Art: Maker of Images

(See Cover)

A work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the object it may represent. When a work has this powerful “vitality, we do not connect the word beauty with it. Beauty, in the later Greek or Renaissance sense, is not the aim in my sculpture. —Henry Moore

The studio is a small, skylit shed set amid four tranquil acres of Hertfordshire farm land, an hour north of London. Inside, workbenches are covered with old bones, sticks, water-smoothed pebbles, shells from the English coast and the Riviera sands. On the walls are curious drawings in pencil or in sallow greens, yellows and reds—disturbing, faceless human forms composed of lines, curves, shadows and holes.

Sculptor Henry Moore sits in an aged wicker chair on a crumpled cushion. He is small and compact (5 ft. 7 in., 154 Ibs.), with a high-domed face that is benign yet cragged. Thinning strands of greying hair stretch errantly across his head. From beneath brows that jut at least an inch beyond pale blue eyes, he stares intensely at a small plaster shape held in his left hand. The right hand, thick-wristed and broad, with straight fingers that are surgically muscular, holds a small scalpel. In a few minutes, the chunk of thumb-shaped plaster takes on form.

Form of what? Vague outlines of the female figure flow from beneath the blade. One breast pushes forward from a gently twisted torso. Where the other breast should be, Moore’s scalpel scoops out a smooth crater. The head does not satisfy him.

Reaching for a smaller tool, the sculptor pares the head into an elongated, rectangular appendage, no larger than his thumbnail, perhaps one-twentieth the size of the body instead of nature’s less than one-seventh. He pushes his own head backward and thrusts the piece forward, studying it with a frown. Then he pokes two tiny indentations to make the eyes. One or more such small maquettes, produced between breakfast and a 1 o’clock lunch, may prove the seed for another of the large reclining women or mother figures to which the mind of Henry Moore returns and returns.

Holes & Torsos. Even in its final form, the result would horrify a Michelangelo or, only 50 years ago, a Rodin. But today, Henry Moore’s massive, pinheaded women with gaping holes in their torsos adorn public buildings or parks in a dozen cities and occupy places of honor in 53 museums over most of the world, including 14 in the U.S. At a recent showing in the small city of Galle, Ceylon, a crowd of 10,000 flocked to see his works in three days. A traveling show of 22 Moore pieces and 25 drawings will open next month behind the Iron Curtain in Warsaw.

Fact is that Moore is part of a new outburst of sculptural activity that history has not seen since the Renaissance. As in ancient Rome, where statues gestured along every bare boulevard as the fur-clad Goths came rampaging in, the modern world is heavy with sculpture. Park strollers the world over are familiar with the saber-brandishing, chest-scratching pigeon roosts that glorify individuals. Such images are still being produced, but noticed less. They stand in the long shadow of their forebears, the Greek, Roman and Italian Renaissance masters, who did the same thing probably as well as it can ever be done. Increasingly, park strollers and museumgoers are confronted with strange new forms: distorted shapes that puzzle, pocked half-shapes that depress, weird forms that inexplicably move the viewer; objects made of spikes and pipes and wire, of curled tin, discarded hot-water tanks, or bent typewriters welded into caricatures.

Images for Spirits. For just as the rough Goths made a break from the classical tradition that eventually led to the Gothic style, so modern sculpture has shattered old molds in search of a new spirit. It is not so much concerned with people as with symbol. Its practitioners are not figuremakers but shapers of space. The grandfathers of this new art were savage idol-carvers of Africa, Central America and the South Seas, who did not regard sculpture as representation or the finished product as “beauty.” They were concerned with making images that spirits could inhabit.

The moderns, too, think of sculpture as expressing (and therefore in a sense containing) a certain spirit, although they consider it personal and not supernatural. The first great modern to skindive into the silent, other-worldly realm of savage sculpture was Rumanian-born Constantin Brancusi. He emerged to make some of the most powerful carvings that the 20th century has so far seen. Jacob Epstein, the U.S. expatriate, followed a parallel path for a while, but his essential humanism made him wary of abstraction. Exploring a similar bent but a different source, Julio Gonzalez found in Spain’s harshly medieval ironwork a medium and a technique that foreshadowed many of today’s proliferating sculptor-welders.

These men are gone, but they opened new areas that even now have not been fully explored. But already the new spirit has produced a handful of sculptors who, along with Henry Moore, can be ranked as modern masters. As a group, the great living sculptors are no group. Each seems to yell, after the manner of impulsive children: “Look at me!” It is never “Look at us!” Their works have no obvious common denominator; they cannot be lumped, as the anonymous masters of Gothic or Romanesque sculpture are lumped, under the label of a school or a style.

Pablo Picasso, 77, whom most people think of as a painter, is quite possibly the most original sculptor in history. Not content with carving and modeling, Picasso sculpts by a third method: combining. He will make a bull’s head out of a bicycle seat, with handle bars for horns, or a pregnant goat from a palm branch (for the back), a wicker basket (for the belly) and flowerpot udders, or a monstrous monkey, using a toy automobile for a head, a beach ball for a body. Cast in bronze, the results are more invigorating than inspiring, but they can help anyone to see better into the physical world.

Jacques Lipchitz, 68, did for sculpture what the cubists did for painting: he broke up forms into multifaceted geometry. But the cubist method seemed to him to stop, ultimately, at crystallization. Accordingly, he decided “from the crystal to build a man, a woman, a child.” This tension between geometric and biological forms is what has most distinguished his work ever since. It makes him one of the most admired and least understood sculptors, for Lipchitz’ geometric parings and biomorphic bulgings combine to give a brutal and confused effect, like that of a life-and-death struggle in a gunny sack.

Alberto Giacometti, 57, is a hungry sort of spaceman who eats away the forms he makes, leaving space supreme. “I see reality life size,” he once remarked, “just as you do.” But his portraits got smaller and smaller. He would carry them in his pockets, like peanuts, to the Paris cafes, and crush them with a squeeze. After World War II, Giacometti suddenly began producing tall, straw-thin stick men reminiscent of ancient Sardinian bronzes. His sculptures can be seen almost all the way around and dominate space instead of filling it. These new figures were universally acclaimed, but Giacometti went on destroying most of them. For the past year he has finished nothing.

Giacomo Manzu, 50, is the great modern throwback to the Renaissance. Trained as an ornamental plasterer and raised among the Renaissance sculptures of his native Italy, Manzu loves the old. His famed Cardinals are still as shellfish in their enclosing robes and miters, but Manzu himself denies that they are conservative—he calls them “my abstractions.”

Alexander Colder, 61, made sculpture move. Thirty-one years ago, in Paris, he started stringing cards of various colors on a coat-hanger form and let them dangle and twirl. Finally, Calder settled on free forms, flying leaflike on the ends of metal branches strung from wire. “Mobiles” were born, and their cheerful bobbing and spinning helped many an observer find and appreciate other motions in nature. To turn from a pond or a tree tossing in the wind to look at an outdoor Calder, and then back again, can be one of the most rewarding experiences in modern art.

David Smith, 53, is the best of the living “ironmongers.” His raw, openwork constructions of iron, silver and stainless steel stem from Spanish ironwork by way of Gonzalez, but they have a peculiarly American urgency and, so to speak, a questioning emptiness. Smith is the idol of young American sculptor-welders, who find that they can follow his lead on a large scale without too great expense (a big cast-bronze monument may cost $50,000 to erect; a welded steel one as little as $500). Smith stays more inventive than any of his imitators.

Solitary Man. Moore himself has blazed a trail without raising an army of followers; he has created a style without founding a school. He stands alone, as solitary as his bronze image (see color) rising above a lonely Scottish moor, as unique as one of his strong and sweepingly molded figures of wood or stone, recognizable yet unfamiliar, warm yet discomfiting, partly abstract and groping for answers to the mystery: What is man?

Moore pauses when talking about sculpture, searching for words as if for chisels. “If an artist tries consciously to do something to others,” he says, “it is to stretch their eyes, their thoughts, to something they would not see or feel if the artist had not done it.”To do this, he has to stretch his own first. When he succeeds, an artist enriches that side of life that makes us different from animals. You don’t know how it’s done, yet it’s not an accident.”

From Sooted Shadows. Coal Miner Raymond Moore was 50 and his wife Mary was 40 when their son Henry was born on July 30, 1898, in Castleford. There is something in the Yorkshire country, with its brooding hills and its sooted shadows, that brings out the digger and molder in a man, and by the age of ten Moore knew he would be a sculptor. Their miner’s home was poor and crowded—Henry was the seventh of eight children. Father Moore was a fair but stern man. Says son Henry: “He was the complete Victorian father, aloof, spoiled like all of them in those days. No one could sit in his particular chair. But though he was not outwardly soft, he had a real concern and love and ambition for us. Particularly for his sons.” He wanted Henry to become a schoolteacher, like his older brother Raymond and sister Mary.

But it was Moore’s mother who dominated his boyhood. “She was absolutely feminine, womanly, motherly. She had eight children and lost only two. She was an absolutely indefatigable mother. Her day would sometimes begin at 4:30 in the morning, when father was on early shift at the mine, and it would end in the night some time. Never can I remember her resting, except that once in a while she would be bothered by a sort of rheumatism. ‘Oh, Henry lad. This shoulder is giving me gyp today,’ she’d say, and ask me to rub the aching place with some oils she’d evolved herself.”

In Moore’s main studio, about 100 yards from his home in the small hamlet of Perry Green, there stands a recently completed bronze figure of a woman, her belly distended with an unborn child that could almost be moving, her neck and her back strained so that the bones and ligaments stand out. “As I was making that figure,” says Henry Moore, “I was rubbing my mother’s shoulder again. She was constantly in my mind. Those moments all become a part of the sculpture.”

Most of Moore’s works have been of woman or woman with child. Occasionally there have been men in “family groups.” “But the man has been there mostly because you can’t have a family without a man,” says Moore. “He is there mostly as an observer.” He reflects on a point on which he has plainly reflected before. “There’s no doubt I’ve had what Freud would call a mother complex.”

Vision & Hope. Moore followed his father’s wish and became a teacher, but World War I liberated him. He joined the 15th London Regiment, put in a long stretch of monotony in France that culminated in a surrealistic burst of four days’ combat at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917. He was gassed and invalided. Instead of returning to teaching at war’s end. he took an ex-soldier’s educational grant and enrolled in the School of Art at Leeds.

There, in the library he discovered Roger Fry’s Vision and Design, with its contention that there was more power and freedom of form in the sculpture of African savages than in most “civilized” art. The idea struck Moore’s imagination as sharply as a chisel striking stone. After two years at Leeds, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London and discovered the primitive sculpture in the British Museum. “I was in a daze of excitement. I would literally float home on the top of an open-deck bus at the end of each visit.” He was affected by all-Egyptian, Sumerian. Etruscan, archaic Greek, Norman, Romanesque, and especially by the art of ancient Mexico. One of his first reclining women (1929) is an unabashed descendant of the ancient Mayan Chac-Mool, which Moore saw only as an illustration in a German magazine at the British Museum.

So entranced was he with the primitive and the preclassical that Moore balked momentarily when offered a Royal College of Art traveling scholarship to Italy in 1925. “The Renaissance was what I was trying to get away from.” But he went. Once there, he could not, would not shut his eyes, was thrilled to see how different were the real masterpieces of the Renaissance from the plaster copies he had studied in Leeds.

For six months after returning from Italy, Moore was miserable. “That exposure stirred up a violent conflict with my previous ideals. I found myself helpless and unable to work.” On one side was the primitive’s rude power, on the other the Renaissance’s calculated sophistication. He scuffed along with a two-day-a-week job teaching sculpture at the Royal College. Only when he returned to studying the primitives at the British Museum could he gradually begin to work again.

Book in Hand. It was then that he met Irina Radetzky, an Austro-Russian who was studying painting at the college. Moore was then 31 and she 21. Irina gave up her painting (“And she could have been a fine painter,” says Moore) to become Moore’s wife. Their small house and studio in London’s Hampstead cost $650 of Moore’s yearly $1,100 teaching income. Occasional sales of sculpture, gifts of random blocks of stone or carvable logs from friends helped ends to meet. Moore set a goal of 30 pieces a year, and Irina tried to keep him to it. Some days he would lag, and she, hearing no sound from the studio, would ask, “What are you doing?” “Thinking,” Moore would reply. After that dodge wore out, Moore, when the urge was not in him, would read a book with one hand and with the other pound on a block with hammer or chisel to give the pretense of working.

For an artist, there was much in the air of those times. Lipchitz was experimenting with his “bronze transparents.” Gonzales with his spiky metal abstractions—adventures that, while they left the vast public admiring Meissen figurines or Rodin’s Thinker, had the art world in a swirl of healthy controversy. This heady atmosphere fired Moore’s imagination, helped him grow away from the blocky, derivative primitivism of his work in the 1920s. Among his elders, Moore particularly admits an obligation to Constantin Brancusi. “Since Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds —all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It was Brancusi’s special mission to get rid of this overgrowth and to make us once more shape conscious.”

With an obsessiveness that has not wavered since, Moore concentrated on the organic ripeness that suggests, even in his most abstract or most surrealism-tinged moments, the human body. Early “compositions” made of two or three carefully placed objects were designed to make the space between them a part of the whole. Constructions of smooth-rounded wood and string carried this further, suggesting half-human harps and lyres built to play silently for the eyes and mind. Finally, “the search that is discovery” led Moore to the hole.

Outraging nature, Moore’s holes drove right through his bodies. “At first holes were made for their own sakes,” says Moore, “because I was trying to become conscious of spaces in sculpture. I made the hole have a shape in its own right; the solid body was encroached upon, eaten into, and sometimes the form was only the shell.”

The hole as such was not by any means a Moore invention. The primitives had used it. Picasso. Archipenko and others had been experimenting with it. Moore’s contribution came in his single-minded conception of the hole as a tunneling into material to carry the eye into and through and around, and to bring the inside of the work out to view.

“The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation,” he wrote. “The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is possible. The mystery of the hole—the mysterious fascination of caves in hillsides and cliffs.”

This near ecstasy over the uses of the visible invisible demonstrates how important to Moore was his discovery of its potentialities. But today he avoids the word hole. “I have attempted to make the forms and the spaces [not holes] inseparable, neither being more important than the other,” he insists. In many late works he has all but abandoned the hole. But through those first apertures Moore traveled like Alice through her rabbit burrow into a most fertile wonderland of sculptural invention.

Brooding Presence. The results were not beautiful in the simple sense. Few Moore works are, and Moore makes no apologies. “Most people wouldn’t say that a bulldog or a bull is beautiful in the sense that they would say a gazelle is beautiful or a deer,” he explains. “But a bulldog, or a bull, or a rhinoceros has a terrific force in him, a strength that even if you don’t immediately realize it, you come to recognize as beautiful and important. I find a bull much more beautiful than a frisking lamb, or a fleshy beechtree trunk more beautiful than an orchid.”

Beautiful or not, his works took on a brooding presence, seemed inhabited by a nameless spirit in a way that a savage artist would recognize. The swelling curves of a woman also suggested the surge of a hillside, the texture of water-shaped stones. The figures swallowed the light here, emitted it there, and a viewer walked away feeling that he had seen stone or wood or bronze touched with life.

World War II brought him a special kind of recognition he never aspired to, when he went down into London’s underground as a war artist to do a series of air-raid “shelter drawings.” These, unique in their shrouded, sallow-hued style, conveyed with Dantean impact the spectacle of humanity huddled in refuge, yet fated to stir again, to live and to work on. Londoners, who would have blanched at the sight of his statues, recognized themselves in his swaddled figures, and hailed him as one of their own.

Out of Limbo. Since then, none of the superficial necessities or reasonable rewards of life have eluded Sculptor Moore. Always a good businessman, Moore is selling as fast as he cares to produce, at prices ranging from about $1,000 for foot-long figures to about $15,000 for each of five bronze casts being made of his UNESCO working model. He has a new car (a Rover) in the garage, a secretary to handle his correspondence, and a 13-year-old daughter, Mary, that he dotes on.

This spring he built a second greenhouse to indulge his wife’s horticultural hobby. He is content to live out his life in the nonbohemian tranquillity of his Hertfordshire home, with only an array inside of small Henry Moore statues and Irina Moore’s fine collection of primitive sculpture to show that it is the place of an unconventional family. He also has the satisfaction of knowing that his own breakthrough has opened the way to public acceptance for a whole generation of radical young British sculptors, topped by such bright new talents as Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, although they follow conceptions far different from Moore’s own. Says a London art dealer: “It is not a Renaissance in British sculpture. It’s a naissance, because before Moore there was almost none.”

Rodin Had 30. Moore is in the enviable position of being able now to refuse commissions as he pleases and to work only on what intrigues him. In recent years, he has found a new fascination in what he had scorned in his youth—the intricate drapery of classical Greece. Currently, he is occupied with three larger-than-life reliefs, first worked out in miniature and now being shaped in plaster in one of his two large studios set away from his house. For the routine modelmaking and preliminary shaping, he has two assistants, students who work for a year or two at modest pay to learn what they can from a master and then gooff to continue studies or try on their own. “Rodin had 30 assistants,” Moore is quick to point out. For the moment, he is preoccupied with pieces for the outdoors. “Sculpture is an art of the open air,” he believes. “Daylight, sunlight is necessary to it. I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in or on the most beautiful building I know.”

In slacks, sandals, open-throated sports shirt, he may loaf in the garden during nonworking intervals; if it is Sunday, he will stroll to the village pub (The Hoops) for a half-pint of bitter. More often of an afternoon, he will show a visitor about his property, explaining sculptured works in a soft, eager voice almost denuded of its Yorkshire burr, describing with a loving caress along a bronze flank why it takes two or three weeks of rubbing, gouging, sanding and polishing to finish a freshly cast figure: “It’s the putting on of skin.” In a corner of the studio is the figure whose making reminded him of the days he rubbed his mother’s aching shoulder.

Why the odd-shaped, minuscule head on a figure that is otherwise so real? “Do people today find it odd that the figures in Chartres have bodies made of little more than straight sticks?” he asks. “Michelangelo’s heads would sometimes go ten or more times into his bodies. This is the head I made when I did the figure. I wondered about it. And experimented. I removed this head and replaced it with one that was more representational. It didn’t work. This head is right for this figure.” He adds defensively: “Some people have said I make the head unimportant. This is just not so. Because I think the head is the most important, I use the head to give scale to the rest of a figure. If one can give the human meaning of a head without using eyelashes, nostrils and lips, just reduce it to a simplicity—the angle at which it is poised to the neck, say—then by making it small, one can give a monumentality to the rest of the figure that cannot otherwise be given.”

After the Fact. Having made his defense, Moore confesses that the finished piece under discussion displeases him. “It is simply too anecdotal, too sentimental,” he says, and moves in the studio to a nearby figure, a more distorted yet far more powerful version of the same theme (see second color page, lower right). A woman almost bursting with the life of a new child? An earth bursting with spring? A moment swollen with the pain and hope of living? Were these what he was trying to convey in the figure?

“Everything explained about a work of art, including what the artist himself says, is likely to be explanation after the fact,” says Moore. “To the extent that one has a rough notion, common sense, a craft, an ability to work out a plan, a work, of course, is plotted in advance. But why it comes out that way, and what it is intended to convey, becomes clear as it is being done, or after it is finished.”

Moore recalls how he began his 1953 figure of a maimed warrior. “One day I found a small smooth stone about an inch long. It reminded me of a leg, an amputated leg. I couldn’t quite conceive of a woman losing a leg. It had to be a man’s leg. So I began to build a torso onto the shape of that stone. It was not until I had shaped quite a bit that I knew I was shaping a maimed warrior.”

The Human Is Basic. As a young man, Moore dismissed or disdained enough of his predecessors and peers to learn not to be bothered by the fact that today many young sculptors disdain his course and style and think the future of sculpture lies in other directions. He has enjoyed too fat a share of art critics’ praise to feel more than fleeting impatience when some critics accuse him of timidly narrowing his subject matter, or tending too far to the humanistic.

“I cannot imagine I’d ever become uninterested in the shape of the human form, the form of woman in particular,” he says, when asked why he does not branch out to other subject matter. “I cannot see how I am ever going to drop it, to switch away from something so fundamental. That is the one basic that makes me a sculptor. I interpret everything through the human shape.” As for the current preoccupation of sculptors with the geometric and the welding torch, Moore is interested but not beguiled: “I think that the most ‘alive’ painting and sculpture will eventually go more humanist, though at present there are more ‘abstract’ artists than ever.”

Moore candidly hopes that he has produced a few works that can stand as masterpieces—perhaps four or five, perhaps fewer, perhaps more. But perfection is elusive. Says he: “I am obsessed by the desire to produce something that I know is exactly as I intended it, that is, a piece of nature. But the farther you go on, the more distant the horizon becomes, the more there is to be ventured and to be done. If one lived three lifetimes, it would not be enough.”

But in an age that has no agreed ideals of beauty or indeed of aims, Henry Moore’s looming women and hollowed men have an authority that forces respect. For like the huge stone heads of Easter Island or the Mayan temple carvings of ancient Mexico, they are not representations but presences, more live themselves than like anything else. Future generations may admire such works or reject them. But they cannot ignore them, for they have a life of their own.