Avant-gardist status and public recognition seldom go hand in hand, the one seeming to disqualify the other. By the 1960’s Henry Moore definitely seemed passé for many of the new generation of British sculptors who were searching for a new type of sculpture no longer derived from the human body and the real world. Moore’s sculptures were too solid, too stable. During the 1950s his figurescame to stand for the conscience of the nation, national emblems that embodied classical humanistic values of suffering and endurance, stoicism and survival. In the immediate post war years this had reflected the spirit of the nation, for Britain unlike France and Germany had not known defeat despite years of protracted fighting, sacrifice and deprivation. Whereas in the years before the outbreak of World War II Moore was not known or admired by the general public but earned the respect and admiration of his fellow avant-garde artists, by the end of the war he was beginning to become a public figure whose archetypal sculptures represented not just historical continuity but elements of anti-modernity and a traditional pastoral quality that reinforced our cultural isolation in Europe. Increasingly, this high public profile which legitimised his practice contradicted the thrust of modernism’s avant-gardist rhetoric which by definition stood for innovative opposition to the entrenched establishment.  This exhibition purports to reintegrate Moore within the ranks of the avant-garde, to radicalise him by revealing the darker side of his imagination and in this way to rescue him from a secure but marginalised position within modern critical thinking. Placing more emphasis on his drawings plays an important part in this reinvention of Moore which is all the more intriguing since his war time drawings have often been used as evidence of his turning his back on the avant-garde and modernism. 

Situated mid way in the exhibition between “modernism” and the “post war” is a “war time” room dedicated to Moore’s drawings.  The decision to place these drawings at the centre of the exhibition is significant to both Moore’s artistic practice and his public persona.  For the Shelter Drawings of 1940 represent a pivotal point in Moore’s career marking the end of his abstract period and the beginning of a reengagement with figuration, albeit a modernist version of it. The origins of the Shelter Drawings are not clear. According to Moore mythology he did not often make use of the London underground, but when forced to do so some days into the Blitzkrieg, was amazed by the sight of Londoners asleep on the platform taking shelter there. This series of drawings, which also represents his contribution as an Official War Artist, were at first interpreted as Moore’s rejection of modernism and his turning to a much more legible form of realism accessible to the ordinary members of the public. But despite the evidence seemingly vouchsafed by Lee Miller’s photograph of Moore sketching in the Underground, which may well have been a re-enactment, whether he sketched from life, or as is also likely, adapted his drawings from press cuttings, is beside the point. Rather, Moore recognised in these sleeping bodies his own reclining figures and he admits as much, remarking that he saw “hundreds of Henry Moore Reclining Figures stretched along the platforms.” The technique of white wax crayon covered with washes of ink and watercolour lends itself to this atmosphere of darkness, drama and menace. For there is a distinctly dream-like quality to these drawings of recumbent bodies which, cocooned or mummified, seem suspended between life and death. It is this surrealist aspect that is highlighted by the curators who associate the Shelter Drawings  with the Freudian notion of the uncanny (Unheimlichkeit); I’ll come back to this concept when considering the “war time” section.  However, it is pretty certain that the Londoners sheltering there did not recognise themselves in these drawings and in no way do they suggest the ordinary untidiness and chaotic activity that must have accompanied surviving in these cramped conditions. The basic brief of this exhibition is that the darker side had always been there and was either a part of Moore’s own psyche going back to his relationship with his mother or related to his experience in World War I when he was gassed, hospitalised and never sent back to fight on the front. Both life experiences, the exhibition suggests, contributed to a hidden aspect of a mature personality normally seen as benign.

What comes over as Tate’s main objective is a re-appraisal of Moore. This begins appropriately in two galleries devoted to “world culture” with his discovery of primitive artefacts that coincided with the enthusiasm for direct carving that, by the interwar years, was becoming de rigueur for young sculptors. Brancusi spearheaded the movement by declaring that “direct cutting is the true road to sculpture.”  Sculptors in the 20’s and 30’s attached such importance to the notion of truth to materials, especially to stone, that together with direct carving it constituted a new orthodoxy. Part of a wider cultural rejection of both modernity and classicism, direct carving, it was argued, was more honest and more authentic than sculptural practices like Rodin’s that were based on clay modelling. This was because direct carving or cutting dispensed with mediators, assistants who created bronze casts from the original clay or plaster model or used pointing techniques to create scaled-up versions of the original. What were lost in these mechanised processes were the sculptor’s authorial control and artistic quality. The revolutionary and avant-gardist imperative was to restore through direct carving a relationship between head and hand, between the artwork as concept and as finished product. Moore had to wait till his student days at the Royal College of Art to study carving, since up till then it was still regarded as manual labour betokening the craftsman and not the artist. Carving into stone meant that a certain refinement tended to be lost but the directness and simplicity that was gained was in accordance with a new understanding of primitive artefacts that eschewed naturalistic realism for a deeper symbolic or expressive language. It was this that artists intent on introducing a new authenticity and truthfulness in their artistic practice, were searching for.