The power of The Sea

Ben East

• Last Updated: November 21. 2009 4:30PM UAE / November 21. 2009 12:30PM GMT

Paris has Monet; and Madrid, Goya. Manchester’s celebrated son is LS Lowry, the uncompromising painter of northern English industrial scenes populated by his ubiquitous matchstick men. Rightly, a museum in his hometown is dedicated to his life – he died in 1976 – and work. But such deserved hero worship creates a unique problem: how to keep the world’s largest collection of Lowry’s work fresh, interesting and relevant. The current answer, at the futuristic Lowry centre, is to take a trip to the seaside.

This might seem odd: Lowry is famous for depicting belching smokestacks in grim northern towns. But he was also fond of the sea. “How wonderful it is, yet how terrible it is... it’s the battle of life, the turbulence of the sea,” he once remarked. And in this new exhibition, aptly named The Sea, his seascapes sit alongside those of the award-winning contemporary British artist Maggi Hambling.

Initially, at least, it appears an odd clash of styles. Where Lowry’s sea paintings seem almost benign – usually flat, calm and almost featureless – Hambling’s are furious, violent affairs. Lowry’s pieces are often small and sometimes nothing more than naive pencil sketches. Hambling’s are huge, arresting canvases, thick with paint, movement and vitality. There are swathes of brown, black and white: it’s as if the whole world were being turned upside down as Hambling’s waves crash on to the East Anglian coast she calls home. The way she is able to capture the very moment when the wave breaks is quite remarkable – you can almost hear the sound of the sea.

But as the walls of this gallery fill with more and more sea paintings from both Hambling and Lowry, it becomes startlingly clear that they do perhaps have a symmetry after all. For starters, there are no people in these works. It gives them a mesmerising timelessness, and a sense that the waves are speaking directly to the viewer of their power – there’s no one else in the way.

As Hambling explains in the accompanying video installation at the end of this excellent exhibition, even though the styles are very different, she and Lowry share a lot. The awe she feels for the sea’s power is obvious, but it’s not quite right to call Lowry’s work calmer and less involved. “It’s something more ominous than that,” she says. “I find them hypnotic, his sense of time seems to stand still. The simplicity is threatening.”

Perhaps you’d expect an island nation to be responsible for some of the finest seascape painting. It’s surely no coincidence that the greatest painter in this medium in the 19th century was the Englishman JMW Turner, that Lowry is often given the accolade for the 20th century, and that Hambling is without doubt the best contemporary artist of the subject. What the exhibition does hammer home is how, for this pair of artists, there’s something elemental at play here. The sea is a metaphor for life and death: just as the waves will inevitably eat away at the land, so life moves on, changes and eventually stops altogether.

The great success of The Sea is that it makes the viewer reassess not only what Lowry was good at, but the nature of the world around us. Stepping out of the exhibition on a windy autumnal day, I found it apt that the magnificent Manchester Ship Canal came into view. Once the largest navigation canal in the world, it carried products from the factories Lowry painted to the Mersey Estuary, the Irish Sea and from there, the world. Even though it is 58km from the nearest wave, Manchester, one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution, needed the sea. And as The Sea proves, artists feel a powerful need to tap into its power and beauty. Our fascination with understanding it – and our helplessness in taming it – is the source of some truly great art.

The Sea: LS Lowry and Maggi Hambling is at The Lowry, Salford Quays, Greater Manchester, until January 31 2010. www.thelowry.com.