‘Lowry is Britain’s preeminent painter of the industrial city’ says Tate curator Helen Little, as she introduces the exhibition ‘Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life’.
For Lowry, modern painting needed to represent the remaining rituals of public life: football matches and protest marches, evictions and fist-fights, workers going to and from the mill. Without his pictures, Britain would arguably lack an account in paint of the experiences of the 20th-century working class.
As a modern painter Lowry wished to show what the industrial revolution had made of the world, yet his dominant status in British art coincided with a disappearance of the industrialised world he engaged with.
Curator Helen Little takes us on a tour of the Lowry exhibition at Tate Britain in this TateShots video.
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