Sculpture
Mooreland
Phillip Bergson
`Henry Moore's 80th Birthday Exhibition' with which the Cartwright Hall, Bradford, has most spectacularly pre-empted the cap ital's celebrations, planned for the summer, marks a further development in the amelio ration of North-South relations. The display of over 220 pieces — of sculpture small, medium, and huge, and of drawings and graphics — is the most extensive showing of Moore's work ever mounted outside London, a significant coup for any gallery and especially appropriate for one in the vicinity of the artist's place of birth and early influences.
The subtle but strenuous campaign has. effected a total `image re-think' in the media, sweeping away the notion of Up North as a living monument to the Dark Ages, a land of potent beers and even rougher drinkers, starved of continental films and menthol cigarettes, served by number twelve touring companies and where the only `private views' are held behind the gasworks (for a largely undiscriminating clientele). Thanks to such acceptable faces of regionalism as Parkinson and Melvyn Bragg, the cultural backwater has been transformed into a nouvelle vague. Even that staid barometer of popular taste, the Hit Parade, has succumbed with Wuthering Heights (an everyday ballad of country folk from Haworth) rapidly followed at the top by a hymn to Lancashire's Lowry and his matchstick men and cats.! should not be a bit surprised if the Black Dyke Mills Band (which is not composed of commonwealth ladies of unusual leanings) were now to enter a version of 'enry Moore b'aht 'at' in the Eurovision Song Contest, and win.
It is a double achievement for the Bradford Gallery to lure so many and so heavily insured works away until 25 June, and to entice journalists and critics from Pleet Street into making the pilgrimage, braving the hazards of travel and British Rail food (and they use the word loosely) to arrive in Bradford's disorientating new Interchange complex, a truly complicated mess of glass thoroughfares resembling a grotesque parody of the Beaubourg Museum in Paris: I have a grim suspicion that out-of-town shoppers could grow old and drop before finding their way out of this wonder of urban planning. Lucky escapers are greeted by the imposing façade of a town hall and campanile copied from Florence and a picturesque collection of Wimpy Bars and ABCs decorously grouped around a central avenue optimistically named Broadway, whence one of the longest and busiest roads in the West Riding leads to Lister Park and Bradford's famous grammar school which had the honour of my attendance for a few years though its most distinguished alumnus is perhaps that blond gentleman David, Hockney. It was his brother Paul, currently the city's youngest Lord Mayor and a Liberal with it,. who had the idea of presenting the exhibition as a birthday tribute. Assisted by the Henry Moore Foundation at Much Hadham and with more than a little help from the Friends of Bradford Art Galleries, his realisation of the project is a rare triumph in an age when the promises of politicians are worth less than the papers they are printed in.
The opening ceremony was an historic occasion, recorded by Yorkshire Television as a commemorative special, and will endure for local posterity as a memorably 'grand do'. Introducing the artist and his work was his friend J. B. Priestley, who at eighty-four shared the resilience of a sculpted piece himself. His address to Moore was touching, deeply felt, and as keenly appreciated. The welter of congratulatory telegrams also invested proceedings with a familiar cordiality. An enormous birthday-cake was wheeled in and some impromptu carving followed to delighted applause.
As the wine and the guests flowed through the galleries, the other objects on display stood out in sober contrast. Outside, the larger figures., principally reclining, adorned the surrounding park, like remnants of a lost civilisation,. or newlylanded harbingers of one yet to be encountered. For an artist who has explored so devotedly the human landscape of the body and its contours it is curious how inhuman his recreations of it seem, and how their 'modernity' belongs to any time but the ipresent.
The exhibition is expertly arranged, the works themselves artfully grouped and illuminated and the excellent catalogue, with high quality reproductions in colour and monochrome at a reasonable price, provides a very informative guide to the show. The comprehensive study of this gives a sense of context, above all, which helps to make more sense of the works that, individually, may startle or annoy. Through the drawings, in pencil, pen and ink, or watercolour, Moore's formal preoccupations can be recognised, and the way he strips down the figure, denuding it of anatomical regularities, becomes a personal approach and not just the jettisoning of representational reproduction in plaster, wood, or bronze. The recurrent motif of Mother and Child, whether secular or overtly religious, can be better understood after viewing the portraits of the Artist's Mother, whose massy presence is almost tangible. The coalface studies chime with childhood in Castleford, a mining community, and the impersonal Helmet Head castings seem meditations after the fact. I do not suggest trite correspbndences or a more sophisticated scheme of symbolism embracing a Yorkshire upbringing and the near abstract sculptures, but it is only by recourse to the kind of lexicon that a major retrospective exhibition represents that any approximation of what the artist may be saying — as opposed to doing — can be grasped. The most casual visitor can gauge how prolific is the talent from the wealth of materials and textures exploited. But it is only by reference to the drawings of the war-time shelters — scenes from the Underground indeed — where the helplessness of the wraithlike figure is most apparent, that a clue emerges as to why the sculpture is so stylised and, in a way, forbidding. The unseeing eyes and silent mouths are black infinities, voids that contain and are contained in us. For all their solidity and smooth-hewn grandeur, the shapes seem the work of one who has looked into the heart of things and found nothing at all. Wuthering Depths, you might say.
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