Tate Britain to host Lowry exhibition this summer

The grime and smoke of Britain’s industrial past will be aired in what will be the first exhibition of Lowry's workhosted by a London public institution since his death in 1976.Lowry might have seemed a quirky northern original but his work is in the tradition stretching back to the French Impressionists, according to curators of a new Tate Britain exhibition.
Unveiling details of the exhibition which opens in late June 3013, Professor Anne Warner said: “It’s our contention that Lowry picked up the tradition of late 19th-century French painting and makes it over in his own way.” The Impressionists in the late 1880s and 1890s were painting a landscape which might appear “a simple world of leisure” but was undergoing the transformation of encroaching industrialisation and urbanisation.Lowry, living in Manchester when its Industrial Revolution glory days were waning, understood the French tradition through his teacher, Frenchman Adolphe Valette, and art magazines, and regularly sent his paintings to France, said Professor Wagner.
The Tate has been accused of neglecting Lowry through snobbery and this will be the first major public exhibition of his work in London since his death aged 88 in 1976. However, Professor Wagner said one reason there had been no previous such show was because half of the works being included had to be tracked down and borrowed from private owners.Highlights include eight giant late urban panoramas — five industrial landscapes and three of the mining valleys of South Wales — being shown together for the first time. “Lowry was commissioned actively by government to paint large-scale paintings and then they were sent around the country to encourage provincial patronage of art at a time when the idea of a Labour Britain and the public collection had never been greater,” added the professor.