Art: SCULPTURE OUTSIDE

PAINTING is an illusionistic art, a substitute for reality, and should be seen indoors,” says Britain’s famed Sculptor Henry Moore. “Sculpture can be at home out of doors because it is real, real as a tree.”

Suiting action to words, Henry Moore works in the open and keeps his works out of doors. At 59, Moore is the first native-born British sculptor ever to achieve so exalted an international reputation.* To his white-walled, red-roofed house on the outskirts of Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, about 30 miles north of London, come visitors of all nations on pilgrimage. They are led down a garden path past herbaceous borders and neat rows of vegetables to emerge suddenly in an open field. Against this lush background stand some weather-beaten perennials (opposite), Moore’s abstractions, scooped-out females, spatulate King and Queen, draped Reclining Figure.*

Moore keeps his figures in the field because he believes that “daylight, sunlight is necessary to sculpture, and for me its best setting and complement is nature.” He fully realizes that some open-air sites are wrong for some sculptures, e.g., a windswept hilltop for a realistic statue of a naked adolescent girl. But he likes to place his work “with room to stretch the eye beyond,” seeing it in relation to sky and trees, on murky days, in summer sunshine and snow, surrounded by space, air and light. “Indoors,” he says, “one can put a piece of sculpture under a flattering light and kid oneself that what only half exists is already there, but a sculpture almost fails to exist under the diffused light of the open if it isn’t fully conceived in the round.”

Hard by Moore’s field is Moore’s simple whitewashed studio where he works on an open veranda under a transparent roof that keeps him from being rained out. Last week he was chipping away at a huge chunk of dazzling white plaster against the deep green grass and bright blue sky. It was the working model for the 30-ton marble reclining figure of a woman that will be placed in front of the UNESCO building in Paris. It will be completed next year.

With increasing commissions from commercial and industrial firms and public institutions to do sculpture for a variety of business and public buildings, Moore, along with other sculptors, has got an increasing amount of work, filling his schedule for years ahead. That, too, is sculpture in the open, with figures fronting buildings, fitting into architectural spaces, giving relief to severe simplicity, rigorous lines, unrelenting material. Though the rewards of this work are enormous, Moore’s first love is still nature. Says he: “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.”

* Sir Jacob Epstein was born in Manhattan.

*Made for the terrace of the TIME-LIFE Building in London, the original cast of Reclining Figure is known there as The Tired Researcher.