The Art of Henry Moore
ON Bryher, in the Isles of Scilly, a fognight ago, a doctor and discovered the skull and skeleton of a dolphin, half in the sand. H was excited—and I was, too, as he pointed them out—by certal features of structure and adaptation, ridges of bone curved ba, by powerful muscles, the blow-hole passages curving up to the to of the skull. But both of us, I think, were rationalising our excite ment in the skull, which we really found a curious object, of life an death, and flotsam, and involution of form. We were feeling, an up to a point disguising, a curiosity and interest such as Henry Moor feels in the world's diversity of natural Objects, the forms he enio in order to make his own forms and his own images. Those who look, perhaps a little unwillingly, perhaps a lin' bewildered, perhaps with the irritation which can come, wi bewilderment, from unfamiliarity—those who look through this 191 book of Moore's sculpture and drawings might remember th dolphin. And a good deal else. They might remember to forg —as Mr. Read urges them to do in his introduction—our recen born idea of the Beautiful, and realise ,that the Beautiful is sorn thing which has been put upon art and artists from the outside, ourselves. It is not what the artist, by and large, has worked b The artist is, per se, the curious man, Courbet noticing the trip legs of two wrestlers, Gerard Hopkins being taken for a natural b the gardener because he saw him staring at a piece of glass in th gravel, or Palmer seeing the whole of the art in the grounds in coffee cup. Whatever in one period or another, under one surfa influence or another, the products eventually have been, or boo ever the aims have been put, artists have worked in that way. A Read quotes—and asks the reader and those who look at Moore work to memorise, as " an epitome of the modern movement sculpture "—a statement from Rodin: " By following Nature o obtains everything. When I have a beautiful woman's body as
model, the drawings I make of it also give me pictures of insects, birds and fishes. . . . Genius only comes to those who know how to use their eyes and their intelligence." Cardinal in Moore's sculpture is that this working of the eyes, this staring at the glass in the gravel, or the coffee-grounds, or, with Moore especially, at the dolphin's skull, or the water-hollowed limestone, or the broken hollows of a shell, is much more obvious in the results, in the sculpture, much less concealed behind the work in the privacy of his mind and his notebooks. " Sculpture," says Mr. Read, " is the creation of solid forms which give aesthetic pleasure." I might cavil at " pleasure" and at " aesthetic," which partakes more of the Beautiful than of the Interesting (which, I take it, is Moore's aim); but Mr. Read means that the sculptor is free to make what shapes he likes, to represent what he likes, and liberate himself from the particular kind of representation which too many of us•still think must be sculpture's, or painting's, sine qua non. Looking through the three hundred or so excellent photos of nearly every piece of sculpture by Moore, and of many of his drawings, I would deny that Moore does not represent: he only does not represent in the Beautiful manner of Renaissance dictation, or its semi-scientific, debased fag-end. To those with eyes (and, incidentally, fourteen years' increasing knowledge of Moore's work has cleared my eyes to much that is interesting in the word, from the tension of tree roots to hollows in stone or the clean delicate structure of a mosquito)—to those with eyes, Moore's" following of nature " constantly gives representational hints, it gives hints which start one on the full feelings his sculpture can rouse, with all its niceness of craft, and moving pray of curve and volume and shape and line.
Mr. Read points out the union which Moore contrives between two usually opposed and exclusive notions of art, the " organic " notion of an art deriving from the rounded shapes of life, and the " constructive" notion of an art of mentally contrived geometric shapes ; but there is one thing which I think he over- emphasises and too readily accepts—it is in his statement that " the aim of a sculptor like Henry Moore is to represent his conceptions in the forrus natural to the material he is working in." " Suppose a woman to be made of stone," Mr. Read seems to agree and Moore to say sometimes in his sculpture, " this is what stone, instead of flesh, would make of womanly volumes." Mr. Read nearly allows this to account for what Mr. Morning Dress, R.A., wou'd call Mr. Moore's distortions ; it suggests what, in fact, does seem to occur sometimes—that the sculptor is being bullied by his material. Often the best of Moore's sculpture is far away from common sense appearance or near to it—often the least effective lies in between, when Mr. Moore, in obedience to this dogma, does allow himself to be bullied by stone or wood. Surely stone, or wood, can be made to obey—up to the point of danger at which its nature would be violated?
There, I think, as some of the plates in this fine book recall—the finest, most complete, and most ably prefaced of any book given to a living English artist—there, decidedly, is a weakness in Moore ; and I wish it had been faced by Mr. Read. GEOFFREY GRIGGON.
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