Lowry and Dali/BBC 4

BBC 4 on a Monday has some excellent art programmes and yesterday there were two such: Fake or Fortune and another on Salvador Dali.

On Fake or Fortune the son of a successful northern businessman was seeking to authenticate 3 Lowrys acquired by his father.

His problem was, whilst they certainly looked like Lowrys with that distinctive Manchester and Salford feel, there was no evidence of acquisition e.g. a bill of sale.

This problem was compounded by the number of forgeries of this well-known northern artist.

Lowry himself was a rent collector but so successful that even now, years after his passing, the market in his work flourishes.

He and Atkinson Grimshaw are the two most collectible northern English painters.

Four experts did authenticate the pictures but, significantly, did not indicate any interest in acquiring them.

I suspect that the problems of provenance would affect their value. Lowry said that he only used 5 colours, one of which was white flake.

Philip Mould – through forensic examination – established that the paint on one of the pictures was zinc white.

This seemed to indicate a forgery but, in a film of Lowry’s studios, Fiona Bruce saw a zinc white paint tube.

So why did Lowry not admit to this?

His trademark was simplicity and he was adhering to his image by only admitting to 5 specific colours when this was not the case.

I found the programme on Salvador Dali less enjoyable.

I am not a fan of either his work or his showman persona carefully cultivated by himself and his wife Galen.

Think of Dali, think of surrealism.

Yet the founder of surrealism, Andre Breton, mocked Dali – using an anagram of his name “Avid Dollars”.

By the end he was not only doing product endorsement but, for a sum you could acquire a blank sheet of paper signed by him.

As for his works I personally find them vulgar and disturbing.

Finally on the question of image,, I must mention an excellent book on Gauguin by Susan Hodge that I read over Xmas.

Gauguin’s reputation has suffered from the accusation that he was a paedophile.

This is a classic case of judging someone from the morals of a different age. The age of consent in Tahiti at the time was 13 and, when he returned to Tahiti, his lover was married with a child.

Gauguin has also had a rather romantic image as the artist who abandoned bourgeois life for his art. Again incorrect.

Gauguin was skint when he made his first Tahiti trip and he believed he could obtain commissions there. He did not come over as an attractive person: he abandoned his long suffering wife Metta and five children, married bigamously, was argumentative, self-absorbed, arrogant and restless, unable to settle anywhere.

He was, though, a wonderful painter of colour and texture.

On his second trip to Tahiti he stopped off at Auckland and admired the Māori art he saw at a museum.

He must surely have influenced Modigliani and – in an era of isms – could be said to be the father of primitivism.