Either way, as a follower or cynic of Lowry, this exhibition is for you. I must admit that I was a little cynical, concerned that Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life would be a little too repetitive. And he is! But I love that about Lowry.  To me his repetitiveness means Lowry knew exactly what he was looking for, and he finds it and re-finds it over and over, and over again. Just like Warhol did with his soup cans and Marilyns.
This is quite a modest show, 95 works (when Lowry died the Royal Academy exhibited 400!), each riveting in subject matter, be it panoramic or intimate vignette. Instantly recognisable, hard-edged, grotesque, comedic, Lowry’s painted people look formulaic because he draws them from memory. Although simple, even in his fairly idiotic matchstick men you’ll recognise human variety; “I’ve put many of my tenants in my pictures.”
He made more than 1,000 paintings and 8,000 drawings. If you asked him, “What are you doing when you’re not painting?” he’d have replied, “thinking about painting”.
He described himself as “a simple man”, but, in fact, he was complex and contradictory considering the murky realism of his environment. There are lots of assumptions about Laurence Stephen Lowry (1887-1976). Born lower middle class, in Stretford, Manchester, to an estate agent and hopeful concert pianist, a move to the industrial hamlet of Pendlebury led to an obsessive subject matter for the young painter. He captured how, if you work with machines, 12 hours a day, six days a week, it bends and twists your body in a particular way. Always scurrying along, Lowry’s people have very little time, and very little money, too busy running around representing the rituals of public life from football matches to protest marches, evictions and fist-fights. Workers going to and from the mill, the experiences of the 20th Century working-class life are all captured by Lowry.
A rent collector by day and virgin by night who lived with his mother, he was formally trained in drawing and painting under French Impressionist Valette. Although he’s never been a darling of the art world, after Freud, Passmore and Piper he’s there!
His landscape of textile mills and factory chimneys make Lowry an artist of the ‘place’. His ‘localism’ - topographies of slums in Manchester – speak to the locals, as normally labour is concealed within the factory. Lowry takes it outside, showing men at work, on the streets.
“My ambition,” Lowry said, “was to put the industrial scene on the map because nobody had done it, nobody had done it seriously.” Lowry was street-wise with street life.
Today, as Lowry’s work often sells for millions of pounds, and it inspires other artists, to me, Lowry was all about telling a whole story of what life was pre NHS; pre small scale capitalism; pre strike meetings.
Tate’s Room 4 Ruined Landscape is painted the darkest grey. The landscapes speak of the enormity of the gloomy, tragic, industrialisation in the 20th Century.
Melodramatic and pessimistic, the mood changes drastically in the next room, Room 5 The Social Life of Labour Britain as Lowry paints people frail, after the war, in VE Day 1945.
If you’re surprised at how small the paintings are, just wait for the last room, Room 6 The Industrial Landscapes, here, for the first time five grand-scale panoramic landscapes, of his world, are shown together.
His world, celebrating a pictorial record before Thatcher, changed the face of British industry. The trouble is, unsurprisingly, when the industrial scene passed away he couldn’t paint anymore and he upped-and-left to go to the mining district of South Wales to paint the trees looking like they oozed smoke.
For the first time industrial panoramas leap up to ‘history painting’ size, indicating the measure of his final ambition. If the little, bent, people in The Pond, 1950, are a tad too maladroit, you must admit that the architecture is eye-catching.
What makes this the perfect exhibition at the moment is our social awareness of our current financial times.
Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life, Tate Britain, until  October 20. www.tate.org.uk