BOOKS & ARTS
ARTS
Mummy dearest
Why did Elizabeth Lowry hate her son’s paintings? Laura Gascoigne talks to Timothy Spall
and Adrian Noble about their new film, Mrs Lowry and Son‘I
often wonder what artists are for now-
adays, what with photography and a
thousand and one processes by which
you can get representation,’ L.S. Lowry
muses in Robert Tyrrell’s 1971 documenta-
ry. ‘They’re totally unuseful. Can’t see any
use in one. Can you?’
I can: as fodder for biopics. Cinemato-
graphers have always been inspired by
painting, but the appeal of the artist’s biop-
ic lies less in the representation than the
lifestyle: mainly the sex. Kirk Douglas’s
Vincent van Gogh demonstrates his ‘lust
for life’ in the trailer for Vincente Minelli’s
1956 film with what would now be consid-
ered a sexual assault on Jeanette Sterke as
his cousin Kay; Charlton Heston’s Michel-
angelo seals his assumed heterosexuality in
Carol Reed’s The Agony and the Ecstasy
(1965) with a Hollywood kiss with Diane
Cilento’s Contessina de’ Medici.
The artist’s biopic is a man’s world, but
it ain’t nothing without a woman or a girl.
The women pose, put out and put the kettle
on. ‘Excellent tea,’ Lindsay Kemp’s Angus
Corky compliments Dorothy Tutin’s Sophie
Brzeska in Ken Russell’s Savage Messiah
(1972). ‘It’s nice to be appreciated,’ comes
the tart reply. It’s the same old story with
Ed Harris’s Pollock (2000): Harris gets an
Oscar nomination for Best Actor for play-
ing Pollock, Marcia Gay Harden wins the
award for Best Supporting Actress for her
role as Lee Krasner. Krasner now has a solo
show at Tate Modern, but the only woman
artist so far honoured with a Hollywood
biopic is Frida Kahlo. ‘Behind the romance,
behind the glamour, behind the madness,
lies the mystery of one of the most seduc-
tive and intriguing women of ours [sic] or
any time!’ booms the trailer for Julie Tay-
mor’s Frida (2002). Never mind the art,
Salma Hayek’s heroine beats the men at
swigging tequila and wins a snog with Saf-
fron Burrows’s Gracie while dancing thetango. But Geoffrey Rush’s Trotsky knows
the way to her heart: ‘I loved your painting,’
he whispers.
For American audiences art has to be
mythic, though not for British ones: they
like their artists larger than life; we like
them smaller. If women are involved, let
them be dowdy. No chance of a snog with
a starlet for Timothy Spall in Mike Leigh’s
Mr Turner (2014) when the love interest
was the artist’s housekeeper and his Mar-gate landlady. In Spall’s latest role in Adrian
Noble’s Mrs Lowry and Son, the woman in
the artist’s life is his mother, played by the
82-year-old Vanessa Redgrave.
Many artists have been mummy’s boys,
but none were so cruelly unappreciated by
their mothers. Laurence Stephen Lowry was
a disappointment to Elizabeth Lowry from
birth, when the discovery that he wasn’t a
girl sent her into a fit of sobbing; when he
grew into a ‘clumsy boy’ who was useless at
school it confirmed her worst fears. Herself
a star pupil with aspirations to be a concert
pianist, Mrs Lowry had expected more from
life and blamed her husband and her son
— neither of whom rose above the rank of
rent collector — for her mortification. ‘Why
is it when I look at you I’ve always want-
ed to close my eyes?’ is a typically waspish
barb in Martyn Hesford’s screenplay. She
could never accept the family’s downfall
from Manchester’s suburban Victoria Park
to industrial Pendlebury. Her response was
to take to her bed, from which she ruled the
Oedipal roost with a rod of iron after her
husband’s death, making her middle-aged
son present his hands for inspection on his
return from work. They fail the test.Theatre director Adrian Noble’s claus-
trophobic, sensitively acted two-hander is
more domestic drama than artist’s biopic:
he chose the script for its cinematic focus
‘on the hearts and minds of two characters
and the intensity of their transaction’. His
film avoids the clichés of the artist’s biopic:
there are no dissolves from painting to set,
although there are some spookily evocative
locations coloured with Lowry’s distinc-
tively limited palette. The opening credits
roll over the artist’s hand slowly applying
a white ground to canvas, but shots of him
in action are mercifully few. Painters have
a particular look in their eye when they’re
working, part-ruminatory, part-predatory,
which appears to be impossible for non-
painters to replicate. Charles Laughton had
it down in Alexander Korda’s 1936 Rem-
brandt (1936), but I’ve never seen any other
actor master it since.
That said, Spall gets the ruminative bit
when applying careful touches to a Lowry
canvas. According to Noble, the actor is ‘no
mean painter’ — at the wrap he presented
the director with a postcard featuring 20
dogs in Lowry’s signature calligraphic style.
As a teenager Spall considered a career in
art before drama got him. He prepared for
Mr Turner with two years of painting prac-
tice and has kept it up since: 14 of his paint-
ings will be on show at the Lowry, Salford,
in an exhibition accompanying the film — ‘a
few Lowryesque subjects’, he confides, ‘and
some Spallesque’. There are landscapes
from Catalonia and New Mexico and cop-
ies of Lowry paintings, one — ‘Winter in
Pendlebury’ — hanging alongside the mas-
ter’s original. ‘I have to be careful I don’t get
above my station. They’re actually printing
them and selling them as postcards. This is a
new deal for me; I have to say I’m chuffed.’
He sees parallels between art and act-
ing, both practical professions. Much as he
admires artists, he doesn’t buy into the Hol-Can it be a coincidence that Lowry
chose to paint the very industrial
scenes that so offended his mother?