Signs and Silences
Henry Moore : Sculpture and Drawings. Vols.
Hudson, 35s.) The Art Game. By Robert Wraight. (Leslie Frewin, 35s.)
At those years ago (it was May 1931), Epstein introduced the younger sculptor in a note for the l.eicester Galleries catalogue. `Before these works,' he wrote, 'I ponder in silence.' We have changed all that, as witness the bibliographies attached to the second (revised) and third volumes in the sequence Henry Moore: Sculp- ture and Drawings, which take us down to 1964 and to No. 515 in the cumulative itemisation of Moore's sculptural output. The change, in the sense of an international appreciation corn- lelling the better attention of the artist's coun- trymen, is fairly clearly dated by Moore's success (and, let us be just, the British Council's) at the 1948 Venice Biennale. But it is time that some- one `paid tribute to the relative, and golden, silence' of the .Bedford Square printing firm (in particular, the late Eric Gregory), who so splendidly backed their fancy in a pre-war era when coffee-tables were for coffee and art was for foreigners. For it is not only the standards of reproduction, typography and layout for which we should be grateful, though they are still distinctive now that the first venture has been extended to keep pace with the sculptor's own fertility and industry.
It is for letting the work work, restricting the textual addenda to what is essential and valu- able. For example, most of what we need to know about Henry Moore's response to the opportunity virtually withheld until he was past fifty can be derived from the series of open-air photographs of the numinous Standing Figure and the King and Queen on their Scottish moor, from statistics of size and indications of editions of four; or, in the same post-war decade, from the information that the bronze Family Group for a county council school and the stone one for Harlow New Town were both done from moquettes produced earlier, in the private and studio phase of what clamoured to be primarily a public and outdoor art.
It is well known, and of a piece with the Whole character of Moore and his art, that his own contributions to thee record have remained both spare and meaningful. Some of them are set out in this series as 'observations.' Another is' quoted by Mervyn Levy, in the book noticed below, to the effect that Moore's ideas have grown out of the action of working, rather than the other way about. A simple example of this Would be the way in which his exploration turned towards the theme of a wall, and the figures in front of it, after the difficulties of em- bellishing the UNESCO building in Paris with a recumbent figure backed by soaring architec- tural fenestration. There has always been Sir Herbert Read to draw attention to the successive inventions while emphasising the single-minded continuity. His new book on Moore includes as much biographical anecdotage as the subject himself has been inclined to vouchsafe, and as usual it is to the point. The upbringing in a mining town—so much like that of D. H. Law- rence in the environment, so unlike in the effect —yields, among other things, Moore's boyhood sensation of massaging the pain from his mother's back, feeling under his fingers the con- tours of flesh and the structure of bone. Though it is early still, God be thanked, for a definitive biography of the artist, this book must be allowed its authority, and in the choice and quality of the illustrations it is high value. With the new collection of essays it must bring the list of Sir Herbert Read's books near to his dis- tinguished tale of years; but the essays in The Origins of Form in Art are seen by the author as continuing his 'constant search for a social, indeed a biological, principle in art,' and they are characteristically illuminated by his immense reading in otherwise unfamiliar continental fields. If his own services to appreciation, his pregnant murmurings in the silences of art; can possibly be summarised, they seem to mark him off by a primary obsession with the processes of the aesthetic impulse rather than its apparently self- contained products.
With Dr. Haftmann's encyclopaedia of twen- tieth-century painting, the other, more icono- graphical, tradition has flowered in an impressive analytical project which not only encompasses a vast quantity of basic information but comments upon it in a stimulating way. The outlook is uncompromisingly European, but the line of argument conducts us boldly towards the pos- sibly unwelcome prospect of a world culture. For such an expanding universe the plate- volume of the 1961 edition has already had to be completely recast (in the new presentation, beautifully produced but at less than a third of the original price, the two volumes are available —and could be of use—separately). This enables Dr. Haftmann to take in Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, And to explain the slow Atlantic crossing of Dada and its revival in Nouvelle Realisme with a slightly patronising sympathy which is less committed than Sir Herbert Read's last essay (a lecture given at Kassel in Septem- ber 1964) on `The Disintegration of Form in Modern Art.' But perhaps the most devastating remark upon American Pop Art—if there were space to discuss its implications—would be that of its happy champion, Mr. Rublowsky, that 'primarily . . . the school was and is a collec- tors' movement.'
How it can be that and some of the other things claimed on its behalf, here and elsewhere, is a question which hardly disturbs Mr. Rublowsky's euphorii. But one concept does seem to be out: that of the artist framing his sardonic ejaculations and crying all the way to the bank. Over there, we find, he doesn't even cry. The act of pure love with which he has 'encapsulated the vivid American image' looks like the most touching consummation since Orwell wrote the last paragraph of 1984. If it were not for the pictures, we should indeed be left to wallow in a Newspeak which contrives to equate the merchant's approach to his market with an efflorescence of popular culture. But pictures there are: continuously engaging and often exciting photographs by Ken Hayman of the artists, their chosen quotidian material, and their works. Nor is there much to choose, in the way of 'valid impact,' between these three categories. In other words, the artist's concern with what the camera cannot do better has become one more defeated resistance movement. But that is a point for the next copywriter to take up.
Pop Art in England (where surely the name was evolved?) has shown a somewhat different face. In the American book, the face of Miss Shrimpton, unexpectedly gracing one of Mr. Hayman's group photographs, is the only con- cessign. A warm welcome, then, to the new edition of Sir John Rothenstein's academic but very serviceable Introduction to English Paint- ing, revised to admit some of today's eclecticism. With the end of Sir John's fruitful period at the Tate, one can turn back to this book, in the balance of its predilections, as a commentary on his dispatch of that part of the Gallery's function. It happens that in the nature of things there was not much to be done about Constable, who still awaits, moreover, the full modem treat- ment of the 'museum without walls.' In the mean- time, nearly ninety plates, and of a good standard, accompany Mr. Peacock's three essays in thought- ful homage.
Like all anthologies, Mr. Levy's choice of life- drawings from the past two centuries is a per- sonal one, and so is his introduction. Those who skip this in favour of the infinitely browsable pastures that it prefaces will miss some interest- ing professional remarks: e.g., on the poten- tialities of different media. The drawings them- selves offer unexpected pleasures among the familiar ones. They cost less than sixpence apiece, which might interest Mr. Wraight, whose dust-jacket quotes his ringing challenge that 'the art game has become a vast confidence trick.' When was it anything else, and does it matter?
FRANCIS WATSON
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