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Lot Essay
Painted in 1941, the same year in which an exhibition of the artist’s work was presented at the City Museum and Art Gallery, Salford, Albion Mill in Pendlebury, is a prime example of L.S. Lowry’s idiosyncratic renderings of modern urban life for the working classes in the North-West of England. In an interview with Hugh Maitland, Lowry later said of the family’s move to Pendlebury in 1909: ‘at first I disliked it, and then after about a year or so I got used to it, and then I got absorbed in it, then I got infatuated with it… it seemed to me by that time… very fine industrial subject matter’ (L.S. Lowry quoted in J. Sandling and M. Leber, Lowry’s City: A Painter and his Locale, Salford, 2000, p. 14). Pendlebury was to remain Lowry’s home for next 40 years, during which time he sought, in his own words, to paint himself into what absorbed him: ‘the beauty of…[its] streets and crowds’ (L.S. Lowry quoted in M. Collis, exhibition catalogue, L.S. Lowry, London, Hamet Gallery, 1972).
Repetition lies at the heart of Lowry’s practice. St Mary’s Church, built in 1859 and demolished in 1964 stood opposite Victoria Park on the corner of Swinton Hall Road near the Albion Mill in Pendlebury. The view from the top of Temple Drive, looking down the alley towards the church, of which Lowry first made a topographical sketch in 1913, subsequently the basis for St Mary’s Church, Swinton, painted 47 years later, was one to which the artist returned many times over the years. Despite being named after the eponymous mill which dominates the right hand side of the painting, the focal point of Albion Mill is St Mary’s Church spire, in uncomfortably close proximity to which is a tall chimney belching black smoke, which Lowry repositioned in order to make more prominent. Lowry was, among other things, a great architectural painter. It is the measure of great, architectural composition that the eye is always able to find a point of ultimate reference, of repose amid the clamour, and in Albion Mill the eye is drawn (indubitably and) inexorably to the church tower and its neighbouring chimney. Churches occupy a particular place in Lowry’s paintings; usually seen as architectural curiosities they are often, as in Albion Mill, placed in stark contrast to their surroundings. Michael Howard asserts that, ‘it is very apparent that churches for Lowry stood as signs of his own imminent and inescapable mortality’ and indeed there is something at once innocuous and insistently ominous about the artist’s depiction of Albion Mill (M. Howard, Lowry: A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, p. 157). We might compare the way in which Lowry’s men, women and children albeit oblivious of the threat of impending doom, seem dwarfed by the buildings that surround them, the most menacing of which is Albion Mill, with the enigmatic, evasive and equally architectural visions of Giorgio de Chirico. Albion Mill is depicted as austere and institutional in appearance with the addition of a multi-storey series of windows which gape black. Thunder is in the air and Albion Mill looms, even seeming to lean disconcertingly streetwards beneath a steadily darkening sky. Here, as in de Chirico’s surreal dreamscapes, there is no room for nature. All signs of life have been obliterated, save for the spectral outline of two leafless trees and a crude stump interrupting the flake white surface of Temple Drive, further evidence of the uncanny artifice of urban living.
On studying Albion Mill, as with the majority of Lowry’s work, the viewer, like the artist feels how unequivocally he/she plays the role of the observer, the voyeur. Lowry, ever the outsider, seems unconcerned in his work with elucidating the activities in which his figures are engaged. In essence ambiguous and evasive, paintings like Albion Mill thus possess the quality of a glimpse, the momentary arrest of life’s curious ebb and flow. Repetition lies at the heart not only of Lowry’s practice but also of the lives of those he depicted, the phrase ‘métro, boulot, dodo’ comes to mind. ‘They are not free’, Lowry said of his people, ‘human beings’ are ‘automatons’ , ‘No-one is [free]’ (Lowry quoted in ibid., p. 135). Doomed to a compulsion to repeat, for such is the absurdity of the human condition, the men, women and children of Albion Mill seem to exist in the eternal interim between life and death. Their anonymity and primitive caricaturisation along with Lowry’s characteristic use of a limited colour palette: flake white, ivory black, prussian blue, yellow ochre and vermillion, lends Albion Mill, as with many of his works, a peculiar sense of unreality, evading exact periodisation and allowing them to function as mythic histories of a generalised past. An integral element then of Lowry’s vision is its nostalgic appeal. For many, the artist’s impressions represent a ‘royal road’ back to an age of unity, order and harmony, an age of course that never really existed in reality and is instead an evocative and often rather theatrical confluence of public and private worlds. ‘I liked in those days to do a picture entirely out of the mind’s eye, straight onto the canvas … because … you are setting down something that comes entirely from your own imagination’ (L.S. Lowry to Gerald B Cotton, Chief Librarian of Swinton and Pendlebury, and Frank Mullineux, Keeper of Monks Hall Museum, Eccles; on tape (undated)). Yet Lowry’s art is an art not simply of pure imagination but of imagination stimulated by detailed, even obsessive observation of people and place, each work, in the artist’s own words, ‘part of a private beauty that haunted me’ (L.S. Lowry in conversation with a close friend, quoted in M. Howard, op. cit.).
Repetition lies at the heart of Lowry’s practice. St Mary’s Church, built in 1859 and demolished in 1964 stood opposite Victoria Park on the corner of Swinton Hall Road near the Albion Mill in Pendlebury. The view from the top of Temple Drive, looking down the alley towards the church, of which Lowry first made a topographical sketch in 1913, subsequently the basis for St Mary’s Church, Swinton, painted 47 years later, was one to which the artist returned many times over the years. Despite being named after the eponymous mill which dominates the right hand side of the painting, the focal point of Albion Mill is St Mary’s Church spire, in uncomfortably close proximity to which is a tall chimney belching black smoke, which Lowry repositioned in order to make more prominent. Lowry was, among other things, a great architectural painter. It is the measure of great, architectural composition that the eye is always able to find a point of ultimate reference, of repose amid the clamour, and in Albion Mill the eye is drawn (indubitably and) inexorably to the church tower and its neighbouring chimney. Churches occupy a particular place in Lowry’s paintings; usually seen as architectural curiosities they are often, as in Albion Mill, placed in stark contrast to their surroundings. Michael Howard asserts that, ‘it is very apparent that churches for Lowry stood as signs of his own imminent and inescapable mortality’ and indeed there is something at once innocuous and insistently ominous about the artist’s depiction of Albion Mill (M. Howard, Lowry: A Visionary Artist, Salford, 2000, p. 157). We might compare the way in which Lowry’s men, women and children albeit oblivious of the threat of impending doom, seem dwarfed by the buildings that surround them, the most menacing of which is Albion Mill, with the enigmatic, evasive and equally architectural visions of Giorgio de Chirico. Albion Mill is depicted as austere and institutional in appearance with the addition of a multi-storey series of windows which gape black. Thunder is in the air and Albion Mill looms, even seeming to lean disconcertingly streetwards beneath a steadily darkening sky. Here, as in de Chirico’s surreal dreamscapes, there is no room for nature. All signs of life have been obliterated, save for the spectral outline of two leafless trees and a crude stump interrupting the flake white surface of Temple Drive, further evidence of the uncanny artifice of urban living.
On studying Albion Mill, as with the majority of Lowry’s work, the viewer, like the artist feels how unequivocally he/she plays the role of the observer, the voyeur. Lowry, ever the outsider, seems unconcerned in his work with elucidating the activities in which his figures are engaged. In essence ambiguous and evasive, paintings like Albion Mill thus possess the quality of a glimpse, the momentary arrest of life’s curious ebb and flow. Repetition lies at the heart not only of Lowry’s practice but also of the lives of those he depicted, the phrase ‘métro, boulot, dodo’ comes to mind. ‘They are not free’, Lowry said of his people, ‘human beings’ are ‘automatons’ , ‘No-one is [free]’ (Lowry quoted in ibid., p. 135). Doomed to a compulsion to repeat, for such is the absurdity of the human condition, the men, women and children of Albion Mill seem to exist in the eternal interim between life and death. Their anonymity and primitive caricaturisation along with Lowry’s characteristic use of a limited colour palette: flake white, ivory black, prussian blue, yellow ochre and vermillion, lends Albion Mill, as with many of his works, a peculiar sense of unreality, evading exact periodisation and allowing them to function as mythic histories of a generalised past. An integral element then of Lowry’s vision is its nostalgic appeal. For many, the artist’s impressions represent a ‘royal road’ back to an age of unity, order and harmony, an age of course that never really existed in reality and is instead an evocative and often rather theatrical confluence of public and private worlds. ‘I liked in those days to do a picture entirely out of the mind’s eye, straight onto the canvas … because … you are setting down something that comes entirely from your own imagination’ (L.S. Lowry to Gerald B Cotton, Chief Librarian of Swinton and Pendlebury, and Frank Mullineux, Keeper of Monks Hall Museum, Eccles; on tape (undated)). Yet Lowry’s art is an art not simply of pure imagination but of imagination stimulated by detailed, even obsessive observation of people and place, each work, in the artist’s own words, ‘part of a private beauty that haunted me’ (L.S. Lowry in conversation with a close friend, quoted in M. Howard, op. cit.).