Henry Moore at Tate Britain
until 8 August
Pictured: Mother and Child, 1924-25
A few words about this lovely retrospective. Before entering, I didn’t know Henry Moore beyond his iconic larger works - scattered across the landscape gardens and sculpture parks of my childhood memories - so this was a revealing education.
In chronological procession, across seven rooms, we wind through Moore’s working life.
His early work, such as the Mother and Child above, is wonderfully primitive - staring eyes, strong arms - and brings to the surface core, primal emotions that stay throughout the exhibition.
“Some of those revelations of sculptural form that alter a man’s life have come to me in the dark, crowded corners of The British Museum.”
The forms become slowly softer and Moore’s base poses are fully realised - the reclining female figure, and the mother and child.
“The fullness of form, the tautness of form, all these things are connected with life, and life is sex.”
Many of these representations have a dream like quality, and lead directly to the abstraction that enters his work in the 1930s. These erotic, sensual forms, occasionally sporting masons glyphs, are simultaneously familiar and alien.
We enter a period of deconstruction with the sculptural forms stripped back to their elemental forms. Many works draw our focus to the void rather than the solid parts - a hole in the heart or womb of the abstracted subject. This concept of the violated body returns in later works.
In a dark room the exhibition focuses on the bleak period of the Second World War, when Moore was an official war artist. The bleak, charcoal depictions of skeletal Londoners sheltering in the tube are rough and harrowing.
“If one had to describe what hell might be like, this would be it.”
“The only thing at all like those shelters that I could thing of was the hold of a slave ship.”
Post-war, Moore’s work becomes more animal and broken. Now the child is bawling, and turned against from their mother. Form is distorted. Not mutated but mutilated by fellow man. Reclining figures are no longer relaxed and languid, but forced to the ground in fear. The Warrior with Shield is typical - amputated and defenceless he awaits a coup de grâce.
In the final room we see several large reclining figures, this time from raw and open grained Dutch Elm. New languid life springs from the dead trees.
Overall a really well constructed and educational exhibition. Narrative in art is really important to me, and Henry Moore has it in spades.
(Sorry for the rambling. I’ve set myself a goal of posting some longer pieces, with the aim of improving my writing, a skill that I’ve never mastered.)
