Few sculptors have produced work more recognisable, more familiar, than Henry Moore. Monumental, bursting with power.
So, out of a show that boasts 120 works by the artist, it might seem perverse to highlight the small pencil and ballpoint pen sketch of Moore’s hands, by the man himself. It was drawn in his eighties, when he was afflicted by arthritis, and is not just a poignant testimony to the frailty that was affecting such a powerful creative instinct but also a reminder of the means by which he created sculptures which were, as he said, a force “pressing from the inside trying to burst or trying to give off the strength from the inside itself”.
“Henry Moore: Back to a Land” at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park reflects his conviction that to understand that force, his sculptures should be viewed in an open space — they should be walked around, looked at from different angles, seen in the sun, peered at in the gloom and enjoyed at dusk when shadows fall and perceptions alter.
The exhibition also reflects his upbringing in the English county of Yorkshire. “I am Yorkshire,” he asserted when he was discussing the drawings he made to accompany fellow Yorkshireman W.H. Auden’s poem “The Shield of Achilles”, which is in the show. He said: “The fact that Auden was Yorkshire and that I am Yorkshire and that the Yorkshire landscape is something that has always been a great excitement in my life.”
Moore (1898–1986) was born less than 24 kilometres away from the Park in the town of Castleford, which in his youth was a busy coal mining community. This was a world of pits where the land was riddled with mine shafts, many of which reached under the Park.
On weekends, his father, who worked in the mines, would take the family walking the moors where the young Moore was to find inspiration in bleak rocks such as Adel Crag near Leeds, and even from the slag heaps.
He first heard of Michelangelo in school, read about him in an encyclopaedia and vowed then and there to be a sculptor; for years, though, he eschewed the classical Italian Carrara marble that Michelangelo would have used for the local stone, exploring its imperfections and wayward colours.
It was only in the days before the show opened on March 7 that his daughter Mary Moore made a discovery that anchors the artist even more securely to his Yorkshire heritage.
“At the end of his life when he was housebound and his eyesight was going, he drew every day,” she recalls. “I always thought these were the landscapes I grew up with in Hertfordshire where he had his studio for many years.”
Moore had not lived in Yorkshire since the 1920s and had long established his studio in Perry Green, Hertfordshire, after his house in Hampstead, London, was bombed in 1940. But Mrs Moore says: “When I was staying in a hotel near here just the other week working on this exhibition, I looked out of the window and realised he had been drawing the landscape of his youth. These were memory landscapes — deep recollections of Yorkshire.”
Quite a shock, particularly as the artist preferred working in Hertfordshire.
She says: “It was rural, it had no great characteristics. It was like a blank canvas which did not intrude on his work. He couldn’t work in a dramatic landscape because it imposed on him, constantly catching his attention.”
The most dramatic things about the countryside around Perry Green were two hillocks created by nearby quarries. He liked them because they made a superb site for sculptures to be placed above the countryside, silhouetted against the sky.
The title for the show is inspired in part by the writer Jacquetta Hawks’s complex book “A Land” (1951), which attempted to explain how “the land of Britain, in which past and present, nature, man and art appear all in one piece”, and which Moore illustrated.
This land is as integral to the exhibition as the objects themselves. No wonder then, that he was one of the founding patrons of YSP, which was established in 1977 and which was voted Art Fund Museum of the Year in 2014.
Stand by Old Flo — the name given to “Draped Seated Woman” (1958–59) by the irreverent residents of east London where it was first displayed — and follow her gaze around the park, which is part of the Bretton Hall estate that dates back to the 14th century. An artificial lake made in the 18th century is surrounded by wooded hillsides, ploughed fields and empty downs.
The landscape plays to the sculptures, the sculptures become part of the landscape. Sometimes they merge into the countryside, sometimes act as a counter point. Views are framed and the importance of the holes and gaps becomes clear because, as Moore explained, “A hole can have as much meaning as a solid mass.”
Behind Flo’s sloping back, by the entrance to the park are three upright figures, in front of her the massive curves of “Large Two Forms” (1969) like two heavyweight dancers swirling together in the grass and “Reclining Figure; Arch Leg” (1969-70). And all the while, the commentary of honking of geese, the haughty indifference of deer and the ruminations of shaggy sheep.
And while Moore is centre stage for the next few months, there are 60 works permanently on display across the estate, including sculptures by Barbara Hepworth, Martin Creed, Roger Hiorns, Richard Long, and Niki de Saint Phalle.
A short walk up the hillside from Flo takes the visitor to the 18th century chapel where Ai Wei Wei’s “Iron Tree” (2013) stands while inside “Song for Coal” by Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson, a clever kaleidoscopic piece, is accompanied by plainsong based on a 19th century composition in praise of coal.
But back to the main event. On a terrace, like an outdoor gallery framed by a tall hedge and dense shrubbery, are three sculptures which prove the artist’s point that his works should be studied — and enjoyed — in the round.
How else to see the carefully uneven patina or an unexpected gash in a smooth flank of a bronze? As Mary Moore says: “My father always used to say: ‘How would you draw my hand, this side is dark, this side is lit.’ He was constantly making you think about form.”
In the Underground Gallery, carved into the hillside below the weathered brick walls of the estate’s kitchen garden, much of what drove Moore on, how he worked, what inspired him, is explained.
Outside is “Large Reclining Figure” (1984) made of startling white fibreglass and in the monumental scale one expects; but inside, the first display is of a row of tiny maquettes. The contrast could hardly be greater.
Mary Moore says: “Many sculptors today — and I can think of some young fashionable sculptors doing huge works — have no understanding of scale. They’ve gone big, maybe they are being ironic, but there is no innate understanding of scale and therefore, there is no emotional reach. My father could envisage the scale his sculptures were going to be by first making a maquette.”
Moore also drew — partly to generate ideas for sculptures such as the etching “Reclining Figure in the Dark” (1979-1980), which hangs behind “Reclining Figure; Angles” (1979) — partly as a means of studying natural forms and sometimes for his own enjoyment.
The drawings invariably have some connection with the land. “Elephant Skull” (1970), which he studied and drew with pencil, charcoal and ballpoint until he “found so many contrasts of form and shape that I could begin to see in it great deserts and rocky landscapes ...”
Which takes one to “Rocky Landscape” (1982), which captures the harsh grey-black crags of the Yorkshire moors.
Stonehenge, a series of lithographs, taken from photographs in 1973, recaptured the thrill he felt when he first visited the site 52 years ago and the visceral effect those prehistoric stones had on him.
He recalled how he had arrived at night, but too excited to sleep he visited the stones by moonlight. He wrote: “I was alone and tremendously impressed. (Moonlight, as you know enlarges everything, and the mysterious depths and distances made it seem enormous.) I went again the next morning, it was still very impressive, but that first moonlight visit remained for years my idea of Stonehenge.”
One of his early inspirations was chacmool, a figure from the Mesoamerican era of central America who reclined on its back or side, legs drawn up, resting upon its elbows and holding a platter. The connection is immediately obvious alongside “Working Model for Reclining Figure: Internal/external Form” (1951).
It helps explain his frequent choice of the reclining figure for his subjects. He talked about the difficulty of sculpting the upright figure, having to rely as the Greeks did by draping the figure and covering the ankles or supporting it against a “silly tree trunk”.
“With the seated or the reclining figure one doesn’t have this worry,” he explained. “And between them are enough variations to occupy any sculptor for a lifetime. The reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially.”
And there were freedoms with the materials he used. “I used to think carved sculpture was the best sculpture. But now I don’t think that it matters how a thing is produced, whether it’s built up, moulded, carved, constructed, whatever. What counts really is the vision it expresses.”
Examples of his versatility include “Mother and Child” (1978), made from a single piece of stalactite, a tender “Mother and Child” (1932) made from alabaster and “Reclining Figure; Bone” (1976-1978) carved from elmwood.
“The Project Room”, curated by Mary Moore, brings us even closer to the artist with a display of many of the bits and pieces — quirky, ancient, valuable — that he accumulated.
The room is overshadowed by three huge blow-ups of the artist. One shows him taking notes in an underground shelter during the war in his role as war artist, which resulted in the moving “Shelter Drawings (1940)” that capture the desolation as bombs rain down. Another finds him deep in a mine for a series about the pitmen of the Wheldale Colliery, where his father had worked, where he was to portray the claustrophobia and discomfort of the workers.
By way of contrast, the third image is of him surrounded by chunks of marble in Carrara, their immensity, hewn from the land, dwarfing the artist.
As a young man, he would spend hours in the British Museum and perhaps that inspired him to collect artefacts such as a female figure in ceramic from the Mycenaean period of around 1400BC, a Papuan Gulf coconut charm, the vertebrae of a minke whale, and above all, clay fertility figures from the Michoacán period of Mesoamerica and pottery figures from Jalisco and Tlatilco areas of Mexico with their similarity to some of the sculptures he was to make.
Rather movingly, there is a display of his working gear; the inkwells, crayons, pens, chisels and rasps, and next to the drawings of his own hands, a maquette of another pair. And another surprise.
“They were made for his bronze ‘King and Queen’,” says Mary Moore. “The hands are held together and lie in repose on the Queen’s lap. Do you know it was not until the day of the opening of this show that I realised my mother used to sit exactly like that?”
It is a poignant revelation — and another insight into the complexity of the artist’s vision.
As he said in 1974: “The mystery of what is under the shroud is somewhat akin to the mystery in poetry. It is this element of the unknown that fascinates me in caves and the holes in the sides of hills — you don’t know what there is until you look and explore them. This mystery excites the imagination and poetry has the same multimeaning that makes you explore it in depth.”
Richard Holledge is a writer based in London.
“Henry Moore: Back to a Land” is on at Yorkshire Sculpture Park until September 6.
