Ballerinas And Bondage: The Secret Desires Of L.S. Lowry

The hidden fetish fantasies of one of Britain’s most beloved artists are uncovered in his kinky private work.

We tend to assume that an artist is entirely represented by their work, perhaps no more so than in the case of L.S. Lowry, manchester’s most famous artistic export and the master of working-class primitivism. His portraits of northern English life, with its factories and his distinctive stretched-out figures, are either loved or hated – simplistic and crude, evocative and impressionistic, the work has long spoken to people who have a distrust of modern art but who buy into the unrealistic style of his work, while sections of the metropolitan art elite have long sneered at the sentimentality and mainstream appeal of the work. He remains a beloved figure – though not necessarily with the people who take it on themselves to decide what great art is and isn’t. Rarely has the divide between the art establishment and the public  – or, for that matter, the North-South divide – been so apparent as it is with Lowry.

There’s an assumption that Lowry’s work is the result of an untrained eye, the outsider artist capturing what he saw in his own crude style. Lowry was actually a trained artist and his style seems to have been a deliberate creation – there is, perhaps, something of the contrived in his work just as there is in much art. Artists rarely find themselves immediately, and we can see from Lowry’s still-life nudes that he was capable of a more natural realism if required. Nevertheless, the working-class Northern landscapes he created make us believe that this was his world – a world of factory world, clogs and wholesome innocence that the sentimentalised figure of the hit song Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs lived. In truth, Lowry was a more complex character than this suggests.

Throughout his life, Lowry was a celibate figure, the sort of person that we might see as ‘asexual’ nowadays. But Lowry was a man with sexual desires and fantasies, even if these remained unfulfilled, and his rarely-seen erotic art provides a fascinating insight into his libido. These works remained unseen until his death, and even now are seen as a bit of a dirty secret by the Lowry Museum and his estate, rarely being shown. This is a pity, as these crude sketches – clearly in his established style – are perhaps his most interesting work, channelling both the fetish art of the likes of John Willie, Carlo, Charles Guyette and other kink creators of the first half of the 20th century and the work of Allan Jones. Some of these works clearly represent his sexual fantasies about the ballerinas that he would watch in Covent Garden – in contrast to his reputation as a salt-of-the-earth type, Lowry was a huge fan of the ballet – and others are more openly kinky, featuring restraint and flagellation scenes.

This work remained hidden away during his life and is undated, so just when it was created remains a mystery – most estimates are the late 1960s to early 1970s. Notably, he didn’t destroy it and must have known that it would be found after his death, so either he was content for others to see it or simply forgot it – there is, after all, every chance that he created a lot more of this material as a masturbatory expression and then disposed of it. These might be images that slipped through the cracks. By the time of his 1976 death, he was important enough for all his surviving work to be saved and catalogues, but clearly these images tend to go against the stereotyped image of Lowry and would be buried away – it wasn’t until 1988 that they were first seen – in Barcelona rather than the UK, tellingly – and they have been only occasionally shown publicly since. Public attitudes towards BDSM have waxed and waned over the years but for many, these images would shatter their own cosy ideas of what Lowry was.

DAVID FLINT

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