Moore land

A farmhouse, its garden and a collection of utilitarian outbuildings at the edge of an English hamlet appear an unlikely hub from which an artist could have practised a decades-long career that featured commissions from global institutions, involved international retrospectives and was the first to be televised in the subject’s lifetime. Yet the 70 acre estate at Perry Green, Hertfordshire where sculptor Henry Moore lived and worked after 1940 was exactly that, and a visit proved something of a revelation for me.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when arriving after a long drive. My knowledge of Moore was minimal and exposure to his pieces limited – a few of his ‘helmet heads’, the stone screen atop the former Time-Life building in Bond Street, London. And in truth my visit was less focused on the man and more about encountering the large works which I knew to be scattered about the grounds; as such, a bright but changeable autumn day seemed perfect. Fortunately, what I found startled and stimulated me in equal measure.

The smaller works are closest to the modern visitor centre, and are a mix of the clearly figurative and the abstract. I was immediately attracted to Falling Warrior from 1957, who writhes, contorts and seems to be both struggling to rise to his feet and reconciling himself to his fate. The poignancy is obvious, helped by the single raised foot and use of the round shield as prop, aid and fulcrum. Obvious, too, is the lineage that Moore’s figure falls within, from the ancient Greek figure in the east pediment of the Temple of Aphaia at Aegina to the Wounded Achilles by Filippo Albacini from the early 19th century.

Also figurative was the excellent King and Queen, made for the Coronation in 1953. A depiction of the Royal couple in blackened bronze, their heads are stylised; hatchet-like, pierced, almost featureless, and with loops representing a crown and a tiara, it seems. Many might find them harsh but I thought there was an undeniable softness and approachability about them, especially the queen, thanks in part to their height (they are both seated on a simple bench that brings them cleverly to eye level with someone standing).

With Three Piece Reclining Figure No.2: Bridge Prop and Square Form with Cut from the 1960s, the interest for me was how they changed as I circled them, with gaps now opening and now closing or shapes revealing themselves from one angle but not another. Dipping into the online guide showed how Moore altered the scales and materials of a given piece, replicating them in stone where the original was in bronze or vice versa for example. Indeed the materiality was fascinating, with objects seemingly of metal in fact proving to be executed in fibre glass, say, something I was to have explained later.

Off to one side of the grounds, a short detour into some more trees allowed me to discover the massive, dome-like bronze Large Figure in a Shelter from the last year of Moore’s life. Like a tremendously enlarged gourd split apart to reveal a seed, itself similarly inflated, this work could be walked into and so inhabited, its curving shards yielding variant views out into the green trees and up to the blue sky.

Deeper into the woods, The Arch (1969) towered over me as high as the tall trees forming the avenue in which it stood. My immediate thought was a giant’s pelvis, the preserved remains of a lost race perhaps, or a henge or tomb they might have erected. Dark, heavy and scored, this last the marks of the cuts into the polystyrene Moore carved the design out of, it too was made more explicable as I continued my exploration. Elsewhere, the very large bronze Large Upright Internal/External Form (1954) opened other elements Moore become associated with – nurturing, flora and fauna. Thus to me it recalled an animal hugging its offspring or a plant budding new life, and again presented different sides of itself depending on the point from which one sees it. Its position, acting as the sentinel of a field with distant horizon, was notable, although it was only after an intervening building was passed that the final surprise was unveiled.

At the furthest boundary of the estate, on a mound Moore built for it, was his Large Reclining Figure, made two years before the sculptor’s death. A startling, sinuous, segmented bronze of considerable scale, it lies on the hill neither dominating nor integrating but certainly being. In fact it also IS a being, one from another world, like an alien in the English landscape or a contemporary sphinx. Not being able to actually come closer to it than the foot of the mound emphasised these readings.

It was time to tour the various studio spaces within which Moore and his assistants crafted these and many, many other works to get some answers.

In one, shelves of found objects – smooth and knobbly flints, animal bones, weathered limbs of trees – provided the first of those. It was clear that the landscape was a powerful force in Moore’s art, whether at the scale of a stone or a hill. Of course this method prompted the question of when or whether found object becomes art, shown by one neat piece of angular yet smoothed wood that proved to be a Venetian gondolier’s oarlock… A member of staff illustrated how he drew inspiration from such items and so was unafraid of altering, combining or dividing them. The continual adjustment of small items, including the maquettes or models he made to test ideas, was also vital and I had already seen how this affected the final work. Maquettes also inform decisions on size and material, allowing the enlargement and transmuting I had also seen. In all of this I was reminded here of Auguste Rodin, whose own approach used exactly this concept of division, addition and enlargement, regularly revisiting previous ideas and doing something different with them.

The commissioning of Modernist sculpture as part of an architectural commission is of particular interest to me, from the small figures of Eric Gill to the large abstracts of Isamu Noguchi, so I enjoyed being educated on Moore’s achievements in this field beyond those I was familiar with (Michael Rosenauer’s Time-Life building, yes, but also Charles Holden’s 55 Broadway tower in Victoria). A new ‘barn’ – actually a state-of-the-art exhibition space – on the estate provided the material here, mostly in the form of photographs given the immense size of most pieces from this phase of Moore’s career.

Different ‘Reclining Figures’ were fashioned from travertine – carved by Moore himself in an Italian quarry over many months – for the UNESCO campus in Paris and bronze for the Lincoln Center in New York in the early Sixties; fifteen years later, Moore collaborated closely with I.M. Pei on works for the architect’s projects in Washington, DC (an extension to the National Gallery) and Dallas (its new City Hall). The linked-to films give a good idea of the scale, scope and significance of Moore’s work at this time.        

That all of this was achieved by a working-class man from a mining family in a small Yorkshire town, whose modest lifestyle at the time of his death belied his status as one of the world’s most famous and successful artists, is extraordinary. One must therefore ask, what lies beneath (a phrase I toyed with for the title of this post)?

The Moore foundation’s concise and well-illustrated biography gives some hints, as do the reminiscences of John Read, a documentary film-maker who recorded periods of Moore’s life on many occasions after that pioneering early study.

Obvious talent, promptly identified and encouraged; unusually (in context) supportive parents; sympathetic teachers; useful social opportunities. Appreciation of the power of the land must have come from the physicality of two worlds, that of his youth (coal, burning or stacked) and teenage years (earth, churned on the Western Front). As a mature artist, the avuncular man seen in the films appeared to have no vices, no spite and no pretentions. And I’d like to think he shared the deep spiritual connection with the land that surfaces repeatedly in our culture, whether through William Blake, Paul Nash, Nigel Kneale or Ben Wheatley.

Regardless, in the fortieth year since his death – and my fortieth since having my eyes opened to visual culture – it was good to finally meet Henry Moore in his landscape.