Anne Wagner: L.S. Lowry and the Local

Anne Wagner is one of the curators of Tate Britain’s L.S. Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, an exhibition opened on 25 June that promises to reappraise this familiar but often critically sidelined artist. Her talk will discuss Lowry’s drawings. They do more, Wagner argues, than record streets and buildings: they aim to define the character of modern industrial space, without omitting issues of labour and class. This is one reason that in 1930 a Manchester Guardian critic wrote that the artist’s drawings have a ‘grasp of slum landscape’. But what, precisely, does it mean to grasp a slum?