Stonehenge is a befuddling prehistoric monument in Wiltshire, England and is one of the most famous heritage sites in the world with its mysterious ring of standing stones. There is a similar quality to sculptor Henry Spencer Moore’s work. It has a dormant energy, a powerful sweep, an organic quality that is of this world and yet not. His works look like something children would build in their spontaneity and playfulness and yet like Picasso’s art, they cannot be duplicated because of their strong individualism. His sculptures flow, freeze in dynamic stillness, seem to be rooted and yet free. Self-contained and yet communicative.
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They gesture, they withdraw, they rest, they struggle. They look unfinished in their bronze abstraction and yet complete. These sculptures are not meant for galleries but for open spaces where the elements of nature can interact with them and the sky can frame them and the earth can contextualize them. Moore is one of the most influential artists to have impacted public architecture because he made us realize just how important art is for spaces where people congregate, work, while their time away. And how a work of art can change the way we look at a garden, a building. Moore’s most significant architectural sculptures during his career are.. West Wind for the London Underground Building at 55 Broadway in London, the four-part concrete screen for the Time-Life Building in New Bond Street, London, and the carved brick, “Wall Relief” at the Bouwcentrum in Rotterdam.
He made us realize that art can be a public treasure and today his monumental bronze sculptures depicting human feelings are scattered all over the world. He usually created human figures, mostly with a mother and child motif but all his works emanate an overwhelming sense of humanism, of our connection with each other and the earth. Not surprisingly, the flow and ebb of his creations in a way paid a tribute to the hillscapes of Yorkshire, where he was born, indicating just how nature is a part of us and we are part of it.
Most of his forms have hollow voids in them that frame the earth or the sky to emphasise the human relationship with them. As the son of a coal miner, he inherited the love for land and even though the scale of his work and its popularity made him very rich, he invested in the humanism that animated his work by empowering the Henry Moore Foundation to support education and the arts.
The life long love for arts began when at the age of 11 he learnt of Michelangelo in school and began to dabble with wood carving and clay modelling. The path to success was not easy though. He first became a teacher and then volunteered for army service and got injured. Later he enrolled in Leeds School of Art and was influenced by modernist art. A scholarship brought him to study at the Royal College of Art in London and he studied among other things primitive art and quietly but firmly decided he would not sculpt in Victorian styles but was opposed by his tutors. During a visit to Paris, he saw a plaster cast of a reclining Toltec-Maya sculptural form and this figure was to impact most of his work subsequently with him creating human forms always in a fluid, restful harmony.
As time progressed, he became more and more partial to concave and convex, semi-abstract forms influenced by progressive artists like Picasso. But whether he was sculpting lone figures or family groups, what onlookers received from the study of his sculptures was a feeling that none of us are islands. That we belong together and that this planet is our nesting place. And that without the endurance inherent in the human spirit and the earth, there would be no continuity of life as we know it.
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Moore set up his foundation in 1972 that till date manages his house and estate at Perry Green, with a gallery, sculpture park and studio situated in over 70 acres of land. By the end of his career, Moore was the world’s most successful living artist at auction. In 1982, Sotheby’s in New York sold a 6 ft Reclining Figure (1945), for $1.2 million. Moore died on 31 August 1986, at the age of 88 but till the end, despite arthritis, he kept drawing and sketching his ideas and has been influencing artists around the world including Dimply Menon in Bangalore, whose public sculptures in bronze are strongly reminiscent of Moore’s work .
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In his craft, Moore took everything that life gave him and withheld from him and sculpted with it a piece of eternity. As if he was saying in defiance, “I can even sculpt the void and make something where there is nothing.”
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Reema Moudgil has been writing for magazines and newspapers on art, cinema, issues, architecture and more since 1994, is a mother, an RJ , an artist. She runs Unboxed Writers from a rickety computer , edited Chicken Soup for The Indian Woman’s soul, authored Perfect Eight and earns a lot of joy through her various roles and hopes that some day working for passion will pay in more ways than just one. And that one day she will finally be able to build a dream house, travel around the world and look back and say, “It was all worth it.”