch of the couple they appear to be sitting on a communal lavatory, Spencer, proudly erect, studying every curve of Preece's body. Now the artist appears as a disappointed onlooker, nude and tellingly flaccid, staring blankly at Preece's pallid, unappetising flesh as she gazes at him with disinterest. In the foreground, Spencer perversely places a leg of mutton next to his former beloved: the ultimate representation of rancid desire.
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| "Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife" (1936) by Stanley Spencer |
The same year, Lowry, reflecting on his destiny as a bachelor as long as he remained tied to his mother's apron strings, also painted his testament to the erosion of sexual longing in "A Landmark" (1936) - one of the most desolate works he ever produced. The image is deceptively simple, a stone monument set on a hilltop battered by the elements, but it is also a telling signifier of Lowry's sexual and emotional frustrations. The feminine curves of the landscape mirror the classical image of nature as a matriarchal force, but here nature seems barren, exemplified by the sterile, milky lake in the foreground, representing spent masculinity. The monument itself, on the other hand, is an ambiguous symbol that appears in many of Lowry's works - most notably his "Self-Portrait" from 1966, where he sets the same structure in a stormy sea. Here, though, its phallic quality sets it at odds with the landscape, perhaps suggesting the irreconcilable gulf between the male and female, the progressive artist and his Victorian mother, or the immutable authenticity of an artist's vision.
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| "A Landmark" (1936) by L. S. Lowry |
The critical acclaim bestowed upon Spencer in his lifetime has noticeably diminished in recent years. In a neurotic and cynical age, Spencer's work, despite its eternal themes of love and redemption, has been dismissed as overly sentimental: a throwback to a more gentle and arguably 'purer' time and place. If Spencer's vision characterises the longings of the first half of the last century, it is the nightmarish and, it must be said, misanthropic, vision of Francis Bacon that occupies the latter half.
Bacon's stock in trade, alongside Spencer and Lowry, was also in laying open what remains hidden. His hideously contorted and grotesque figures, however, are the refuse of a secular world. Bacon once stated that his work was an attempt to record how human activity and memory leaves behind a vapour trail in the same way a snail leaves its slime. In light of this, it is curious that one of the perennial criticisms of Lowry's work is a supposed sense of detachment from his subjects and a 'dreary' world view. In the 2006 inaugural L. S. Lowry lecture, art critic Julian Spalding attributed this to the "residual cultural snobbery" of London-based academics; a simplistic but nevertheless fair supposition. Lowry made the conscious decision to paint for the ordinary man and play down the thematic elements of his work. "I only paint what I see" was his guarded response to criticism, but while this authenticates the uniquely personal aspect of Lowry's vision, it continues to be misunderstood, deliberately in some cases, as a means to prove the 'poverty of inspiration' in his work. His enduring popularity, therefore, is a by-product of the artist's studied philistinism. Indeed, Spencer once declared his own work a vindication of "angels and dirt" - a sentiment that could well have been Lowry's. Perhaps this is why Lowry and Spencer continue to enjoy popular appreciation outside of the traditional art establishment with its internal (or should that be impregnable?) set of codes and practices. As playwright and novelist David Storey has observed, they remain the only British artists of their period to capture the "reclusive charm of our native art".
