TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/86/86capmil.7

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 5.8 KB | 106 lines

                                                                                September 15, 1986

The Sentinels of Nurture

Henry Moore:  1898-1986


There is ample room to debate the influence that Henry Moore had
on modern sculpture. But the sheer pervasiveness of his work
is not in doubt. When he died last week at the age of 88 in the
farmhouse where he had lived and worked for more than 40 years,
near the English village of Much Hadham, Henry Moore, C.H.,
O.M., was the best-known sculptor in the world.

His public works in marble and bronze, mainly based on the
human figure, stood, sat and (especially) reclined on their
plinths in cities from London to Chicago, from Melbourne to New
York. No other major artist in the past century, not even
Auguste Rodin, completed as many public commissions as Moore.
 At the height of his fame, from 1960 onward, it seemed that
every mayor, museum director and chairman of the board in the
Western world had simultaneously agreed that a Moore work was
the only possible solution to the problem of how to relieve the
hardness and social tension of new post-Bauhaus buildings with
an organic metaphor, how to dress up a civic space without
commemorating anything in particular. At the same time, people
in the street found that his work spoke to them in a way that
some dull tangle of official I beams could not.

It is also worth remembering, now that everyone takes for
granted the rightness of open landscape as a site for sculpture,
that he did more than any other artist of his time to rekindle
that idea and recover some of its archaic roots. Moore's King
and Queen, 1952-53, gazing out over the stony ocean of Scottish
moors, are the descendants not of 18th century garden sculpture
but of something older, more vital and mysterious:  the chthonic
spirit of place embodied in the dolmens of Carnac or Stonehenge.

No other sculptor's imagination was more manifestly connected
to his past, even to his infancy, than Moore's. Like D.H.
Lawrence, he came from a mining village; his father had labored
in the pit and risen to become an engineer. His mother bore
eight children, and one does not need to be an exegete to
realize that it is to her that his work insistently
refers--those broad-backed, maternal figures, like sentinels,
their bodies expanded into bosses and swells that suggest an
infant's apprehension of the breast, or hollowed into womblike
cavities. The fundamental experience of work that every miner's
boy knew about--that of going down into a cramped, cold and
dangerous darkness to hew at rock--was transcended in Moore's
work as a man: still cutting stone, but in the light, and in the
soothing precinct of his mother's remembered body. What anxiety
was to Giacometti or sexual rage to Picasso, nurture and shelter
were to Moore. His commitment to sculpture as an act of
hollowing, modeling and smoothing the "body" of a single mass
ran counter to the pattern of 20th century sculpture, which was
to construct from disparate parts a shape that did not need to
be felt with the hands, one in which sight preceded touch. (Who
ever wanted to stroke a Gonzalez or a David Smith?)  His impulse
to preserve the traditional values of carving and casting went
back to his Yorkshire childhood.

But nothing comes out of childhood without the formal keys to
unlock it. Where other art was concerned, Moore (like his
lifelong friend and patron Kenneth Clark, who arranged for him
to be an official war artist in World War II and was thus partly
responsible for the sculptor's best-known early work, the
underground-shelter drawings) was a great looker and rememberer.
 Certain works were fundamental to his art. A stone carving of
the Mexican rain-god Chacmool gave him the crankshaft rhythm of
shoulders, waist, pelvis and thighs that would surface in him
own figures from the late '20s on. Cezanne's ponderous and
sculptural Bathers spoke to his own obsessions with the
reclining figure. Archaic sculpture of every kind, especially
Mayan and Aegean, fortified his lifelong interest in totems and
sentinel figures; and then there were Donatello and
Michelangelo, the painted figures of Masaccio and, perhaps most
challenging to him in his maturity, the sculptures of Giovanni
Pisano in Siena and Pisa, not far from the marble quarries at
Forte dei Marmi, where he took to working during the summers.

In short, like all conscientious artists, Moore composed his
own tribunal, that of the great dead from whose silent judgment
there is no appeal. Naturally, his lack of close affinity with
the avant- garde--or even with the idea of avant-gardism--made
him seem like a fuddy-duddy to some younger sculptors,
particularly in the '60s. It might have been otherwise had he
behaved like the Great English Artist people were always making
him to be, but he was utterly without pretension, and his zeal
for public service, as long as it did not get in the way of his
work, was genuine. He was consulted by British Prime Ministers,
from Anthony Eden to Margaret Thatcher, on museum and
art-education policy and never failed to stand up to them on
behalf of younger or less successful artists.

Inevitably, so long a working life entailed a certain amount of
repetition; to the skeptic, the later Moore seemed to be running
a one-man academy of stones and bones. "Less is more, and Moore
is a bore" was what one heard from English art students hip to
Anthony Caro and David Smith, and the sentiment was echoed by
people who had forgotten, or not known, his stubborn efforts to
get modernism a hearing among the art-hating English 30 years
before. All that is over, but the sculpture remains. When the
best of it has been winnowed out--which will take years, for the
oeuvre is huge--its grandeur of formal diction and intimacy of
feeling will leave no doubt at all as to Moore's stature.

--By Robert Hughes