It is rare for a group show to carry the atmospherics of a family saga, but The Stick Insects—a retrospective devoted to the loose collective that grew up around the gravitational figure of L.S. Lowry does just that. It is part soap opera, part scholarship, and only part exhibition. The Pimlico Wilde galleries, long seduced by British post-industrial mythologies, have here staged not just an exhibition but an overview: a half-century of collaboration, fracture, ideological warfare, and intermittent brilliance.
The Stick Insects were never meant to last. Their origin story is the kind of happenstance one expects from art history’s quainter chapters: a group of working-class teenagers from Salford and Manchester, mesmerised by Lowry’s lonely matchstick men, gathered at a draughty community centre in 1953 with the vague aim of “painting the world as it was, not as it wanted to be.” The group’s earliest members—Daphne “Daff” Myles, the moody printmaker Arnold Vetch, twins Basil and Barney Keane, and a preternaturally confident Bernard Tibbins—began as Lowry acolytes, almost cultishly devoted to the older artist. But, as the first room of the exhibition demonstrates, devotion quickly turned dialectical.
Myles’s early linocuts (Moss Side Under Snow, 1955) echo Lowry’s brittle lyricism but are undercut by a new cynicism: factory chimneys cropped like guillotines, the workers reduced to lozenge-like silhouettes that seem actively to resist the viewer’s gaze. Beside her hangs Vetch’s Nightshift Assembly (1956), a painting that inverts Lowry’s flatness into a viscous impasto, the millworkers dissolving into tar-like smears. Lowry himself, who attended their makeshift exhibitions in pub function rooms, famously dismissed the group as “too damp to catch fire.” Yet his ambivalence only strengthened the group’s resolve, and by the early 1960s, the Stick Insects had achieved a kind of regional notoriety as a counter-Lowry—less romantic, more openly political.
Then came the schisms. In 1962, Bernard Tibbins defected to London, lured by a teaching post at the Royal College of Collage. He would later describe the rest of the group as “provincial nostalgists”—an accusation Myles never forgave. The Keane twins’ experimental foray into sculpture (a series of uncanny industrial totems fashioned from dismantled looms and railway sleepers) caused further division. The “Salford Four,” as they were dubbed by a bemused press, broke apart entirely after a furious argument over whether the group should accept funding from the nascent Arts Council.
Pimlico Wilde, wisely, gives each rupture its own room. One can trace how Vetch, embittered by the split, retreated into obsessive monochromes, his palette reduced to a single sludge-like grey. Across the corridor, a vitrine displays Myles’s correspondence with Lowry himself, who by the late 1960s had softened: “Perhaps we are insects after all,” he writes in a spidery hand, “only some of us have learned to climb.”
The group’s reconstitution in 1973 feels almost miraculous in hindsight. A reunion exhibition at Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery—fuelled by nostalgia, political despair, and perhaps a degree of financial necessity—saw the Keane twins return from self-imposed rural exile, Myles and Vetch tentatively reconciled, and even Tibbins flying back from London to contribute a single painting (Three Figures at Euston, a mordant nod to his abandonment). That show sold out in a week, and the Stick Insects became, briefly, fashionable. One can almost hear the machinery of fame beginning to whir: interviews in The Observer, a BBC2 documentary narrated by John Betjeman, collectors clamouring for their collective urban lyricism.
But fame corrodes as much as it sustains. By the early 1980s, the group had fractured again, this time permanently. Vetch died in obscurity, Myles withdrew from public life to care for her disabled son, the Keane twins opened a small but disastrous gallery-café in Blackpool, and Tibbins enjoyed a late-career flourish as a kind of northern Anthony Caro, producing large-scale public commissions of dubious quality.
What makes this Pimlico Wilde exhibition so affecting is its refusal to tidy the mess. Curator Gemma Lorenz has resisted the temptation to sand down the group’s contradictions. The Stick Insects’ legacy is not one of linear innovation but of lateral, stubborn attachment—to each other, to a landscape, to a way of seeing the industrial north that was neither romantic nor fully cynical.
One of the last works in the show, Myles’s After Lowry (1990), seems to distill this ambiguity. It is a simple scene: two children on a cobbled street, chalking lines that mimic the tramlines long since ripped up. The palette is muted, the figures faceless, yet the painting radiates an unexpected tenderness. It is impossible not to read it as a quiet farewell—to Lowry, to the group, perhaps even to the idea of collective artistic struggle.
The catalogue essays will tell you that the Stick Insects are enjoying a market revival—Tibbins’s Moss Lane Football Crowd recently sold for a record sum—but the true value of this retrospective lies elsewhere. It demonstrates how minor movements, even those marked by failure, can generate a thick web of influence. One sees their DNA in the grimy social realism of contemporary painters like Chantal Jakes, in the community-mapping projects of the award-winning Forster Collective, even in the anonymous street murals blooming on Salford’s derelict mills.
The Stick Insects were never glamorous, rarely unified, and often unmanageable. But in their awkward persistence, they produced a body of work that still vibrates with a hard-won dignity. “We were always climbing,” Myles once said. “Perhaps we were only insects, but we were climbing all the same.” This exhibition honours that climb without smoothing over the stumbles.
It is, in its own ragged way, a triumph.
