Two BBC Arts Programmes about JMW Turner and LS Lowry

There is to be a 50th anniversary season of Arena classics on BBC Four this Autumn. As well as creating access to new documentaries about JMW Turner and LS Lowry (see below) they are also releasing a further 50 titles from the archive available on BBC iPlayer.

Two of the new documentaries are about much loved English Artists of note. 

Given the absolute annihilation of anything about art history on the BBC after the cuts, these documentaries are very welcome - but I have some reservations. I hope they're going to be good - but I think people have maybe taken the opportunity to be "creative"

Turner: The Secret Sketchbooks

This is the BBC press release about it. 

This groundbreaking documentary unlocks the hidden psychology of J.M.W. Turner through his 37,000 private sketches, drawings, and watercolours – an extraordinary archive that reveals the man behind the masterpieces. For the first time on television, these pages – Including erotic sketches previously thought to have been destroyed – are used as a window into Turner’s inner world, exposing his private thoughts, creative obsessions and emotional life. Rarely writing about himself, Turner left behind few clues to his personality. But in his sketchbooks, his restless imagination and vulnerabilities come vividly to life.

Helping unlock Turner’s life story is legendary actor Timothy Spall, who famously portrayed the artist in Mike Leigh’s Mr Turner. He is joined by Britain’s most renowned living artist Tracey Emin, artist and filmmaker Sir John Akomfrah, Rolling Stone’s Ronnie Wood, psychotherapist Orna Guralnik, naturalist Chris Packham, and an array of leading art historians. Together, they guide viewers through Turner’s life and art, revealing how his 37,000 sketches not only chart his creative evolution but also provide an unprecedented psychological portrait of a man both visionary and vulnerable.

What some of these people have to do with Turner is totally beyond me. It's got a whiff of "which names have most pull?" about it. I want to know which leading art historians are contributing to it, not what gimmick the company which made the documentary came up with.

Jury is out for me based on this "insight" into what's coming.

Lowry: The Lost Tapes

“Self Portrait” by Lowry, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Oil on board, 57.2 x 47.2cm
This was painted when the artist was 37.
 Lowry later recalled,
‘I had a great tussle with it, and when it was done said “Never again, thank you.” '
© The Lowry Collection, Salford

The film has been commissioned by the BBC  to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of L.S. Lowry in 2026.

This looks promising - but for some more nonsense in this press release as well.

LS Lowry: the emerging artist and how he priced his paintings

Today I came across an unusual image in amongst a lot of image files I was transferring from one device to another. It's a list of priced oil paintings by Laurence S. Lowry - or LS Lowry as he became better known in later life.

The titles say a lot about life in Salford at the time

List of priced paintings exhibited by LS Lowry in 1921
at the Office of Rowland Thomasson at 87 Moselt Street, Manchester

On the Lowry website, there's a timeline of Lowry's life - so took a look and apparently back in 1921 he exhibited his paintings for the first time. 

In 1921 Lowry exhibited work alongside two other artists in an architect’s offices in Manchester. The exhibition was reviewed in the Manchester Guardian by Bernard Taylor who described Lowry as someone who ‘may make a real contribution to art.’

So I looked up "Office of Rowland Thomasson" and got this archive page about the architectural practice on the Manchester Victorian Architects website.

This states

In 1921 the artist L S Lowry, with two others exhibited in the offices of Rowland Thomasson at 87 Mosley Street Manchester. Here Lowry sold his first picture, a pastel, entitled "The Lodging House,"

So the first painting Lowry sold was a pastel - which he sold for 10 guineas.

That's the equivalent of just over £500 in today's money after allowing for inflation.

This was right at the beginning of Lowry developing his theme of painting the urban landscape seen on his travels as a rent collector.

Within a decade of that first sale his work was being collected by Manchester Art Gallery and
Salford Museum & Art Gallery.

Litographs of his work now sell for the low thousands. His oil paintings typically sell for in excess of £100k.

While the most most expensive sale of a Lowry work was The Football Match which sold for £5.6 million back in 2011. Lowry was a big City fan and had a bit of a fixation about painting on the theme of football matches!

The Football Match by Laurence Stephen Lowry 1949 (Private Collection). pic.twitter.com/MMAdUPXClz

— Dr Liv Gibbs (@DrLivGibbs) May 27, 2017

The moral of the story? 

Paint what you know. Paint what you like and enjoy

Then think long and hard about how you price your paintings as you're starting out as an artist. It's probably more important to make a sale than to price too high and  make absolutely nothing.

It's also worth thinking long and hard about the price that attracts impulse sales....

Art from the BBC Archives - a retrospective

The BBC has been having a rush of art to the BBC4 programme controller's brain. Moreover it is raiding the BBC Archives as a way of making television programmes about art while spending very little. Or as the programme makers put it

Delving into the BBC Archives to reveal a colourful, surprising and rounded portrait of how television has chosen to portray the world’s most famous artists and artistic movements over the last 60 years.

This post is about:

• another new series of programmes about art - on Sunday night (which started last night)
• a BBC Archives website Collection of various Art Programmes

Art on the BBC

The series or four programmes (4 x 60 minutes) about "Art on the BBC" comprise:

• 2nd February 2020: The Story of the Nude (now available on iPlayer)

Humans have been drawing nudes for almost 30,000 years. Kate Bryan explores six decades of BBC archive to discover how television has influenced our understanding of the nude.

• 9nd February 2020: The Many Faces of Picasso - a television history of Picasso who the BBC term "the controversial godfather of modern art" - curated by David Dibosa (pictured) 
• 16th February 2020: The personality of Michelangelo - curated by Sona Datta
• 23rd February 2020: Constable - pushing the boundaries of landscape painting - with Rose Balston

It follows on from a programme in 2018 (repeated in 2019) about The Genius of Leonardo. The video below gives you a sense of the approach of these programmes.

ART ON THE BBC_THE GENIUS OF LEONARDO_CLIP1 from Alleycats Films on Vimeo.

Art from the Archives - The Art Collection

You can also go direct to a BBC Archives website Collection of various Art Programmes and view the various programmes from the Archives which are available to view on iPlayer.

These include:

• Omnibus: Lucian Freud (1988)  - I've watched this one and will no doubt view it again (Available for over a year)

For over 40 years, the artist Lucian Freud has allowed his paintings to speak for themselves, but in this week's Omnibus he talks for the first time about his work and ambitions.

'The greatest living realist painter' is critic Robert Hughes' description of Lucian Freud, whose major retrospective at London's Hayward Gallery earlier this year, brought together the paintings of a lifetime. The exhibition was seen as a revelation, just as it had been in Washington and Paris. 

• LS Lowry at work (17 July 1957 short 3 minute extract) - The artist LS Lowry discusses his painting technique, in a documentary about his work. Originally broadcast 17 July 1957 . I don't think I've ever heard his voice before

"The buildings always come before the figures"

• Rossetti - Sex, Drugs and Oil Paint (2003) - Andrew Graham-Dixon considers the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the painter and poet who reinvented the Victorian ideal of female beauty... and who dug up his wife's coffin to retrieve poems he had buried with her. 

available on iPlayer

• Release: Pop Goes To The Hayward (5th July 1969) 

On July 9 London's Hayward Gallery becomes host to one of the largest exhibitions of Pop Art to be seen in this country. In the words of one of its exponents, Pop Art is ‘young, witty, sexy, glamorous, and big business’. It is an instant art form and has had instant success. Robert Hughes talks to leading pop artists in New York amid the ad-mass living that inspires their art. Artists featured include Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, George Segal and Andy Warhol. 

Films about artists - Mrs Lowry & Son

Those of us with northern roots will be interested to know that The Gala Premiere of Mrs Lowry & Son is next Tuesday 27 August 2019 at the Lyric Theatre at The Lowry in Salford.

The film is about the relationship between L. S. Lowry, one of the greatest artists of the 20th century and his bed-ridden mother Elizabeth.  Timothy Spall plays Lowry and Vanessa Redgrave takes on the role of his mother, Elizabeth.

Below you can see view:

• a trailer video of the film
• a video of a Curator at the Lowry commenting on the paintings seen in the film
• a video which compares the paintings with what the places look like now
• where you can see LS Lowry Paintings - in art galleries, online and in my blog posts
• where you can find out more on the dedicated social media sites
• where you can see the film
• PLUS Artists and Art on Film: my past blog posts

Rare Lowry "Cricket March" painting - on view for 5 days in Salford and London

If you want to view "A Cricket Match" by LS Lowry - you can view this privately owned work, at The Lowry arts centre until 5pm on Monday (27 May) in their free LS Lowry: The Art & The Artist exhibition.

This rare painting - LS Lowry didn't paint many paintings to do with cricket - has gone on display in Salford ahead of its auction next month at Sotheby’s. Which means those of us who live in London can view it at the pre-sale preview exhibition at Sotheby's in June. (see details of times and dates below)

Laurence Stephen Lowry, R.A. 1887-1976
A CRICKET MATCH
signed and dated 1938 |  oil on canvas  |  46 by 61cm.; 18 by 24in.

So basically if you're 'up north' you have until the end of the Bank Holiday weekend to see this painting.

Here's a very informative video with Claire Stuart, Curator of the Lowry Museum plus the Lady from Sotheby's telling you a bit more about it - if like me you're unable to get to the Lowry Museum.

A Cricket Match is a wonderful example of Lowry at his very best, in what is arguably his best decade as an artist, the 1930s, where he fully establishes the rules and parameters of his unique vision. It seems at first-glance to be a simple ‘slice of life’ and yet the painting is constructed very carefully, in both the way the narrative unfolds and also in how it releases its emotion. As ever, Lowry restricts his palette to a range of colours so narrow that Mondrian would no doubt approve: the dominant white; outlines in black; a dirty green and sooty blue to pin the work to the ground and to give it its sombre timbre. It is this blue-green that also frames the picture, drawing our eye into it, across the dirty standing water and snaggletooth fence posts in the foreground and through to the ramshackle sheds in the middle ground. To this Lowry adds a few dots of red, in a scarf or a hat: another favourite trick to draw the eye in a zig zag through the composition, to ensure the viewer looks everywhere and experiences it as a whole.
It is in the 1930s that Lowry’s masterful use of white really comes to the fore. It has both a painterly function – allowing him to give a clarity to his figures and buildings, which in turn enhances their phenomenological solidity – as well as an emotive quality, as it brings a hard, brittle coldness to his work, whatever the season, that in the viewer’s mind translates into an understanding of the hardship of the world he is painting. It has a conceptual aspect, too, as it is the white that makes this Lowry’s world, something that has its root in a hard reality but also seems to exist in of itself.Sotheby's Auction - Catalogue Note

Exhibition details

The Lowry says it's only been on public display twice before

• once in 1939 when Lowry chose to include it in an exhibition in London
• briefly in 1996 at Sotheby’s as part of a pre-auction display when it set the then world record for a Lowry painting of £282,000.

When A Cricket Match last appeared at auction in June 1996, it sold for a then world record price for a painting by Lowry, prompting a plethora of cricket-inspired puns from the newspapers, both national and local to the artist’s home town of Manchester: ‘Lowry scores a record price’, ‘Cricket oil hits artist’s price for six’, ‘Painting a big hit’ etc.  Catalogue note

On display in the exhibition at the Lowry

• LS Lowry: The Art & The Artist
• The Lowry, Pier 8, Salford, M50 3AZ
• Sun-Fri, 11am-5pm. Sat, 10am-5pm.
• Admission: Free. Donations welcome.

To be auctioned by Sotheby's 

The work will be auctioned on 18 June by Sotheby’s. It's estimated it could fetch up to £1.2 million.

This exceptional painting is both a ‘classic’ Lowry, depicting the hard life of the industrial cities at the turn of the 20th century, and also quite rare in its depiction of a cricket match, even though cricket has always been very much part of Manchester life.  Simon Hucker, senior specialist for modern and post-war British art at Sotheby’s

See

• Howzat! LS Lowry's cricket match painting may sell for £1m
• Lowry cricket painting to be auctioned during World Cup

The exhibition dates and times are as follows

• Friday 14 June 9am - 5pm 
• Saturday 15 June 12pm - 5pm 
• Sunday 16 June 1pm - 5pm 
• Monday17 June 9am - 5pm 
• Tuesday18 June 9am - 4pm 

Mrs Lowry & Son

Timothy Spall as LS Lowry in Mrs Lowry & Son

The display of the painting comes ahead of the release of a feature film this summer about the artist starring Timothy Spall and Vanessa Redgrave. Mrs Lowry & Son depicts the relationship between Lowry (Spall) and his mother Elizabeth (Redgrave) with whom he lived until her death.

The film is directed by Adrian Noble, the former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and made by production company Genesius Pictures.
Timothy Spall's recent weight loss makes him uncannily like Lowry. Spall was JMW Turner of course in a previous acting incarnation!

"We’re absolutely thrilled to be able to share this work with our visitors. With the release of Mrs Lowry & Son this summer there’s a real buzz at the moment about his story and his journey as an artist and it’s great to have the chance to display a work few people will have seen before.” Claire Stewart, curator of The Lowry Collection