"This is her picture as she was"

This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise
Thy voice and hand shake still,--long known to thee
By flying hair and fluttering hem,--the beat
Following her daily of thy heart and feet,
How passionately and irretrievably,
In what fond flight, how many ways and days! 

- Dante Gabriel Rossetti

As you know, this blog doesn't just write itself. So a few days after a brief burst of 'Lady of Shalott' and some Dante I went to Cartwright Hall in Bradford to see their exhibition of studies that Dante Gabriel Rossetti did of Jane Morris, wife of William and the fulcrum of one of those odd set-ups that the Victorians seem to have all carried on behind closed doors. It's well worth seeing, as are the other two temporary exhibitions there at the moment.

The first, a travelling show from the British Museum, is basically just one turban, but what a turban. It's a Sikh fortress turban from the nineteenth century with a small amount of background material and other artifacts. I was sorry to see that I had missed lectures earlier in the month on Sikh troops in the First World War and one in conjunction with the Royal Armouries on Sikh arms and armour.

The third exhibition was actually the best, a number of lithographs and prints from the city's own collection. There was inevitably, and quite rightly, some Hockney, in this case 'The Rake's Progress' a series of sixteen prints from the early sixties. There are also some colourful and amusing Glenn Baxter's and a selection of prints specially commissioned to celebrate the 2012 Olympics including works by Tracey Emin and Chris Ofili. Perhaps of most interest to wargamers would be a dozen small prints by Sir William Rothenstein entitled 'Landscapes of the War', the war in this question being that of 1914-18 because Rothenstein served as an official war artist in both world wars. However, those that I'd personally like on my walls are thirteen Lowry's from the mid 1960s.

Silence is more musical than any song

And so to Tate Britain for their exhibition of the works of L.S. Lowry, the 'Pendlebury Utrillo'. After yesterday's observation about the small size of the Royal Academy's exhibition I am pleased to report that this one is huge. According to the Tate, 'painting was Lowry's obsession' and indeed it must have been to produce this lot; it's a mystery where he found the time to do any rent collecting. Six galleries are full of Lowry's work plus a Van Gogh, a Pissaro and a couple of paintings by Utrillo (not, as far as I know, ever referred to as the 'Montmartre Lowry') for a bit of context.

Lowry as an artist is smothered by misunderstandings: the sentimentality of those who don't look at the paintings and/or don't bother to think about them, the false belief that he was ignored and undervalued during his life and the somewhat redundant debate about whether his Toryism reduces the social commentary of his subject matter. I personally wasn't surprised to find that the biggest scrum of visitors was around 'Going to the Match', a painting that is a) full of his trademark figures and b) nostalgic from the perspective of Premier League, prawn sandwich football crowds. To Lowry, of course, it was simply the way things were.

As for not being recognised, the exhibition brings together for the first time five large works that were commissioned from the artist by the Festival of Britain; a fairly significant accolade I would have said. His political beliefs were middle of the road and of their time. In the early part of his career he certainly saw the bleak, industrial landscapes as inevitable, but that doesn't necessarily imply he thought them a good idea. And later on, when he painted them in the knowledge that they were disappearing, did he mourn their loss per se or the economic incompetence that failed to replace them with any other source of employment or wealth creation?

While the heavy industry may have disappeared, the other aspects of working class poverty that he documented are inevitably still with us: pawn shops, loan sharks and the like. Nothing sentimental there. Mind you, the Tate does its crass best to trivialise all this; in the shop one can buy a special exhibition flat cap - seriously!

I didn't have much time to look at the Tate's standing collection. Regular readers - at least those who read to end of postings such as this - may recall me praising a piece by Nevinson hanging in Leeds Art Gallery, and so I did go to look at the Nevinson work on show here. It is called 'The Soul of the Soulless City' which is a damn fine name quite apart from anything else.