Two months

It took me two months to get back to the Lowry exhibition at the Tate, our first visit having been logged on 30th July.

Since then I have come across two reviews. The first, in the TLS, by one Frank Whitford I remember as being very condescending in tone. Jogging my memory at the TLS archive today I find that it indeed was, also that Lowry was the most popular artist in the UK after Rolf Harris, the review presumably having been written before Harris was charged with offences against children. The second is in the latest number of the NYRB by Sanford Schwartz who appears to be an arty journalist of the same cut as Whitford, albeit a US citizen. He is much more respectful about Lowry, to the extent of including him in the same sentence as Damien Hirst, but his main concern is to have a pop at the curator of the show, Tomothy Clark, a lefty looking arty historian rather than an arty journalist. It all reads rather like a rather bitchy pillow fight, staged for I am not quite sure whose entertainment.

Exhibition rather more crowded on this Friday lunchtime than on our last visit, a rather older audience than last time, just leavened with a well behaved school party, scattered around, making sketches and notes. Luckily teacher did not see fit to lecture them in open exhibition, although we still had the musak, musak which Mr. Schwartz thoroughly disapproved of, a point in his favour.

I continue to like a lot of Lowry's pictures, with the only addition to the comments I made last time around being that I do not think that he did big very well and I was not that keen on the five big pictures in the last room. I wonder if his restricted palette was something of the same sort; a restricted palette on a restricted canvas was what suited him.

Out to inspect the Morpeth Arms, once the favoured haunt of the long service men at Riverwalk House, a gang to which I was never elected and on from there to inspect the hole that was Riverwalk House. Having talked, quite recently with a chap in demolition who told me that when one took a tower block down one had to dig out the foundations too, back to clean clay, I was interested to see that they did indeed seem to be doing just that. With two large, rusting steel cylinders propping up the hole. I hadn't thought to clarify about the piles, but I assume that taking out the foundation does include the pile caps but does not include drilling out the piles themselves - which I would have thought would have done more harm than good to the structure of the ground under the proposed new tower. Quite apart from what I would have thought to be the considerable expense.

A short and hopeless game of aeroplanes at Clapham Junction, without a single sighting. What are all these people who bang on about more capacity at Heathrow on?

As luck would have it, browsing among the art books being remaindered by Surrey Libraries the day after, I came across a handy biography of Lowry by a Shelley Rodhe, a snip at £3, less than half the new price way back in 1979. So far I have learned that he was indeed a rather odd chap, but rather likeable too. I will try to get through it before my next visit to the pictures.