When the Labour government came to power in May 1997 it launched a cultural offensive. A new Britain was to be projected on to the world. Some of us were reminded of the way Harold Wilson's government caught the winds of swinging London in the mid-1960s and used them to blow out its empty sails. But as Wilson bandwagoned trendiness, he cold shouldered a British artist who was this country's (and perhaps the world's) most successful sculptor of the time, Henry Moore. This seems especially surprising, as Moore came from a classic Labour background-the seventh child of a Yorkshire miner-and by the 1960s had become globally celebrated. True, Moore participated in-and even helped to pioneer -the inflated monumentality of lifeless modernism. But it cannot have been the shallowness of much of Moore's later work which explains his rejection.
It was Margaret Thatcher who put Moore into No. 10. She did not celebrate him publicly, for he was an icon of the "progressive consensus" that she denounced. But she discovered that other European leaders regarded Moore as a figure of prestige. In 1979 Helmut Schmidt oversaw the installation of a Moore outside the Bonn chancellery. In 1985 Fran?ois Mitterrand helicoptered to the home and studio of the then ageing Moore to make him a Commander of the Legion of Honour. The appreciation of these two cultured social democrats encouraged Thatcher to request a copy of a reclining figure for her official residence. There it remains, in the corridor between the famous front door and the cabinet and garden rooms, in an alcove backed by some Moore prints. There Thatcher could show off, if she wanted, a British success story.
What kind of success was it? Despite his early association with Barbara Hepworth, for much of his life Moore's work was modern sculpture, if only because it was lampooned in Punch. More than 30 countries acquired pieces by him for their public collections. In Japan, Australia and Hong Kong, through the middle east and even Bulgaria, across Europe and North America, as well as in Venezuela and Argentina, there are copies of Moore's work. They are often in the open air. It is tempting to suggest that "the sun never sets on Henry Moore." In this sense he was one of the century's greatest artists.
It is surprising that a world sculptor of the mid-20th century should be English, because England had no sculptural tradition of any originality. It is even more surprising that he should have been born into a labour movement notorious for its disinterest in art. A painter of Moore's generation might have looked back to Turner and Hogarth, as well as across to France. In terms of sculpture there were no such reference points. The hitherto "un-British" nature of Moore's medium is especially interesting in view of the proclaimed "Britishness" of his work. So, at the centenary of his birth, it is worth trying to assess the qualities and limitations of Henry Moore as an artist of his time; he may even tell us something about ourselves.
Broadly, there were three overlapping periods to Moore's work. The first takes us from the time he emerged as an avant-garde carver committed to "truth to materials," to the second world war. Then, under the patronage of Kenneth Clark, the influential director of the National Gallery, Moore became a controversial but also quasi-official artist, first for the war effort, with his famous drawings in the London underground, then for the world market. In this period his work became more sentimental and inflated. Third, in the 1960s, no longer able to carve, but wealthy enough to have a workshop which transformed simple maquettes into enormous figures, he abandoned "truth to materials" and produced, alongside commercial "Henry Moores," late works of dramatic power and feeling.
Reclining figures are Moore's most distinctive shape. They used to annoy critics because of the irritating balance they retained between abstraction and figurative representation. One of the definitions of "modern sculpture" was that it rejected statue-making-the public art associated at its worst with the puffed-up celebrations of the 19th century. Moore participated in this rejection. But he never moved completely into abstraction. His surrealism was also a realism.
Moore sought to address the abstract characteristics of humanity. He tried to get under the skin of feelings. With few exceptions he did not sculpt a mother and child to stand as an emblem of "maternity" in the way that Rodin's "thinker" might personify the process of thought; rather, Moore sought to capture in stone the physical sense of a body which gave and received life. He sought to make allegory redundant in works intended to express "universal values." He sought a sculpture which would encompass the experience not only of his own civilisation but that of others; and not only human experience but also the very outcrops of the earth. No previous age would have had such an aim-and only abstraction had the capacity to make this ambition plausible. Hence Moore's modernism. His was surely a "grand narrative."
None the less, the reclining figures are figures. And apart from rare exceptions (such as the quizzical expression on Reclining Woman, stone, 1930) they seem to share a peculiar type of expression. Many have virtually (some even completely) faceless heads. The eyes are often tiny dots which stare into the middle distance. Mouths are empty, they suck in air and do not speak. Zombie-like to the point where all personality is decapitated, these heads are more than a denial of individuality. Nothing in nature would produce faces like this. A street full of people who had the facial expression of Henry Moore's work would be horrific.
Pull back from the faces to the head and shoulders and Moore's reclining figures have a recognisable human attitude. They can be full of energy, sensuality, even combativity. Moore's figures seem to have surrendered all prospect of getting up. They are not yet completely crushed, for they raise themselves on an elbow. Yet they seem hardly able to do more than this and it gives them their characteristic "look." As if aware of their plight, a heroic resignation pervades Moore's reclining figures.
Their faces are ghastly, their postures barely rise above fatalism and they are full of holes. There can be a superb, sensuous beauty to the organic internal spaces of Moore's sculptures. But there is something perverse about seeing them as purely positive. We cannot be blind to the literally catastrophic intervention which has been made into many of these "reclining figures." Their backbone totally severed, they could never get off their butts.
What is going on in these sculptures? The fact that we can ask such a question points to another aspect of Moore's work-its repetitiveness and abbreviated range. Figures with holes need not be so insistently reclining, reclining figures need not always have such similar expressions. And why almost always women? "In my work, women must outnumber men by at least 50 to one. Men get brought in when they are essential to the subject, for example in a family group."
We should not take Moore's matter-of-factness at face value. He does not just "prefer" women. He returns insistently to one figure, worked and reworked in many ways. Suppose that it does stand for something allegorical. Marina Warner has argued that a symbolised female body may represent masculine activities and values. Perhaps Moore's reclining females are also symbols of male fate. Indeed, there is at least one recorded instance where he himself reversed the gender of his own sculptures. In 1957 he took the maquette of Seated Woman, placed it on its back and then turned it into Falling Warrior. He described the piece as showing "the dramatic moment that precedes death." He gave it a shield, whose antique connotation reinforced the archaic title to deny any contemporary relevance.
None the less, Moore had personally witnessed that dramatic moment. In November 1917, aged 19, he was sent into action as a Lewis gunner at Cambrai. His battalion suffered horrendous losses. Moore claimed that only 52 of 400 men returned, although official figures show that 200 out of 500 survived two days of fighting. At an age when most British art critics are waiting for their A-level results, Moore rode the first modern horse of the Apocalypse, the small machine gun. He was mildly gassed and was hospitalised for three months. When he recovered he returned to his training unit, where the sculptor who claimed to have discovered the hole through the body taught bayonet drill. Once he had to train a refined public-school boy who hesitated before the dummy Hun. "Stick it right in and shout 'Take this, thee bugger!'" was Moore's order.
Moore's biographer Roger Berthoud comments: "It is tempting to see a link between the fallen bodies of his army comrades and the cadaverous, hole-pierced forms of his reclining figures." He then resists the temptation. Later he quotes Kenneth Clark who, after describing Moore's gay and confident disposition, wrote: "The deep, disturbing well from which emerged his finest drawings and sculpture was never referred to." The silence continues. Moore himself insisted on it. But it shrouds his work in pretension and diminishes its interest. It is not merely "tempting" to see that a scattering of Moore's figures across a muddy landscape would suggest a massacre. How can a drawing like Four Figures in a Hollow (1942) not be regarded as an echo of no-man's land? Nuclear Energy, a giant, skull-like piece made as a monument for the site of the first controlled splitting of the atom in Chicago, the huge interlocking Three Piece Vertebrae and other bone type pieces resemble massive mementi mori now strewn across the planet. Once the connection is made, the terrible stares and crippled postures cannot but be a reflection upon the experience of the first world war.
What kind of reflection is another matter. Moore's work is no protest. William Feaver once praised him because "sculpture to him was reassurance; not memorial figures, implying life after death, but comfy maternal bulk, totem, shield and shelter. This optimism, or sense of security, made him seem something of a Pangloss..." Moore himself said: "I would like my work to be thought of as a celebration of life and nature."
Moore's figures are the antithesis of the memorials which stand as the official response to the Great War. The statues erected over the names of those who fell, their theatrical mourning perpetuated in black stone, are exactly what Moore is not. He did not share the official response of horror at the trenches, the response which held the experience of war to be a tragic eruption into an otherwise settled and pleasant society.
The years 1914-18 were a time of special grief for all classes. For the working class, however, it also held out the possibility of escape. So many miners volunteered for the front that coal production suffered; they had to be excluded from conscription. It was not just patriotism which drew them to the flag, it was the conditions in the mines, too. Moore's father, an active trades unionist, was intent that his son would not follow him below ground. Trench warfare was made possible by the violence of industrial life. The explosives were made possible by coal, the bayonets by the steel factories. The war amplified the conditions which had gone into their making. Moore's own response was a practical one, "Take this, thee bugger." It is not a remonstration, but a witness to a way of life which for one moment found expression in the Great War.
The symbol of this moment is the earth-mother-a far more terrible metaphor for the trenches than the poppy. Blood soaked into Flanders and brought forth flowers. But bodies entered too, and transformed the landscape. In Moore's reclining figures space invades the forms and the forms themselves fold around to incorporate the environment. The distortions shift away from the anatomical and undulate like hills as the figures return to the stuff of which they are made. This can be rendered with love and care as well as juddering amputations. The earth-mother is entered into-she is death-but she also gives forth as the source of life.
Henry Moore belonged to the cultural wing of a northern trade unionist left in Britain which aimed to stake its claim in London. It sought to be, and perceived itself as having every right to be, part of the country's ruling coalition; it became so with the second world war. In his famous drawings of people sleeping in the safety of London Underground stations during the blitz, Moore rendered the patriotic, collectivist atmosphere in a way that was peculiarly his. Here were his reclining figures, now truly massed in the tunnels and holes.
One exception to Moore's reclining figures is a peculiarly surreal couple looking outwards with confident visage and posture. Placed in a landscape they seem to regard as their own, this couple is called King and Queen. In Britain, for well known reasons, the industrial working class was relatively unified and conscious of its separate fate. Its skilled members felt themselves to be holding up society, representing its best qualities of loyalty and straightness, yet remaining willingly subordinate. Sociologically it was described as an incorporated class. Similarly, Moore's figures do not rebel; they accept their condition. They have the strength but not the will to rise. "The smallness of the head is necessary to emphasise the massiveness of the body," he commented about Seated Woman (1957). Moore's figures come from a collective experience in which women toil the harder. They are the expression of industrial labour as a lifetime: its skill and craft, its sense of presence and its limitations. Moore went along with the British order. He also left a sometimes implacable expression of its cost.
Whatever the weaknesses of his later work, Moore's nerve held. One of the legacies has been a Foundation which has steadily and effectively invested (in the best sense of that word) in his own field of work. It seems to have done so in a liberal fashion which recognises the need to support originality in an open-minded way. As a consequence, an artist who might have been seen as an extraordinary exception in British culture has helped to ensure that he can now be regarded as an early representative of a phenomenon, if not of a tradition: "Anglo-British" sculpture. From Tony Cragg to Rachel Whiteread, from Anish Kapoor to a rejuvenated Tony Caro, "post-modern" sculpture is being transformed by beneficiaries of Moore's example and his Foundation.
Their range, difficulty and originality has not inhibited their success. This suggests that, encouraged by an equivalent, quiet, steady patronage, the well-spring of local talent might have been equally enabled in other arts. As it is (mostly uncelebrated and thankfully un-cool) the progressive tradition in Britain has shown that its commitment to the radical truths of hand and skill, of eye and experience, can still be sustained in an age of the spectacle. Any account of its achievement must acknowledge the role of Moore.
