Peter Davies
A Northern School Revisited
A Northern School Revisited by Peter Davies is a revised and updated version of his 1989 book A Northern School – Lancashire Artists of the Twentieth Century, and documents the landscape of what we might broadly call the Northern art scene, thereby showing the enduring appeal of art from the north west of England (covering many cities and towns in Lancashire, Merseyside and Greater Manchester). In an era of increasing globalization, with a general shift of attention to the international art market, the regional often becomes overlooked, and, worse still, rendered invisible. The publication of Davies' book is especially important in this context as it presents a restatement of the importance of Northern art in the narrative of British art and moves beyond the popular but limited perception of L.S. Lowry as representative of the Northern tradition. It also inadvertently underscores the innovations and contributions of regional art 'schools' in other areas of Britain, including Cornwall (the St Ives School), Glasgow (the Glasgow School), and London (the Euston Road School), to British social history and heritage. With a wealth of historical detail attained from the Manchester Academy of Fine Art archives, Davies builds up a vivid picture of the life and times of numerous artists, groups and bodies who were connected with the North West, which included artists who were variously born there, studied in Northern art schools, or worked and exhibited there. This expanded sense of the Northern is important as it provides the rationale for including artists as far apart as the Welsh-born Augustus John, who taught at the University of Liverpool, and Picasso, an exhibition of whose work was shown at the end of the war at Manchester City Art Gallery. We learn about the various personal and institutional connections that aided the development of a recognizable body of work that came to be regarded as Northern art, which is characterized by the evocation of a sense of the North, whether through the representation of actual or imaginary senses of place, local events such as market day, or sporting events, and the representations of working-class life. Many artists combined or melded a 'topographical record with the collective memory' (p. 189) of the past, to use a phrase of Davies' with reference to Alan Lowndes but one that can be taken to have more general application to other artists. While being concerned with charting the influences and interests of the chosen artists, Davies avoids parochi-alism by showing how artists were engaged with currents in the mainstream , whether in the form of art movements, such as pop art, or events, such as the Festival of Britain in 1951.
Edition of 30
Copyright The Artist
