The Black Tower

L.S. Lowry’s The Black Tower, painted in 1938, presents the viewer with a striking example of the artist’s singular vision of the urban landscape. The improbably elongated church tower with large white clock face rises out of its foundations and draws the eye upwards to the distant skyline: in the foreground, a handful of brightly clad figures populate the lane beneath the tower, and the red and teal blues tones for the fences and posts the artist creates a startling contrast to the leafless tree nearby. The tower and tree, and the figure with bowed head in conversation, can be viewed as symbolic of the artist’s own tall, thin presence in the painting, standing firm within the Manchester landscape that he knew and loved. Maurice Collis, writing of Lowry’s figures, during the artist’s lifetime, referenced the present work, ‘They are his own reflection as if seen in a distorting mirror, the projections of his mood, his very shadows, ghosts of himself, sometimes even becoming direct self-portraits, as in the taller of the two central figures in The Black Tower. Nevertheless, their relevance to the pictorial setting is sufficiently natural for them to have been taken solely for what they purport to be, citizens walking the streets of Manchester. Thus, his paintings are both scenes of contemporary life and psychological statements. This duality adds greatly to their force and permanence. (M. Collis, The Discovery of L.S. Lowry, London, 1951, pp. 21-22). Lowry himself stated that his figures ‘are symbols of my mood, they are myself …’ (L.S. Lowry in A. Woods ‘Mr Lowry: Community, Crowds, Cripples’, The Cambridge Quarterly, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1981, p. 3).

The present work once formed a part of Eric and Stella Newton’s esteemed art collection. Eric, an art critic and survivor of the Somme and Passchendaele, and Stella, a notable costume designer, were significant supporters of the British art world in pre- and post-war years. During the 1930s, Stella was working on costumes for T.S. Eliot’s stage productions and Eric had been the art critic for the Manchester Guardian before joining the Sunday Times. Eric Newton had been a constant advocate of Lowry’s work and, by the late 1930s, when the present work was painted, Newton was already a household name - he was in high demand as a lecturer in art history across the country and had been delivering radio programmes for the BBC. Positive critical reviews after the artist’s first one-man exhibition in 1939 played a crucial role in the artist’s discovery and subsequent success. Eric Newton’s review of Lowry’s exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery was instrumental in the artist’s critical achievements. Newton wrote:

‘Mr. Lowry has formulated his own creed and consequently he will fit into no pigeon-hole. His vision is personal to himself … and owes nothing to any other artist. Like Cezanne he has gone straight to life … and his only concern as an artist is to translate his attitude into paint. He belongs to no school, but he may ultimately be the founder of one’ (E. Newton in M. Collis, op. cit., p. 6).

Whilst some critics remained apprehensive of Lowry’s style, Newton praised the artist for his unencumbered originality. The critic admired how Lowry’s work did not lean on the conventions of the French school that, at the time, had set the precedent for modernist depictions of urban environments. In the late 1930s, Newton was one of the first art critics to offer a depoliticised interpretation of Lowry’s work, comparing the artist’s fascination with the Northern industrial landscape to Constable’s love of the English countryside. In the eyes of critics like Eric Newton, Lowry’s oeuvre was aestheticised and, in turn, became a symbol of a particular region of the country and its community. In this way, important works like The Black Tower now epitomise an image of England’s industrial legacy, making Lowry the key figure in transforming the North into a subject of artistic veneration.