While people queue at the British Museum to see the Battle of Hastings, this excellent survey of LS Lowry at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes takes you back to another, maybe more decisive part of our past – the age when Britain was the most industrialised society on Earth. Laurence Lowry was born in 1887 and worked for 41 years as a rent collector, a job that took him all over his native Greater Manchester observing its people and places. He had the city’s grime and grind in his soul. The MK wants to show him as a fully rounded artist, to uncover the Lowry with a song in his heart, but it’s the misery of his urban hell that holds and harrows you.
In his 1930 painting Coming from the Mill it’s the end of the shift and scores of people emerge from a factory’s bleak yellow gatehouse as if leaving prison. Their daily captivity has left them broken and exhausted and the little abstracted figures hunch forwards as they walk without pausing to laugh or chat, going to their separate homes, each one withdrawn, wretched. They are not the painting’s protagonists – they are passive victims. The architecture of industry dominates the picture as it rules their lives. How can any of these little people, dwarfed by the mill that eats their time and energy, attain individuality? No wonder they all look the same except for minor variations in their drab clothes. They’ve been reduced by the Industrial Revolution to matchstick people.
