Arts
The public Moore
John McEwen
Henry Moore will be eighty next year, London will be his as the Orangerie is now in Paris. He has become an institution. Moore, OM — the abbreviated honour sounds as natural as an initial and the surname might have been assumed, so Perfectly does it conjure up the neolithic Character of his most familiar work. But all this is quite recent. Well into his sixties Moore was the butt of every art Joke going: birds nested in reclining htl,cies, attendants ran to release children who had got their heads stuck through his holes. One shudders to think what it must have been like for him in the 'thirties, ,When he was in his thirties in England before the War. It would be fair to say that visual art had died here in those Years, at least that is what they say. Nothing much new in London, and nothing outside at all. Of course there was the underground, but publicly and ?fficially there was nothing, least of all !Or a sculptor. Even today Henry Moore Is not an RA! The most famous sculptor England has ever produced and he is not even an honorary member of the most august art institution in the country. That IS probably the best indication of what it Was like in the 'thirties, in England, always in philistine old England of e„(3urse, where artists were the sort of veoPie who wore sandals, and smelled ,a,nd drank a lot, and so on. Too many of
ern were perhaps, but that is England
where Matisse would have been ,trowned on for wearing a suit and Picasso rani' having a chauffeur and saying he was communist. But anyway, things have '-uanged a bit, at least for Henry Moore, cluite suddenly really. This is his entry in Dictionary of Art and Artists, 1960 edition: 'Henry Moore (b. 1898) is the most ..,"1..Inent living British serrri-abstract .c;-uutptor. His drawings of air raid shelters „ring the War and his 'Madonna' in a ureh at Northampton are among his lest-known works, while there is an barlier one on the London Transport ;iiding at St James's Park. He won the 'international Sculpture Prize at Venice in 448 and is represented in London ‘, ate), New York, and other British and American Museums, and has recently a Memorial to the Airborne Forces gt; Arnhem in Holland and for the new uNESCO building in Paris.' ti It is hardly ecstatic, all those qualificath°ns — 'British semi-abstract' — but all at has changed in the intervening seventeen years. Now there is a veritable ,°°re industry, its latest. product the "inst luxurious book yet and certainly the heaviest in weight — Henry Moore: Sculpture and Environment, photographs and text by David Finn, foreword by Kenneth Clark, commentaries by the great man himself: 495 illustrations, seventy-eight in colour and £30 to buy, from Thames and Hudson. The endpapers have Florence in a symbolic blur, a Moore bronze in sharp focus foreground. This is a gargantuan, neolithic yes, presentation of over ninety of his public sculptures round the world, no longer just in England, America, Holland and Paris but Belgium, Sweden, Canada, Switzerland, Israel, Germany, Japan, Australia, Italy, Denmark, Scotland and even Ireland, not once but many times, over ninety times, and this is only the ones• Finn could trace. As Kenneth Clark puts it, `Moore's sculpture has spread around the world in a way that has no equal.' And the jokes have gone. The children do not get their heads stuck any more.
But the present is all that matters and the first thing is to judge the book on its own merits. Finn tells how it all came about — he is lunching with Moore and the wellknown publisher Harry Abrams in New York: How about a book on Henry Moore sculptures around the world?" 1 asked. "With me doing the photography, of course," I added cheerfully. The others laughed. "That's quite an excuse for travelling," Moore remarked.'
Still, he got the job. He also got Moore to write comments on his photographs and Clark to do the introduction. Or someone did. The type is fittingly gigantic for the foreword, and Clark rises to the occasion: David Finn is a' 'photographer of genius', 'greats' fly in all directions, everything is at it should be except in France: 'This book makes one realise that the appeal of Moore's sculpture is almost universal. France, as usual, is an exception; the only Moore in France, that in front of the UNESCO Building in Paris, was put there by an international team of architects and an English secretarygeneral, and its position has since been ruined by rebuilding.' Trust the frogs, but the show at the Orangerie suggests that they too have finally surrendered.. So to the photographs, with no alphabetical order of countries or page numbers to help.
Moore's are a cinch to photograph but the master keeps an eye on things: 'A nice sky. One has to be careful in such photographs that the sky is not what you look at rather than the sculpture.' But in
principle that is how he likes to see the work: 'Here the sculpture is well placed in that you can see it up against the sky.' And detail: 'I like the detail which looks like a vase.' Finn's comments are more prosaic. Moore has always been forthright in his comments and his observations here are no exception — the water reflecting his piece at the Lincoln Centre, New York, is too shallow, the base is too white at Arnhem, dreadful brick in Cologne, the site too cramped in Turin. Undoubtedly if you turn the pages one by one and read Moore's italicised texts — sometimes a few lines, sometimes half a page — you will soon see the pieces through his eyes. You will learn that the position of a sculpture can alter its appearance and that on the whole Moore likes his elemental work to be shown in the most elemental settings, namely on the rough pastures and appropriately, against the moors of Glenkiln in Dumfriesshire. But apart from being more grand, more reverential, more sumptuous in every way, this book offers no real insights that have not been adequately treated elsewhere, notably in the similar though much broader and more revealing study by John Hedgecoe almost a decade ago.
My mind wandered to some words I once heard uttered by Sir Herbert Read: 'The Americans are trying to make David Smith the most famous sculptor in the world, but they are not going to succeed, they are not going to succeed. Moore is.' And Moore is. The Moore industry has seen to that. Alas, Moore himself appears to have hadno qualms about it. More and 'more, bigger and bigger, hollow and yet more hollow monuments have been winched onto the trucks at Much Hadham and shipped off to the four corners of the world, many of them, as David Finn discovered, unnoticed, unappreciated, even undiscovered by the inhabitants of the places they are finally deposited on.
Just through being so successful Moore has done a great service to British art. He has opened the international market to the British. He has inspired a following and given succeeding generations something to pitch against. He has had a surprisingly large number of present British artists of all ages as assistants and, as the Murrays pointed out in their dictionary entry for 1960, he will be remetnbered for his lively work in the 'thirties and his drawing of Londoners entombed by the War. He is unquestionably the richest and most widely known sculptor England has ever produced. But looking at this book one is further persuaded that he has increasingly become the victim of his own success. In case you cannot get to Paris it is worth pointing out that a vast and unexhibited Moore, 'Sheep Piece', will crown the jubilee show of sculpture in Battersea Park, which opens on 2 June.
Previous page
