On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art MODERN PRIMITIVISM by JAMES R. MELLOW The career of Henry Moore, England's reigning sculptor, is one of the remarkable success stories of modern art. At about the age of 11 ????he was born...
...Moore evidently has reservations about the artist explaining himself in public...
...A revealing moment of prissiness emerges in Moore's discussion with Alan Bowness of the erotic urgency in much of Rodin's sculpture: "It is certainly very important for Rodin, though it doesn't excite or interest me very much, perhaps because one knows the human figure so well...
...He was encouraged by his father, a miner ambitious for his children, who counseled him to become a teacher first: "Be sure that you have some living in your hand...
...they seem to be delivered up, straightaway, to the heaven of purified forms...
...Nevertheless, in the course of a lengthy career he has made a number of public statements, been interviewed frequently, and published his random observations on art...
...Arms and legs merge together around gaping holes...
...His admiration for modernist styles, notably Cubism, allowed him to transform a time-honored convention like the Madonna and child of Renaissance art into a modern subject...
...His first exhibition of sculpture and drawings, in 1928, not only sold well but among his patrons were the sculptor Jacob Epstein and the painter Augustus John...
...The contrast between the "tough" and the "tender," as he terms them, referring to his admiration for both the virile, sometimes brutal, forms of primitive sculpture and the sophisticated amenities of European art????has provided his work over the years with an admirable formal tension...
...If his sculpture has been largely figurative, it has not been strictly representational...
...There is a large element of the puritanical in Moore's art...
...But for Rodin I think this erotic excitement was a part of his rapport with the human figure...
...Subsequently, Moore was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Art...
...From the beginning, it seems, Moore understood and welcomed a certain dichotomy in his artistic intentions...
...It is indicative that Moore should especially remember Rodin's observation that sculpture is "the art of the bump and the hollow," a definition that applies perfectly well to his own work...
...We know," Moore goes on, "that the Industrial Revolution has had a detrimental effect on the arts, but we cannot tell what further revolution or counterrevolution would be required to restore the health of the arts...
...Moore encountered primitive sculpture quite early in his career...
...Not all of this, I suspect, is due to reticence or prudishness...
...One suddenly realizes that Moore's figures make few demands upon our erotic sensibilities...
...It is irritating to hear a great artist reduce the complexities of art and art history to the level of the banal...
...There is a marked tendency toward abstraction, though inspired by human and natural forms, which provides one of the opposing terms in the dialectics of his sculpture...
...His remarks on the necessity of being "truthful" to his materials offer an explanation...
...Moore is at his best in the sections devoted to the tribal arts of Africa and Mexico and to the works of individual artists: Michelangelo, Rodin, the 13th-century sculptor Giovanni Pisano...
...I was one of the real rich students at the college," he has noted, "and I had no worries or problems at all except purely and simply one's development as a sculptor...
...In Pisano, it is the physical stance of the figures, the mystery of human gestures that he alerts you to, as well as the technique of drilling Pisano used not only for practical purposes but to bring out color and texture in the stone...
...His other favored theme, the reclining female (the male figure has interested him a good deal less), gradually evolved into a kind of landscape, acquiring a topographical interest that gave it a surprising vitality as well...
...The new volume, Henry Moore on Sculpture (320 pp., illustrated, paperback only, $5.95), edited by Philip James, is a reprinting of an earlier coffee-table book with additional editorial material and photographs...
...His comments on Michelangelo's unfinished Ronda-nini "Pieta"????that difficult masterpiece with its one dangling arm and legs done in an earlier style, contrasting with the rough-hewn figures of the Madonna and the dead Christ ????Are noteworthy: "Here in this "Pieta' is the thin expressionist work set against the realistic style of the arm...
...But, possibly, one should not single out the example cited without noting that Moore was speaking to an international conference of artists sponsored by unesco in 1952...
...Why should Michelangelo, out of nothing, achieve that feeling of somebody touching another body with such tenderness...
...One might take the opposite position: that the Industrial Revolution, whatever its social complications, ushered in a period of intense artistic activity, an era of radical and profound stylistic changes, many of which are still being played out...
...space pours in and through the figure, opening it up, revealing its sides and depth...
...This doesn't make Cezanne less of a physical artist, and I don't think you ever need this obvious erotic element for a person to understand the human figure...
...These have been gathered together for the latest volume in the series, "The Documents of 20th Century Art," published by the Viking Press under the general editorship of painter Robert Motherwell...
...Blown up to monumental proportions, they tend to look grotesque and even a bit silly...
...After serving in World War I, Moore attended Leeds School of Art, but found the conventional method of copying plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures rather stultifying, particularly since the casts had acquired 20 annual coats of whitewash and bore little resemblance to the originals...
...At about the age of 11 ????he was born in Yorkshire in 1898 ????Moore knew that he wanted to become a sculptor...
...As a student, he haunted the British Museum, with its extensive collections of Mexican, African and Oceanic art, and he is one of the most sensitive exponents of the formal virtues of so-called primitive sculpture...
...But for the most part his career has been a steady march to success...
...Yet at times there is a disturbing simplicity to some of Moore's remarks about art...
...If the system of patronage has changed, has it really made the creation of painting and sculpture any more or any less difficult...
...Moreover, the sensual aspects of the human figure are intimate in nature...
...He is a perceptive guide (these sections are handily illustrated), making you aware of stylistic audacities, the tensions of a work of sculpture, the queer renew-ability of the creative process, the "flicker" of originality that can occur even in sculptures dominated by strict conventions like the fetish figures of African art...
...The modern sculptor, he says, knows "that sculpture in stone should look honestly like stone, that to make it look like flesh and blood, hair and dimples, is coming down to the level of the stage conjuror...
...And he was unlike Cezanne, who had his erotic side but who suppressed it...
...The Medicis might have demanded more...
...At one point, he says, rather funnily, that he would not "want to see, say, a realistic nude of an adolescent girl exposed on a bleak hillside, and except in a warm sunny climate such a figure would be best indoors...
...But the book does provide a handy summary of Moore's views on sculpture and art...
...Moore is a master sculptor in the monumental tradition and much of his work has been conceived for outdoor settings...
...In one of his public addresses, "The Sculptor in Modern Society," for instance, he offers the old schoolboy truths: The Middle Ages was a period of unity and faith, the artists of the period had an easier time of it, the patronage was comfortably defined...
...What is wanted at such official functions????even at official convocations of artists, it seems?are prestigious names and a few commonplace observations that can be quietly laid to rest at the banquet table...
...In 1925, he won a traveling scholarship for several months of study in Italy...
...Following his first exhibition, a newspaper critic thought it "immoral" that Moore should be teaching young people at the Royal College and one of his colleagues declared: "Either Moore goes or I go...
...Still, one does have the feeling that in Moore's work the more troublesome passions have been damped very low...
...He seems to be extremely sensitive to the light, the climate and the landscape features of the sites chosen for his work...
...The trip had a profound influence on him, inspiring a sustained interest in the humanist traditions of the Renaissance...
...There were, of course, some minor disappointments and hardships...
...to the barely emergent figure of the unfinished "Captive" in the Acca-demia in Florence...
...It releases tensions needed for his work," he claims...
...I just don't know...
...At 74, he is regarded as one of the great modern masters...
...The format is somewhat disjunctive, being arranged according to topic, and there is a certain amount of repetition and contradiction, since the entries skip back and forth in time...
...Moore's own method for avoiding such literalism is to open the figure out, to punch holes in it...
...Moore seems to have gone straight to his lifelong sculptural themes?women with children, the reclining female form????early in his career and without unnecessary fuss or anxiety...
...Why should that hand, which scarcely exists, be so expressive...
...Turning to Michelangelo, Moore compares the "melancholic slow laziness" of the sculptor's languid "Dying Slave" in the Louvre ("I admire that, but I don't like it...
...Numerous public commissions have come his way????the large reclining figure in travertine for the unesco Building in Paris, the two-part bronze figure for the pool in Lincoln Center, as well as other important commissions in the United States, England and Europe...
Vol. 55 • January 1972 • No. 2
