For many years the name of Henry Moore was synonymous in the public imagination with modern sculpture. He was the man who made blobs with holes through the centre: easy prey for cartoonists keen to ridicule the absurdities of modern art. But he also attained an almost institutional authority, he was a cultural fixture, as set and durable as his numerous public sculptures dotted, it seemed, through every town in the land and, eventually, every city in Europe and North America. It was this ubiquity, in fact, that led to the eventual backlash, and it has to be said that critically his reputation is still under a cloud. He's the man younger generations of sculptors love to hate.
He makes a tempting critical target. Apart from the mere fact of his extraordinary worldwide success, there is a lumpen, plodding quality to much of his work. What once seemed outlandish and inventive looks in retrospect much more cautious and hidebound, even bland. Similarly with his drawings, which brought him great acclaim. They are often stodgy and awkward. While all of this is true, it's also true that, besides the awkwardness, the drawings are wonderful sculptural statements with patient, stubborn feeling for form. Not surprisingly, Moore's caginess and caution, his taciturnity, come across in his work and colour its character. But they are not necessarily negative qualities, and despite his detractors, he was a gifted sculptor with a profound understanding of volume, form and texture.
Last year, the centenary of his birth went largely unremarked here, but now the Solomon Gallery is making good that lapse with a sizeable exhibition of his work which will be open from Thursday. This centenary show, which has already visited New York, Singapore, Tokyo and Sydney, was organised by London's Berkeley Square Gallery. It is in effect a mini-retrospective and incorporates sculptures, drawings and prints from the beginning of the 1930s to the 1980s, including the reclining figures that became Moore's trademark, mothers with children, and studies of animals. What it doesn't have, of course, are the larger works which accounted for a great deal of his output.
Scale, in fact became a contentious issue. "Most everything I do," he is quoted as saying, "I intend to make on a large scale if I am given the chance . . . Size itself has its own impact." Yet, despite producing enormous numbers of monumental bronzes, he remained at heart a carver who worked directly on a small scale. He had little opportunity to make sculpture during the second World War, but as a war artist he produced his rightly celebrated drawings of Londoners in Underground air raid shelters during the Blitz. From the time the war ended, he worked almost entirely in terms of small maquettes, leaving the scaling-up and casting to the relevant assistants.
The volume of work going through his studio made this a necessity, but it was, in any case, normal sculptural practice. Moore knew his craft inside-out and had great feeling for materials. His case is not comparable to that of someone such as the American artist Jeff Koons, who employs skilled artisans to make his sculptures from start to finish, because the point of his work is not the workmanship but the conceptual underpinning. Still, Moore has been criticised for embracing factory-like production methods.
Perhaps he had such criticism in mind when he spoke, in 1964, about the difference between scale and size. "A small sculpture only three or four inches big can have about it a monumental scale . . . When the work has this monumentality about it, then you can enlarge it almost to any size you like, and it will be all right; it will be correct . . . It's in the mind rather than in the material." Defensive, perhaps, but also true as he proved time and again. IT'S as well to remember that he was born in the 19th century, and that his work, for all its modernity, lies firmly in the tradition of European figurative sculpture. Not uniquely, he looked to the art of other cultures for stimulus in the 1920s, finding inspiration in the ethnographic collections of the British Museum. His great formal contributions to the sculptural language of his time were in cutting into and opening up form, leading, of course, to the much caricatured blobs with holes, and in making pairs and groups of separate, related forms.
A pragmatic, down-to-earth Yorkshireman, he was not exactly the stuff of romantic legend. Born into a family of miners, he was lucky to survive being gassed as a young infantryman at the battle of Cambrai during the first World War. His artistic talent was evident and encouraged from quite an early age, and he became identified with Britain's avant garde in the 1930s. Championed by the influential critic, Herbert Read, he gained and never lost official approval. It's a simplification, but not a great one, to say that from then on he was showered with commissions, honours and accolades. A list of honours bestowed makes for dull reading, and the truth about Moore that matters is that he got on with his work. His life is in his work, and despite currently being out of critical fashion, it is fair to say that his reputation as one of the 20th century's greatest figurative sculptors will endure.
Henry Moore: Bronzes, Drawings and Graphics is at the Solomon Gallery from October 28th to November 17th
The Solomon Gallery website is at www.solomon.ie
adunne@irish-times.ie
