Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A.

The Artist
Alex. Reid & Lefevre Ltd, London where purchased by Monty Bloom, January 1961
Private Collection, UK, from whom acquired by the present owner 
 

Manchester, Academy of Fine Arts, The Ninety-Eighth Annual Exhibition, 28th January - 3rd March 1957, cat. no.106 (as Three Heads);
Sheffield, Graves Art Gallery, The Works of L.S. Lowry, 15th September - 14th October 1962, cat. no.55;
Kendal, Abbot Hall Art Gallery, LS Lowry: Paintings and Drawings, 1964, cat. no.12, (as Father and Sons);
Newcastle-upon-Tyne, The Stone Gallery, The Later Paintings of LS Lowry, 23rd October - 14th November 1964, cat. no.4, (as Father and Sons);
Sunderland, Sunderland Art Gallery, L.S. Lowry, August - September 1966, cat. no.67, illustrated, with Arts Council tour to Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, Bristol Art Gallery, Bristol and Tate, London;
Southport, Atkinson Art Gallery, The Bloom Collection, 1967 (no catalogue produced);
London, Hamet Gallery, L.S. Lowry, 21st September - 21st October 1972, cat. no.14, illustrated;
London, Royal Academy, L.S. Lowry, R.A. 1887-1976, 4th September - 14th November 1976, cat. no.183, illustrated;
Salford, City Art Gallery, L.S. Lowry Centenary Exhibition, 16th October - 23rd November 1987, cat. no.197;
Middlesbrough, Cleveland Art Gallery, The Art of L.S. Lowry, December 1987 - January 1988, cat. no.46, pl.58, illustrated, with tour to Herbert Art Gallery and Museum, Coventry, Stoke-on-Trent Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter and Barbican Art Gallery, London;
Salford, The Lowry, 7th June 2000 - 29th August 2005 (on loan);
Salford, The Lowry, Lowry's People, 28th April - 4th September 2000, illustrated front cover;
Salford, The Lowry, Who Chose That, 6th January - 22nd April 2001, un-numbered exhibition;
Salford, The Lowry, At Home with Lowry, 28th September 2002 - 5th January 2003, un-numbered exhibition;
Salford, The Lowry, A Lowry Summer, 7th July - 28th October 2012, un-numbered exhibition;
Chatsworth, Chatsworth House, Frank and Cherryl Cohen at Chatsworth, 19th March - 10th June 2012, cat. no.21, illustrated.

Mervyn Levy, The Paintings of L.S. Lowry, Jupiter Books, London, 1974, p.22, illustrated pl.70;
Shelley Rohde, L.S. Lowry, A Biography, The Lowry Press, Salford, 1979, 1999, illustrated p. 203;
Michael Howard, Lowry A Visionary Artist, The Lowry Press, Salford, 2000, illustrated pp.168-169;
Shelley Rohde, The Lowry Lexicon, The Lowry Centre Ltd., Salford, 2001, illustrated, unpaginated;
Shelley Rohde, L.S. Lowry, A Life, Haus Publishing Ltd, London, 2007, illustrated p.31.

Condition report prepared by Hamish Dewar, October 2015 UNCONDITIONAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE Structural Condition The canvas is unlined with a canvas maker's stamp on the reverse and is evenly and securely stretched onto what is clearly the original keyed wooden stretcher. There is a very faint horizontal line running across the canvas, which appears to be within the canvas weave and is approximately 34cm below the upper horizontal turnover edge. Paint surface The paint surface has a rather uneven varnish layer and should respond well to cleaning. There are some very minor flecks of paint loss on the turnover edges. Inspection under ultra-violet light shows no evidence of any retouching. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in excellent and stable condition and should benefit from cleaning.
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Lowry’s Father and Two Sons, like all great works of art, is both highly specific to the time and place of its creation yet also universal and timeless, speaking across history to the wider human condition.

These are very much Salford men, from the streets, factories and pubs of Manchester’s twin city across the River Irwell; the father Lowry’s Manchester Man (1936-7), revisited years later, stripped of his pride and hope and turning in ever-decreasing circles of low wages and low expectations. Indeed he is on the same agonising journey of slow social degradation that Lowry’s own father went through, dragging the family from the leafy and relatively affluent suburb of Victoria Park to the rougher streets of Pendlebury. The painting can therefore be read as being extremely specific to Lowry’s life, a form of self-portrait, in which the two sons could both be the artist himself, the one on the right retaining a glimmer of his mother’s ambition for better things, the one on the left, narrower, more pinched, standing as the spitting image of his father’s failure.

Yet they are also faces that could have been glimpsed anywhere in the first half of the 20^th century (and Lowry’s works, on the whole, are set in the 1920s and 30s, regardless of when they were painted). They are the hungry urban poor, from New York’s Lower East Side; from the American Dustbowl; from Weimar Germany in the grip of hyperinflation; from the streets of Paris observed by Manet and Degas (Fig.1). But what makes Lowry so significant today is that these faces have been re-cast in those parts of the world undergoing the same rapid industrialisation and urbanisation Europe experienced at the end of the 19^th century. As T. J. Clark and Anne Wagner proposed in their introduction to the recent Lowry retrospective at the Tate, the city of Lowry’s imagination could easily be Shenzhen, or Rio, or the outer reaches of an Indian megalopolis; Father and Two Sons could be a chance encounter on the streets of Shanghai, outside one of the small stock exchange shops where small-time investors can lose what little they have.

This is a painting about memory and experience, the past and the present. Its impact - carried most clearly in those mesmerising eyes, but given an aching finesse in the narrow slopes of their shoulders and the empty background whose vertical brushstrokes run like tears - is perhaps best described by literary comparison, for great literature too is both specific and timeless. The father is a Salford Lear, here dividing his kingdom of troubles and small debts between his sons; or a figure straight out of the imagination of Samuel Beckett, Krapp from Krapp’s Last Tape, with perhaps all three men waiting outside the factory gates for Godot to arrive. Beckett’s work is, in fact, a perfect lens through which to see Lowry’s later painting, in which he reduces the city to nothing, save for the hard, brittle white of its pavements and frozen waste-grounds, and chooses instead to focus on small groups and single figures, set in isolation, beset by dislocation. Just four years after he painted Father and Two Sons, Lowry attended the Manchester staging of Luigi Pirandello’s absurdist masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author. He was bowled over by it and saw the play on numerous occasions. The strangeness of its staging; the loneliness and isolation of the characters; their broken stories coming into focus, briefly and then fading – all of this he had begun to explore in works like Father and Two Sons and The Cripples (Fig.2, 1949) and would, consequently, make his main theme in the last fifteen years of his life.

Equally, this work contains more than a nod to Walter Greenwood’s hugely influential novel, Love on the Dole (1933), set in Hanky Park, a slum in Salford a little further down the social-scale to Pendlebury. Both the sons in Lowry’s painting could be Harry Hardcastle, younger brother of the novel’s heroine Sally, who quits his low-paid job at a pawnbroker’s – a good ‘white collar’ job that offers escape –to join the apprentices in the local factory, for the glamour of an extra shilling or two in his pocket, cigarettes and beer and taking girls to the pictures on a Saturday night. Harry ignores the warnings of Sally’s boyfriend, the older and wiser political activist Larry Meath, that most of the apprentices don’t get taken on to work at the mill proper, but are instead laid off, to be replaced by the next generation of naïve and cheap-to-pay boys. And so Harry joins the ranks of the hollow-eyed, dejected long-term unemployed - alongside his father, who he despised for his lack of work.

Father and Two Sons was bought from Lowry by the Stockport-based businessman Monty Bloom, who specialized in buying up failing businesses, making them viable, then selling them on – and so a man as familiar with the life of the urban poor as Lowry was. They met in the latter half of the 1950s, just as Lowry was finding fame, after decades of being overlooked (it is one of the ironies of his career, however, than in the 1930s, when he couldn’t even get an exhibition in Manchester, he was showing his work at the Salon in Paris). Visitors to Lowry’s new home in Mottram-in-Longdendale often wanted to commission a ‘classic’ industrial cityscape from him. Lowry would send them away, asking them to come back another day, by which time he had found something painted years ago that would suffice. Monty Bloom, on the other hand, was interested in what the artist was doing at the time, these ‘grotesques’ as the artist called them (unable to come up with a better term) that are some of the most unique and startling works in the history of 20^th century British art. Bloom’s support – he bought hundreds of works – allowed Lowry to extend himself in these final two decades, creating a compelling body of work that is both deeply challenging yet simply concerned with the everyday; confrontational yet suffused with compassion.

Whilst Lowry’s paintings are more about a world remembered, his ‘landscapes’ often fictional constructions built out of different details of the towns of the industrial North-West that he knew like the back of his hand. And yet there is something absolutely real about them – real to those who remember the mills before they became swish apartment blocks; who remember the ‘factory fortnight’ holidays where whole towns decamped to cold seaside resorts; who remember being paid weekly, in cash in small brown envelopes, and taking them home half-empty after settling up various lines of tick. And real, too, for anyone living today in a strange and unforgiving city.

Lowry may have called his later works his ‘grotesques’, but he knew that to be the way others might see them. If pressed on this subject matter, he would simply invite you to jump on a bus from Piccadilly Gardens out to one of Manchester’s suburbs or linked towns. Within half an hour he would have pointed out individuals who would have made subjects for fifty paintings. Yet they are never subjects, as such: Lowry has too much compassion for that. He is no flaneur looking for a bit of grit. His people are not ‘grotesques’, more like fellow-travellers. They are him and they are us.

The present work will be exhibited at Sotheby's New York: 

Fri, 30 Oct 15: 10:00 AM – 05:00 PM
Sat, 31 Oct 15: 10:00 AM – 05:00 PM
Sun, 01 Nov 15: 01:00 PM – 05:00 PM
Mon, 02 Nov 15: 10:00 AM – 05:00 PM
Tue, 03 Nov 15: 10:00 AM – 05:00 PM
Wed, 04 Nov 15: 10:00 AM – 05:00 PM
Thu, 05 Nov 15: 10:00 AM – 01:00 PM