Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life

This is a timely study of the life and work of L.S. Lowry, as well as his contribution to the development of 20th-century British art. "This smart volume accompanying Tate's recent and radical re-evaluation of Lowry is delightfully atypical of exhibition catalogues: though extensively illustrated, it is compact, readable and intellectually fresh... A perfect, clever stocking-filler." --FT Books of the Year list. "This handbag sized book will accompany a long overdue retrospective of the much-loved British painter L.S. Lowry (1887-1976), the first show held by a public institution in London since the artist's death. Bringing together around eighty works, the aim is to reassess Lowry's contribution as part of a wider art history and to argue for his achievement as Britain's pre-eminent painter of the industrial city. Although Lowry's most frequent subjects were drawn from a pattern of streets he walked daily, he is not straightforwardly a 'realist' artist nor really an 'impressionist' artist. For Lowry modern painting needed a mode of observation capable of representing the remaining rituals of public life: football matches and protest marches, evictions and fist-fights, workers goin