It is interesting that many artists come from modest backgrounds, the working class or the simplest middle class environments. Lawrence's father was a miner.
I watched a wonderful film the
other night, Le Facteur Cheval. It is about a country postman
in the Drôme region of France who one day decided to build 'le
Palais Idéal' on a plot of land he bought for the purpose. It took
him 33 years. He had no prior knowledge of building, or architecture,
only the vision in his mind and an incredible determination. The
enormous, elaborate structure still exists and can be visited.
Ferdinand Cheval (1836-1924) was finally given official recognition,
as it was classified as an historical monument by De Gaulle's culture
minister André Malraux in 1969, who described it as "le seul
représentant en architecture de l'art naïf (…) Il serait enfantin
de ne pas classer quand c'est nous, Français, qui avons la chance de
posséder la seule architecture naïve du monde et attendre qu'elle
se détruise…".
Thinking about 'naive art',
created by artists with no formal education or training, often from
very modest backgrounds, one English 'naive' artist came to mind,
although he is not always considered ‘naive’ by the specialists :
L.S. Lowry (1887-1976)...
Whatever he might be in artistic terms, there
is real ingenuousness in his paintings of industrial landscapes, of
tall chimneys and his famous ‘matchstick man’. He was born, lived
and painted in the north west of England, and when moving to
Pendlebury due to financial pressures as a young man, he experienced life in a world
of textile mills : "At first I detested it, and then,
after years I got pretty interested in it, then obsessed by it ...
One day I missed a train from Pendlebury – [a place] I had ignored
for seven years – and as I left the station I saw the Acme
Spinning Company's mill ... The huge black framework of rows of
yellow-lit windows standing up against the sad, damp charged
afternoon sky. The mill was turning out ... I watched this
scene — which I'd looked at many times without seeing —
with rapture ...". This is the sensibility of the
artist, his ‘rapture’, a state ‘being beside oneself’
in experiencing a moment of beauty in the most unexpected of places.
I have always found his vision of the city and its ordinary people
deeply moving. There is a bleak beauty in the scenes, which the
artist can capture through seeing the grandeur of the city’s essential
character, and its touching human lives. Many great artists have sublimated
the urban environment into great visions: Lawrence, T. S.
Eliot, Charles Baudelaire, Dickens.
Coming Home from the Mill (1928), J.S. Lowry
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