28 MAY 1977, Page 26

Moore's 'Sheep Piece'

Bryan Robertson I

Moore is just about two years older than the century, and the big bronze 'Sheep Piece' which commands its own presence in the forthcoming Battersea Park exhibition is a recent work, completed in his seventies, so that it also parallels our relation to the historical chronology of this century.

The pen and ink sketch reproduced here was not intended by the artist to be any kind of definitive drawing (it's never been exhibited or published) for this sculpture and it is not a first exploratory drawing of an idea for sculpture, either. Moore's basic imaginative drive, the first impulse, always, is essentially stereognostic so that he feels, thinks, apprehends, in three-dimensional terms. The idea for a sculpture is first expressed threedimensionally" through modelling: a small plaster maquette. This can be fairly exact in definition or it can be lumpy and rough and then refined upon or adjusted later. Sometimes it is cut or carved, when dry, which is why some of Moore's bronzes do not exactly reflect a modelled form.

After the maquette, Moore sometimes makes sketches of this small solid object to see if the transference of the image from three dimensions to two dimensions, or a flat surface, will talk back at him as it were and add something to his sense of the form, or disrupt it in some useful way. The idea for the sculpture came, partly, from Moore watching the barrellike, ineloquent, unsculptural shapes of sheep grazing at the far end of his garden and finding himself involved in the formal challenge of their un-plastic shape.

Like so many of Moore's most typical and powerful works, the result is some kind of unknown, unforeseeable anatomy that is also, in itself, an action. The 'Sheep Piece' has about it a vague suggestion of coupling, or mounting, but most of these works — which exteirl back to the great Glenkiln cross and have even earlier roots in Moore's work — impact the object and the 'action' within a single form.

The twoand three-part figures both extend and disrupt a quite different action connected more with 'landscape: think of the offshore rocks at Etretat rearing up from the water in Monet's paintings, and you may see how Moore tackled the theme of reflective surfaces at the Lincoln Centre (which in this case completed the formthrough mirror-image in, water) before the use of transparent or translucent materials, plexiglass and so on, by younger sculptors.

The 'Sheep Piece' is one of a long series of sculptures which do not aim for the plausibility, the more immediately comprehensible power of the reclining figures or other inventions. It has a rough awkwardness that's intentional: some work of this sort can be disagreeable or alarming in its deliberate equivocation between flesh and bone, and the meaty, biomorphic connotations of a shape that's beyond any known congress. The positive, affirmative relationship with history and tradition that Moore has always retained — so that his awareness of the past is always related to a present obsession, to a new form conceived now — is very much at work in the sculptures of this sort. It comes, again partly, from Moore's deep interest in the Greek sculptural frieze from the Cythnian treasury at Delphi in which strange bulbous fragments of human and animal figures, men and horses, are all that's left after erosion and damage. The frieze from the temple at Bassae in the British Museum is more complete, but gives a sense of what I mean.

Moore's sense of the past is as profound as his feeling for the present. If he pulled everything he made back to some aspect or another of historical tradition, he would have been an academic artist. What he has done, as a reverse process, in sustaining his sense of the past only in relation to the living, changing present, is‘, one of the reasons why he is a gernag,, our greatest artist, and the subject ot, homage this summer from the city 113; Paris: in the Orangerie, outdoors ah through the Tuileries, and in the Bibliotheque Nationale — like the stunning exhibition in 1973 all over and outside the city of Florence, Masaccio, Mantegos' Donatello and Michelangelo mean a to Moore so that Florence was treasured venue for him. Paris will h,e more awkward, and we'll explore this occasion later.