Tuesday 8 November 2011
The Hirsts, the Koonses and the Emins may hog the headlines, but no artist is as globally conspicuous as Henry Moore.
Across the world – from Singapore to Stevenage, from Bolton to Buenos Aires – his bulbous, abstracted figures and bony boulder forms reside in plazas, foyers and civic spaces, acting as a soothingly organic counterpoint to the angularity of innumerable new buildings, while at the same time expressing reassuringly universal values associated with motherhood, humanity and nature.
The son a Yorkshire colliery worker and one of eight children, Moore never forgot his working class roots. From the first TV documentary made about his work in 1951 up until his death in 1986, vigorously promoted as the acceptable, down-to-earth face of British contemporary art both at home and abroad. His series of Shelter Drawings made on the London Underground between 1940 and 1941 had become one of the defining images of World War II. Later, his giant undulating ladies were chosen to recline on the capital’s newly built South Bank at the post-war Festival of Britain, as well as outside both the United Nations in New York and UNESCO’s Parisian headquarters. Moore’s role as Britain’s aesthetic ambassador even continued posthumously, most notably when a major exhibition of his sculpture toured several cities in China in 2000, during an especially delicate period of trade negotiations.
Yet this is only part of the story. Alongside the image of Moore as an avuncular national treasure is another Henry Moore, who was the maker of radical, uncompromising and often highly disquieting work, which is currently striking an increasingly sympathetic chord with many of today’s artists.
This is the more complicated Henry Moore who refused a knighthood and who declared that ‘discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.’ It is this Henry Moore who was praised by the likes of Antony Gormley and ‘Shedboatshed’ Turner Prize-winner Simon Starling in the catalogue of last year’s major Tate retrospective, an exhibition which has done much to aid his reassessment by presenting the modest son of Castleford as the maker of work that was more violent, problematic and sexually charged than his ubiquitous public sculpture might suggest.
A deep and very private darkness ran though many of Moore’s distortions, whether his small lead figures of the late Thirties, with their truncated shrieking heads, stretched voids and disconcerting protuberances; his brutally dismembered Fallen Warrior series of the Fifties; or the various hieratic Helmet Heads made between 1940 and 1950; as well as the constant stream of stunning drawings that fed into and emanated from his sculpture throughout his life. For all his talk of method and materials, he was also an artist who at the age of 18 had been gassed in the Battle of Cambrai, had demonstrated against Britain’s policy of non-intervention in the Spanish Civil war, helped organise Britain’s first international exhibition of Surrealism and who had befriended Giacometti and visited Picasso’s studio when the Spanish artist was working on ‘Guernica’. Whether within or beyond the UK Henry Moore was undoubtedly one of the defining artists of the 20th century, and it is good that he is now being appreciated for the right reasons.
Louisa Buck is Contemporary Art Correspondent for The Art Newspaper
Image courtesy of ASSOCIATED PRESS
