A new exhibition, LS Lowry: the Theatre of Life, opening on 24 October, sets out to challenge the enduring perception that the Manchester painter was "naive and uncultured". Co-curator Anthony Spira, director of MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, argues that Lowry has long been misinterpreted and reduced to a caricature as merely an industrial painter, when in fact he was formally trained and deeply engaged with the wider arts. The show aims to present a fuller, more balanced view of an artist best known for capturing working-class life in the industrial north-west of England.

The exhibition brings together 140 paintings and highlights that Lowry spent years at art college, frequented the opera, theatre and cinema, and collected works by the pre-Raphaelites, Jacob Epstein and Lucian Freud. Among the standout inclusions is the rarely seen 1932 work A Football Match, publicly displayed for the first time in nearly 85 years, having last appeared at the Royal Academy around a decade after it was painted. Spira notes that Lowry, a Manchester City fan, also painted leisure scenes such as seasides and festivals, and that his most famous work, Going to the Match, was bought for £7.8m in 2022 by the Lowry arts centre in Salford. The renewed interest follows a 2013 Tate Britain show of 90 works and a recent BBC film, The Unheard Tapes, featuring Sir Ian McKellen.