Maximal Moore
ART BRYAN ROBERTSON
The assembly of sculpture by Henry Moore at the Tate, staged as a tribute on his seventieth birthday, is a stirring sight in its concentration and power. Selected for the Arts Council by David Sylvester, with discretion as well as breadth, it is most tactfully installed by Michael Braun. But the cries of 'fresh revelation' and the 'need for a new evaluation' of Moore's work in the light of this splendid show, are in my view misplaced. It is those critics now piously bleating in praise whose perception and standards require reassessment: Moore's strengths have always been there and the show does not disclose anything that was not already apparent.
The occasion itself shines with brilliance and authority. What might have been a constrict- ingly solemn moment is, instead, a vigorous indication of work in progress: there is no sign of any slackening in Moore's creative tension and we are left with the strongest sense of the present and an already loaded future. This is not, of course, to say that earlier works do not make their presence felt, for practically everything that followed was clearly stated in the work of the 'thirties; but the show refuses to rest as a memorial.
The specific range of Moore's ideas has always been wider than is generally allowed. Its common denominator is mortality, the erosion of time, and an odd mixture of northern pessimism, grim and harsh, with a more classically southern infiltration of stoicism. Formally the work is wholly northern: the sudden appearance of one of Matisse's marvel- lous bronze reclining nudes in this gathering of Moore's would be like the eruption of a worshipper of the Apollo of Veli into the inner circle at Stonehenge. But the coldness in Moore, like that in Norman tomb effigies, has its own passion and the work breaks through into warmth often, if unpredictably, with the reclining figures, and with odd-ball inventions like the Three Part Object in which a rough sexuality has devoured the entire construction.
I believe that, from the mid-'fifties onwards, Moore's work has got better and better by getting back into the tougher abstract mood of the 'thirties, and that it was the much-lauded wartime phase of tube shelterers and family groups, flaring into a belated reanimation with the warriors of the 'fifties, which was something of a distraction from Moore's essential path. The war adversely affected so many careers, so much was retarded or con- fused, throughout a whole decade, for an un- fortunate generation. Moore certainly made something of the war but, at the risk of sound- ing like a national traitor, I have to record that for me these works are of far less formal interest than other aspects of Moore's evolution, and the same goes for the academic exercises in drapery and massive limbs weighing heavily on Steps, which came later. It seems that Moore's moment for radical departure after the war came with the meaty insignia for the Time-Life decoration of 1952, following the baleful helmet heads, in another aesthetic area altogether, of 1950. One of the culminating moments, subsequently, is to be found in the famous Glenkiln Cross and its two attendant figures of 1955. One of the criticisms levelled at Moore has been some kind of equation of his work with the spirit, if not some of the props, of Wagner and with an accompanying high minded rhetoric which has no relevance for our period. I don't understand this at all : Tolkien is nearer Wagner than Moore, if you like, but to con- fuse the mood and formality of this sculpture with the cardboard world of Wagner's music- dramas is hopelessly unperceptive. Two other criticisms of Moore, equally preposterous, must cause the artist some wry amusement these days. One of our younger sculptors, m ho in earlier day s poured scorn on Moore (as on Hepworth) for employing assistants and getting most of the laborious work done by remote control, has now made minor history by be- coming perhaps the first sculptor in modern history to have a large and presumably im- portant work placed in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York— a sculpture which he has never seen.
The last criticism is almost the silliest: that Moore, in keeping to the traditional materials of wood, stone or bronze, became a victim of the 'truth-to-materials' creed of an earlier generation. But what about all this 'anonymous surface' and 'flat colour' sculpture in painted steel or moulded fibreglass, from which all trace of a positive 'material' must be sup- pressed. What about this new, relentless ortho- doxy? The answer is that good artists always remain true to the medium, the materials can take care of themselves; and Moore has always achieved this truth: none of his sculptures could be paintings, for instance, whilst a few recent colour jobs might perhaps be better aau! two dimensional images, as paintings; their disruption of space being so very minimal. . . .
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