Father Figure: Reconsidering Henry Moore and his Australian influence
Alex J. Taylor
In the first major Henry Moore exhibition in more than twenty years, Tate Britain’s recent survey offers an importantly refreshed account of a giant of modern sculpture. “The aim of the exhibition”, writes curator Chris Stephens in the catalogue, “is to assert a different Henry Moore: a Moore whose work is darker, edgier and more complex than the familiar Moore, redolent with undertones of morbid and sexual energy… In contrast to the dominant idea of Moore, we propose that he presented the body as abject, erotic, vulnerable, violated and visceral.”[i]
These are strong words for a sculptor who had, in some circles, come to stand at the pinnacle of academic modernism. Feted by the likes of Kenneth Clark and Peter Fuller for their timeless repose, Moore’s ‘gentle’ abstracted figures were celebrated for their anti-industrial and neo-romantic humanism. At the other end of the critical spectrum, Clement Greenburg and others dismissed Moore as a kind of soft formalist – too tasteful, too comfortable and too popular to be taken as a serious paradigm for modern sculpture.
Over the past decade or so, however, a rigorous and convincing body of scholarship has recuperated Moore from the fate of either ignominy. Such revisionist perspectives include the essays collected in Henry Moore: Critical Essays (2003), and the important writings on Moore by Julian Stallabrass and Anne Wagner. With its catalogue essays, the publication accompanying this Tate exhibition adds further strength to such scholarship.
The exhibition itself powerfully recaptures a progressive position for Moore.
Moore’s cautious surrealism is deftly handled, well suggesting the Freudian resonances of Moore’s maternal preoccupations and favour for distinctly sexual protrusions and recesses, without overstating its radicality. His relationship with war is equally powerfully demonstrated, from the battlefield resonances of his perforated torsos and severed limbs, to his disturbingly aestheticised sketches of bodies seeking shelter in London’s underground.
Moore’s best figures are gripping. His Reclining Figure (1929) is especially so: its taut sculptural poise at suggesting the chucky primitive forms of pre-colombian statuary, yet still as brashly modern as a sleek two-door saloon. The later, larger Reclining Figure (1951) is another highlight. Its string decorated surface suggests the gridded matrix used by Moore’s assistants to scale up his maquettes, registering the geometry usually concealed beneath Moore’s sensual forms, a subtle nod perhaps to the harder edges then beginning to appear among his contemporaries.
The final room of the exhibition is at once its most wonderful and problematic. Displaying large elmwood figures carved over a period of forty years, the logistical triumph of bringing these works from museums around the world together in one room reinforces that here Moore’s strength has been met with equal curatorial muscle. But it is also an oddly counterproductive conclusion: resolving the exhibition with a sense of magnificent continuity that threatens to overshadow the historical specificities of Moore’s practice so convincingly articulated throughout the rest of the show.
One might also ask for more coverage of Moore’s late monumental bronzes, at least via their smaller maquettes; though as several major works are within walking distance of the exhibition, the exhibition’s manageable size justifies their exclusion. The Tate’s take on Henry Moore is curatorship at its most sophisticated; smart, but never laboured, and proof that rigorously scholarly exhibitions need not be hard work.
That a sculptor as prominent as Henry Moore remains such fertile ground serves as a reminder of how little scholarship has been undertaken on those Australian sculptors for whom Moore was, for a time, the preeminent figure. Although they mostly developed their practices independently of each other, these sculptors can be seen to represent a substantial and coherent strand of mid-century sculptural practice Australia that drew heavily on Moore’s innovations.
Histories of Australian sculpture have routinely treated such artists as minor figures working, as one key text puts it, in a ‘stylized figurative mode which was conceptually weak and represented a superficial modernism.’ Thus, we are told, Ola Cohn and Lyndon Dadswell represent ‘tepid modernism’, Gerald Lewers lacks ‘passionate energy’ and becomes ‘more decorative’ and Arthur Fleischman merely ‘seemed modern in the Australian context.’[ii]
More recent accounts repeat the tropes. One recent catalogue considers Dadswell and Lewers ‘restrained and academic’, Clifford Last ‘decidedly mild-mannered’, and only the post-war émigré sculptors such as Vincas Jomantas were ‘relatively free of any of the figurative references abounding in the admired, influential and emulated work of British Masters including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.’[iii] Treating the techniques of Moore and those he influenced as merely a transition towards purer abstractions, such accounts fail to consider mid-century sculpture on its own terms.
Moore never came to Australia, but his influence here was immense. His work would have first been available to Australians via reproductions, particularly in the widely-read books by Herbert Read from the 1930s. As with painting, reproductions of contemporary international sculpture were an important influence on Australian practice, as one might detect in the often overly frontal primitivised stone carvings of Melbourne innovators such as Clive Stephens and Danila Vassilieff.
Despite her more marginal position in art historical accounts, Ola Cohn was supremely influential in championing Moore’s methods in Melbourne. Cohn had studied with Moore at the Royal College of Art from 1926. Returning to Melbourne in 1931, her studio exhibition included works the likes of which had not been seen in Melbourne, embodying Moore’s edicts of direct carving, three dimensional realisation and ‘truth to materials’. Cohn’s subsequent role as a teacher propagated such ideas among many Melbourne sculptors in the forties, including Tasmanian-born Oliffe Richmond, who eventually became one of Moore’s many Australian studio assistants.
Other young Australian sculptors in 1930s London would have encountered Moore’s style in less direct ways. If Epstein remained the giant of modern sculpture, Moore’s The West Wind (1928-1929) for the London Underground Railway Headquarters gave him a new public standing. Sculptors such as Lyndon Dadswell, Gerald Lewers and Leonard Shillam all studied in London in the thirties, the later two taking classes in the studio of Moore-influenced carver John Skeaping. Like Cohn, many such sculptors passed on such influences through their own subsequent teaching work.
Sometimes, the results of Moore’s influence were straightforward imitations (some of the Shillams’ efforts were especially convincing, though never to the exclusion of their own more idiosyncratic interests), but Australian sculptors also began to incorporate distinctly local concerns. Indigenous plants, animals, stones and timbers all served thematic interests in the spiritual and ecological significance of the bush, substituting Moore’s evocation of England’s ‘pleasant pastures green’ with a self-consciously unrefined embrace of the native.
Crucially, such developments complicate the notion that modern sculptural methods only properly arrived with post-war émigré sculptors. While their contribution certainly added momentum to progressive sculptural practice, the idea that the scene was a ‘cultural vacuum’ until émigré practitioners made ‘modern Australian sculpture… according to international standards’ inaccurately presents interwar Australian art as a deserted wasteland, ignoring the progressive contributions of earlier modernisms.[iv]
As in Tate’s revisionist survey, many of the earliest interpretations of Moore’s work available to Australians focused on the relation between his disfigured bodies and the barbarities of war. The September 1941 edition of Art in Australia contained a heavily illustrated article on Moore’s sculpture and drawings by Herbert Read, serving editor Peter Bellew’s desire to “foster the culture our enemies would destroy.’[v] According to Read, Henry Moore’s recent work comprised “the most authentic expression of the special tragedy of this war.”[vi]
In late 1947, the British Council sent an exhibition of 15 sculptures and 27 drawings by Moore’s to Australia, touring to state galleries in Sydney, Hobart, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Quoting from Read’s 1941 article, Clive Turnbull’s catalogue essay emphasised that Moore’s sculptures were not simply “pure abstractions.’ Exhibition visitors were told of Moore’s:
…feeling for the innate qualities of material, stone, wood or metal, as his forebears no doubt felt and understood the qualities of coal they hewed and the soil they tilled: and, along with these, the sympathy of a man of the people for the anonymous victims of the Nazi air raids, to be manifest in the drawings of the London tube shelters.[vii]
For the exhibition’s sponsor, Moore’s humanism not only reinforced post-war unity in service of Commonwealth cultural diplomacy, it also helped to counter Britain’s increasingly dowdy image with one of chic modernity. As Bernard Smith put it in his thoughtful 1948 essay on the exhibition, Moore’s official championing served as “evidence of British resurgence, nay more, leadership, in the plastic arts.”[viii] As American modernism emerged as an increasingly seductive influence, Moore’s protean reputation was in no small part the source of Britain’s continued lure for Australian sculptors.
Local access to Moore’s work was not short-lived. Within the year, the Felton Bequest purchased his Half Figure (1933), and Moore lithographs and ‘Ascher Squares’ were on sale at several commercial galleries in Melbourne and Sydney. If Moore’s position at the bizarre extreme of modern art continued among newspaper cartoonists and self-proclaimed ‘philistine’ letter writers, by the mid-fifties, his status as a modern master was widely agreed among Australia’s art cognoscenti.
Even as Moore’s eminence dulled his edge for younger sculptors – an ‘opressive’ influence said some - his leadership position remained potent. Although Lenton Parr’s sympathies lay with the ‘Geometry of Fear’ sculptors and their embrace of the technical possibilities of oxy-acetylene welding, the armature-like bodies from his time as an assistant to Moore in the mid-fifties certainly follow the formal language of his master. As Parr later acknowledged, it was Moore that trained his “eyes and hands in the sculptural language of space and volume.”[ix]
Similarly, while Ron Robertson-Swann’s sculpture clearly follows the example set by his teacher Anthony Caro, Moore’s influence should not be underestimated. On Caro’s recommendation, Robertson-Swann too worked as Moore’s assistant in the sixties. And like Caro, Robertson-Swann’s agile industrial constructions can be seen to extend Moore’s concern for visual penetrability. Just as bodily in their address as were Moore’s late monumental bronzes, both achieve architectural qualities that invite the viewer to roam – whether optically or physically - the surfaces and cavities of their sculpture.
If Moore – according to another Tasmanian-born assistant Stephen Walker – chose so many Australian studio assistants for their hard working reputation, they didn’t do too badly in return, experiencing working life of the world’s most successful sculptor.[x] But even for those who only experienced Moore’s practice from afar, his position as a giant of twentieth century art was unavoidable. For more than one generation of sculptors, Moore’s cultural resonances and formal innovations were forces that as much animated those who embraced his style, as they were for those who sought alternate models for making modernist sculpture.
[i] Chris Stephens, ‘Anything but Gentle’, Henry Moore (London, 2010), 12.
[ii] Graeme Sturgeon, The Development of Australian Sculpture (London, 1978), 111-124.
[iii] John Stringer, ‘Two Decades of Innovation’, This was the future… Australian sculpture in the 50s, 60s and 70s (Melbourne, 2003), 7-8.
[iv] Christopher Heathcote, ‘The European Intervention’, The Europeans (Canberra, 1997), 138, 150.
[v] Peter Bellew, ‘The New Art in Australia’, Art in Australia, March 1941, 9.
[vi] Herbert Read, ‘The Drawings of Henry Moore’, Art in Australia, September 1941, 10.
[vii] The British Council, Exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings by Henry Moore, (Melbourne, 1947), 8.
[viii] Bernard Smith, ‘Henry Moore’, The Critic as Advocate (Melbourne, 1989), 86.
[ix] Lenton Parr, Vital Presences (Roseville, 1999), 30.
[x] Quoted in Ken Scarlett, Australian Sculptors (West Melbourne, 1980), 672.
Alex J. Taylor
In the first major Henry Moore exhibition in more than twenty years, Tate Britain’s recent survey offers an importantly refreshed account of a giant of modern sculpture. “The aim of the exhibition”, writes curator Chris Stephens in the catalogue, “is to assert a different Henry Moore: a Moore whose work is darker, edgier and more complex than the familiar Moore, redolent with undertones of morbid and sexual energy… In contrast to the dominant idea of Moore, we propose that he presented the body as abject, erotic, vulnerable, violated and visceral.”[i]
These are strong words for a sculptor who had, in some circles, come to stand at the pinnacle of academic modernism. Feted by the likes of Kenneth Clark and Peter Fuller for their timeless repose, Moore’s ‘gentle’ abstracted figures were celebrated for their anti-industrial and neo-romantic humanism. At the other end of the critical spectrum, Clement Greenburg and others dismissed Moore as a kind of soft formalist – too tasteful, too comfortable and too popular to be taken as a serious paradigm for modern sculpture.
Over the past decade or so, however, a rigorous and convincing body of scholarship has recuperated Moore from the fate of either ignominy. Such revisionist perspectives include the essays collected in Henry Moore: Critical Essays (2003), and the important writings on Moore by Julian Stallabrass and Anne Wagner. With its catalogue essays, the publication accompanying this Tate exhibition adds further strength to such scholarship.
The exhibition itself powerfully recaptures a progressive position for Moore.
Moore’s cautious surrealism is deftly handled, well suggesting the Freudian resonances of Moore’s maternal preoccupations and favour for distinctly sexual protrusions and recesses, without overstating its radicality. His relationship with war is equally powerfully demonstrated, from the battlefield resonances of his perforated torsos and severed limbs, to his disturbingly aestheticised sketches of bodies seeking shelter in London’s underground.
Moore’s best figures are gripping. His Reclining Figure (1929) is especially so: its taut sculptural poise at suggesting the chucky primitive forms of pre-colombian statuary, yet still as brashly modern as a sleek two-door saloon. The later, larger Reclining Figure (1951) is another highlight. Its string decorated surface suggests the gridded matrix used by Moore’s assistants to scale up his maquettes, registering the geometry usually concealed beneath Moore’s sensual forms, a subtle nod perhaps to the harder edges then beginning to appear among his contemporaries.
The final room of the exhibition is at once its most wonderful and problematic. Displaying large elmwood figures carved over a period of forty years, the logistical triumph of bringing these works from museums around the world together in one room reinforces that here Moore’s strength has been met with equal curatorial muscle. But it is also an oddly counterproductive conclusion: resolving the exhibition with a sense of magnificent continuity that threatens to overshadow the historical specificities of Moore’s practice so convincingly articulated throughout the rest of the show.
One might also ask for more coverage of Moore’s late monumental bronzes, at least via their smaller maquettes; though as several major works are within walking distance of the exhibition, the exhibition’s manageable size justifies their exclusion. The Tate’s take on Henry Moore is curatorship at its most sophisticated; smart, but never laboured, and proof that rigorously scholarly exhibitions need not be hard work.
That a sculptor as prominent as Henry Moore remains such fertile ground serves as a reminder of how little scholarship has been undertaken on those Australian sculptors for whom Moore was, for a time, the preeminent figure. Although they mostly developed their practices independently of each other, these sculptors can be seen to represent a substantial and coherent strand of mid-century sculptural practice Australia that drew heavily on Moore’s innovations.
Histories of Australian sculpture have routinely treated such artists as minor figures working, as one key text puts it, in a ‘stylized figurative mode which was conceptually weak and represented a superficial modernism.’ Thus, we are told, Ola Cohn and Lyndon Dadswell represent ‘tepid modernism’, Gerald Lewers lacks ‘passionate energy’ and becomes ‘more decorative’ and Arthur Fleischman merely ‘seemed modern in the Australian context.’[ii]
More recent accounts repeat the tropes. One recent catalogue considers Dadswell and Lewers ‘restrained and academic’, Clifford Last ‘decidedly mild-mannered’, and only the post-war émigré sculptors such as Vincas Jomantas were ‘relatively free of any of the figurative references abounding in the admired, influential and emulated work of British Masters including Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.’[iii] Treating the techniques of Moore and those he influenced as merely a transition towards purer abstractions, such accounts fail to consider mid-century sculpture on its own terms.
Moore never came to Australia, but his influence here was immense. His work would have first been available to Australians via reproductions, particularly in the widely-read books by Herbert Read from the 1930s. As with painting, reproductions of contemporary international sculpture were an important influence on Australian practice, as one might detect in the often overly frontal primitivised stone carvings of Melbourne innovators such as Clive Stephens and Danila Vassilieff.
Despite her more marginal position in art historical accounts, Ola Cohn was supremely influential in championing Moore’s methods in Melbourne. Cohn had studied with Moore at the Royal College of Art from 1926. Returning to Melbourne in 1931, her studio exhibition included works the likes of which had not been seen in Melbourne, embodying Moore’s edicts of direct carving, three dimensional realisation and ‘truth to materials’. Cohn’s subsequent role as a teacher propagated such ideas among many Melbourne sculptors in the forties, including Tasmanian-born Oliffe Richmond, who eventually became one of Moore’s many Australian studio assistants.
Other young Australian sculptors in 1930s London would have encountered Moore’s style in less direct ways. If Epstein remained the giant of modern sculpture, Moore’s The West Wind (1928-1929) for the London Underground Railway Headquarters gave him a new public standing. Sculptors such as Lyndon Dadswell, Gerald Lewers and Leonard Shillam all studied in London in the thirties, the later two taking classes in the studio of Moore-influenced carver John Skeaping. Like Cohn, many such sculptors passed on such influences through their own subsequent teaching work.
Sometimes, the results of Moore’s influence were straightforward imitations (some of the Shillams’ efforts were especially convincing, though never to the exclusion of their own more idiosyncratic interests), but Australian sculptors also began to incorporate distinctly local concerns. Indigenous plants, animals, stones and timbers all served thematic interests in the spiritual and ecological significance of the bush, substituting Moore’s evocation of England’s ‘pleasant pastures green’ with a self-consciously unrefined embrace of the native.
Crucially, such developments complicate the notion that modern sculptural methods only properly arrived with post-war émigré sculptors. While their contribution certainly added momentum to progressive sculptural practice, the idea that the scene was a ‘cultural vacuum’ until émigré practitioners made ‘modern Australian sculpture… according to international standards’ inaccurately presents interwar Australian art as a deserted wasteland, ignoring the progressive contributions of earlier modernisms.[iv]
As in Tate’s revisionist survey, many of the earliest interpretations of Moore’s work available to Australians focused on the relation between his disfigured bodies and the barbarities of war. The September 1941 edition of Art in Australia contained a heavily illustrated article on Moore’s sculpture and drawings by Herbert Read, serving editor Peter Bellew’s desire to “foster the culture our enemies would destroy.’[v] According to Read, Henry Moore’s recent work comprised “the most authentic expression of the special tragedy of this war.”[vi]
In late 1947, the British Council sent an exhibition of 15 sculptures and 27 drawings by Moore’s to Australia, touring to state galleries in Sydney, Hobart, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth. Quoting from Read’s 1941 article, Clive Turnbull’s catalogue essay emphasised that Moore’s sculptures were not simply “pure abstractions.’ Exhibition visitors were told of Moore’s:
…feeling for the innate qualities of material, stone, wood or metal, as his forebears no doubt felt and understood the qualities of coal they hewed and the soil they tilled: and, along with these, the sympathy of a man of the people for the anonymous victims of the Nazi air raids, to be manifest in the drawings of the London tube shelters.[vii]
For the exhibition’s sponsor, Moore’s humanism not only reinforced post-war unity in service of Commonwealth cultural diplomacy, it also helped to counter Britain’s increasingly dowdy image with one of chic modernity. As Bernard Smith put it in his thoughtful 1948 essay on the exhibition, Moore’s official championing served as “evidence of British resurgence, nay more, leadership, in the plastic arts.”[viii] As American modernism emerged as an increasingly seductive influence, Moore’s protean reputation was in no small part the source of Britain’s continued lure for Australian sculptors.
Local access to Moore’s work was not short-lived. Within the year, the Felton Bequest purchased his Half Figure (1933), and Moore lithographs and ‘Ascher Squares’ were on sale at several commercial galleries in Melbourne and Sydney. If Moore’s position at the bizarre extreme of modern art continued among newspaper cartoonists and self-proclaimed ‘philistine’ letter writers, by the mid-fifties, his status as a modern master was widely agreed among Australia’s art cognoscenti.
Even as Moore’s eminence dulled his edge for younger sculptors – an ‘opressive’ influence said some - his leadership position remained potent. Although Lenton Parr’s sympathies lay with the ‘Geometry of Fear’ sculptors and their embrace of the technical possibilities of oxy-acetylene welding, the armature-like bodies from his time as an assistant to Moore in the mid-fifties certainly follow the formal language of his master. As Parr later acknowledged, it was Moore that trained his “eyes and hands in the sculptural language of space and volume.”[ix]
Similarly, while Ron Robertson-Swann’s sculpture clearly follows the example set by his teacher Anthony Caro, Moore’s influence should not be underestimated. On Caro’s recommendation, Robertson-Swann too worked as Moore’s assistant in the sixties. And like Caro, Robertson-Swann’s agile industrial constructions can be seen to extend Moore’s concern for visual penetrability. Just as bodily in their address as were Moore’s late monumental bronzes, both achieve architectural qualities that invite the viewer to roam – whether optically or physically - the surfaces and cavities of their sculpture.
If Moore – according to another Tasmanian-born assistant Stephen Walker – chose so many Australian studio assistants for their hard working reputation, they didn’t do too badly in return, experiencing working life of the world’s most successful sculptor.[x] But even for those who only experienced Moore’s practice from afar, his position as a giant of twentieth century art was unavoidable. For more than one generation of sculptors, Moore’s cultural resonances and formal innovations were forces that as much animated those who embraced his style, as they were for those who sought alternate models for making modernist sculpture.
[i] Chris Stephens, ‘Anything but Gentle’, Henry Moore (London, 2010), 12.
[ii] Graeme Sturgeon, The Development of Australian Sculpture (London, 1978), 111-124.
[iii] John Stringer, ‘Two Decades of Innovation’, This was the future… Australian sculpture in the 50s, 60s and 70s (Melbourne, 2003), 7-8.
[iv] Christopher Heathcote, ‘The European Intervention’, The Europeans (Canberra, 1997), 138, 150.
[v] Peter Bellew, ‘The New Art in Australia’, Art in Australia, March 1941, 9.
[vi] Herbert Read, ‘The Drawings of Henry Moore’, Art in Australia, September 1941, 10.
[vii] The British Council, Exhibition of Sculpture and Drawings by Henry Moore, (Melbourne, 1947), 8.
[viii] Bernard Smith, ‘Henry Moore’, The Critic as Advocate (Melbourne, 1989), 86.
[ix] Lenton Parr, Vital Presences (Roseville, 1999), 30.
[x] Quoted in Ken Scarlett, Australian Sculptors (West Melbourne, 1980), 672.
