Art
Bone idle
John McEwen
It can have escaped no-one's attention that this is the year of Henry Moore's eightieth birthday. His sculptures glimmer through the trees of Kensington Gardens, his face stares at us from newspaper pages and magazine covers. Exhibitions of his work can be seen at the Tate (`The Drawings of Henry Moore' and 'The Henry Moore Gift' till 28 August); the Serpentine Gallery and Kensington Gardens ('Henry Moore at the Serpentine', recent carvings and bronzes and a selection of maquettes and natural objects from his studio, till 8 October); Fischer Fine Art (`Henry Moore the Carver', till the end of August); Curwen Gallery (graphic work, till 31 July); and recent photographs of Moore by his 'official' photographer Errol Jackson, at the Camden Arts Centre (19 July —9 August). The three institutional shows are glossily catalogued, with prefaces by John Russell and David Sylvester and, in the case of the drawings, a stupendous piece of annotation by Dr Alan Wilkinson. There is nothing to do but to grin and bear it, because casting a cold eye over the objects of all this adulation is a dispiriting business.
What immediately strikes one is the lack of development, the lack of intellectual engagement. Moore speaks often of his admiration for 'humanism', that old stand-by of the conventional aesthetic that has held sway in England throughout the modern period, and at eighty he still remains as blissfully unaware of the implications of Modernism, as this empiricist stand suggests. His impulse has been worldly, not intellectual, ambition: 'When I was about eleven, I heard a story in Sunday school one day about Michelangelo. The moral of it escaped me; what I retained was the notion that he was esteemed as the greatest sculptor who ever lived. An unremarkable bit of information, perhaps, but enough to move me to decide then and there to be a sculptor myself.' Alas, as this makes painfully clear, it really has been as simple as that. A meeting with Ramsay MacDonald, then Prime Minister, seems to have clinched it. 'At first I was petrified. But you know, with all due respect to the man, he turned out to be a very dull conversationalist. I found myself quite bored. I figured if he's the Prime Minister, I might just be something of a good bet to be an important sculptor myself.' The lesson apparently was that you did not have to be clever to be successful, the intellectual side could be abandoned.
making to Paris at the time. They are studied and conventional life-drawings that slowly come under the primitivist influence of Epstein. Epstein was much taken with Moore's exhibition of 1931, and certainly the earth-mother carving, 'Mother and Child', of that period, on view at Fischer, has an innocence and immediacy he was never to surpass. The following years witnessed considerable intellectual activity in London with the arrival of artists politically exiled by the fascist state of affairs in Europe. Surrealism arrived at last. The problems of the art of the day, impinged upon Moore for the first and last time. He was forced to think and experiment. Characteristically he never committed himself to Surrealism, but its influence spurred him into making his most daring fragmentation of human form, 'Four Piece Composition', 1934 (part of the 'The Henry Moore Gift' at the Tate) and certainly his most famous drawing 'Crowd Looking at a Tied-up Ojbect', 1942. In the main his work since then has returned to the representation of modernish looking abstract forms in nature — rocks and, particularly, bones. He has literally been bone idle.
The last works on view, sculptures in Kensington Gardens and the most recent drawings at the Tate, show the dangers of such self-absorption in all their shallow detail. The fake heroics of his gigantic bones and triumphal arches, the abject lack of curiosity and quality in the representational drawings of his last years is breathtaking. The price of relying on Yorkshire horsesense, of thinking only of the end and not the means, are grotesquely revealed. So how, you may ask, has he achieved the astonishing success he has, even allowing for his age and indisputable energy? The answer is simple. He fitted the bill. For many years he has been the favourite of that arch-enemy of Modernism and greatest proponent of, in his own words at the end of Civilisation, 'stick-in-mud' attitudes, Lord Clark. A friendship Clark privately acknowledged at the end of the programme by delivering his final words with one arm draped around another of Moore's works currently on view (at Fischer), the 1932 'Composition'. Moore's amorphous works are the perfect sculptural expression of Clark's 'humanism', and by extension the prevailing mood of twentieth century English culture. And what could be more appropriate as an expression of the political decline which that culture has nurtured than a little of picked-clean bones?
Previous page
