Henry Moore
24 February - 8 August, 2010
British Land
Finsbury
Goldman Sachs
Tate Britain Gallery - Admission Charge
‘This is not a retrospective of Moore’s work,’ declared Chris Stephens, curator of the Henry Moore exhibition, now open at Tate Britain. I quote: This exhibition is a re-evaluation of Henry Moore, whose complex psychological processes show through his work, he being in the constant presence of death. In short, the aim of the exhibition is to set the work of Moore in the context of its time.
Henry Moore was born in Castleford, Yorkshire, in 1898. Because Castleford was a mining town, Moore was imbued from an early age with the sense of men travelling to the bowels of the earth every day and drawing forth materials to be transformed in an almost alchemical way into the engine that was then industrial Britain. No doubt this transformation of matter from one form to another stayed with him as he studied at the Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. His creative development was tempered with a spell in the trenches of the Great War, in 1917.
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| Henry Moore
Reclining Figure 1929 Leeds Museums and Galleries © Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation |
This could explain the dark thread that was to run through the work of Moore, for the remainder of his life. With the war over, he was now able to study; Paris in 1923 and Italy in 1925. Moore had his first one-man show in 1928. By now, the two main themes of his work had emerged; the mother and child group and the reclining female figure.Reclining Figure, (1929) , is on display at the Tate Exhibition. Although it is much worn, we see Moore’s ability to transform hard stone to soft flesh. The figure has the same massive proportions as a Michelangelo sculpting, but it has shed the ‘realism’ of the Renaissance in favour of another quality. Ernst Gombrich writes:
Henry Moore did not start by looking at his model. He started by looking at his stone. He wanted to ‘make something out of it’. Not by smashing it to bits but by feeling his way and trying to find out ‘what the stone wanted’. If it turned into the suggestion of a human figure, then well and good. But even in this figure he wanted to preserve something of the solidity and simplicity of a rock. He did not try to make a woman out of stone, but a stone which suggested a woman…(except from The Story of Art)
Gombrich puts it eloquently indeed, and it is this respect for the power of his material that puts Moore firmly in the realm of twentieth century artists. On looking at the exhibits, one might say that the artist uncovered a goodly number of women and their infants, of female figures reclining on rocks and stones. But then, we are all essentially mineral rendered flesh through the transforming power of sex.
To me, Reclining Figure suggests the Blue Nude by Henri Matisse. Moore would have seen the work of Matisse, Gaugin and Picasso while in Paris. By the 1920s, French artists had been heavily influenced by ‘primitive art’, that is, the work of non-European artists and craftsmen, particularly tribal art. In the ‘body cultures’ of the Mayans in particular, life hinged around sex and religion. Artefacts like masks and statues were often used in ritual magic to induce healing, reproduction and guarantee good hunting.
Much has been written on Moore’s mother and child groups, no doubt ‘corrupted’ by the post-Freudian world in which we live. But I like to think, along with Gombrich, that he simply ‘found’ the organic forms in the lumps of mineral with which he worked. The Mother and Child section of the exhibition contains a number of these. Mother and Child (1930) is particularly sweet. The face of the child, a baby, peers at us from its medium of Ancaster stone. For a moment, you long for the goblin face to come to life until you realise that a flesh-and-blood baby would simply grow and harden into an adult, its charm lost forever. The works of the Modernism area date from the 1930s, works I would describe here as thoughts in stone (but also wood and on paper.) where Moore is exploring the landscape of Britain.
Two Forms(1936) consists of two, upright almost Brancusi-like sculptures in Hornton stone, putting me in mind of Stonehenge, and other prehistoric places. Chris Stephens pointed out Sculpture (1937) which he describes as a female breast turned into a quasi-religious icon. It was in the 1930s that the work of Moore became increasingly surrealistic and in 1936, he was a founder of the English Surrealist group. But events in the 1940s so knocked upon his life that his work became imbued in an inescapable, dark realism.
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| Henry Moore
Tube Shelter Pespective Liverpool Street Extension 1941 Tate © Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation |
In the Wartime area a selection of watercolour drawings can be seen, the scenes Moore saw when he was an evacuee along with thousands of others in London Underground station in World War Two. Chris Stephens describes, in terms too upsetting to spell out here, the conditions that the evacuees endured and the effect it had upon Moore.
The only thing at all like those shelters that I could think of was the hold of a slave-ship. (Henry Moore)
These are displayed alongside drawings like Miner at Work on the Coalface (1942) and Miner with Lamp (1942). Indeed, in drawings like Tube Shelter Perspective Liverpool Street Extension, the walls of the tunnel do appear to be made of shiny, black anthracite. Once again, Moore had descended into hell, the evacuee experience no doubt triggering off memories of his early years in a mining town, of his time in the trenches. Once again he was able to transform the dark material from the earth into an evocation of humanity. After the war, Moore worked much in bronze, producing images like Mother and Child on Ladderback Chair, 19552, and Rocking Chair, 1950. The final area, simply called Elm, has four works made of Elmwood, including Reclining Figure, 1930 and Reclining Figure: Holes, (1976-8). Moore has stayed faithful to his ethos of working with his material rather than pushing it to the edge. Not for him the virtuoso techniques of Baroque artists like Bernini, who could make marble look like lace – and we are all the better for it. The work of this extraordinary artist and socialist is on display until August 8. I urge you not to miss it.
Mary Phelan, 2010