LS Lowry, the condition of the working class and the birth of the NHS

Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life

An exhibition at Tate Britain, 26 June–20 October 2013

This recent exhibition of the works of LS Lowry at Tate Britain was “the first to be held by a public institution in London since the artist's death in 1976. It [was] also the first to explore Lowry's status as Britain's preeminent painter of the industrial city”. While viewing it, I looked, as always, to medical themes. I was able to find several; perhaps more than the organisers themselves imagined while they were planning this very intriguing exhibition.

As the Tate's press office explained: “The exhibition of over 90 works include[d] Tate's own pictures Coming Out of School (1927), The Pond (1950), Industrial Landscape (1955) and Hillside in Wales (1962), and significant loans from public and private lenders. It demonstrate[d] Lowry's uniqueness as a modern British artist who recognised what the industrial revolution had made of the world and devoted his career to this rich and varied subject matter. Without Lowry's pictures of football and cricket matches, protest marches, funfairs, evictions, arguments, prayer meetings, accidents and workers going to and from the mill, Britain would lack an account in paint of the experiences of the working class in the 20th century.”

In terms of the politics of medicine and health, two works in particular stand in contrast. The painting The Cripples (1949; see Figure 1) shows a number of figures disabled by war and illness. It is dramatised by the blank, empty and desolate landscape, by the figures that look as though they were painted by children, surrounded by images of children – likely orphans – tiny and arranged in a schematized fashion, struggling within a weak post-war economy.

Figure 1.

The Cripples (1949)

This painting is shown beside a later scene, Ancoats Hospital Outpatients Hall (1952; see Figure 2), painted in the early years of the NHS. This image shows a keen attention to the interests of patients, and is a window on how things were changing and developing within the NHS. These developments were leading to higher expectations thanks to the changing climate created by the NHS: people are sitting quietly, there are many of them, faces are more rounded, more coloured; some of them are even smiling a little! It is an image of patients far less desperate than those in the painting of just three years earlier.

Figure 2.

Ancoats Hospital Outpatients Hall (1952)

Excavating in Manchester (1932) depicts workers in Manchester erecting what would become one of the last great cotton warehouses in the city, and is a rare depiction by Lowry of workers actually engaged in labouring. This indicates Lowry's interest in the social health of the working class, as they toiled in conditions that were often detrimental to wellbeing, and which exacerbated stress. In the same context, the Tate Britain's publicity notes that “Industrial Landscape, Wigan (1925) could be an illustration to George Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier 1937; both text and image present apocalyptic scenes of polluted canals and derelict buildings”. The question of public health is very much highlighted in this image. Visitors should stop here to reflect on whether or not today's conditions are unchanged in many aspects.