Noel Gallagher & Ian McKellen Challenge 'The Tate' Over LS Lowry Exclusion

Actor demands London galleries sell 23 works by Manchester painter rather than continue to store them.

The Tate has been challenged to put its collection of paintings by LS Lowry up for sale if it intends to continue to exclude them from its London galleries.

The actor Sir Ian McKellen threw down the challenge in a joint attack by leading figures from the art world which questioned whether the "matchstick men painter" has been sidelined as too northern and provincial.

Although many artists from the north of England enjoy metropolitan critical acclaim, including David Hockney and Damien Hirst, none assert the character of northern people and landscape with Lowry's dogged persistence.

"Over the years, silly lies have been thrown around that he was only a Sunday painter, an amateur, untrained and naive," said McKellen, who narrates a highly critical television programme about Lowry's "exclusion" to be screened by ITV1 on Easter Day.

The programme is called Perspectives: Looking for Lowry.

"His popularity needs no official endorsement from the Tate, but it is a shame verging on the iniquitous that foreign visitors to London shouldn't have access to the painter English people like more than most others."

The film sees others line up to condemn the fact that the Tate has shown only one of its 23 Lowrys – Industrial Landscape, painted in 1955 and owned by the gallery for 50 years – and then only briefly.

Noel Gallagher, of the Manchester band Oasis, said: "They're not considered Tateworthy. Or is it just because he is a northerner?"

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Source: guardian.co.uk

Oasis' video for The Masterplan was based on the paintings of L.S. Lowry.