UK Edition
Review
Henry Moore Drawings: The Art of Seeing, review: a graphic illustration of the sculptor's talent
The greatest British sculptor of the 20th century first found fame, not through his sculpture, but with his drawings: haunting images of Londoners sheltering in tube tunnels during the height of the Blitz, which have taken their place among the great, iconic artworks of the Second World War.
The idea of Henry Moore drawing in the depths of the underground with bombs falling overhead has become such a potent part of the artist’s mythology, that it will surprise many to learn that these drawings weren’t created in situ. While Moore certainly spent time observing life in London’s air-raid shelters and made written notes, the drawings themselves were created in the safety of his studio here in Hertfordshire, where he moved at the beginning of the war.
This is just one of many insights emerging from this fascinating exhibition on Moore’s work as a draughtsman, with 150 works covering seven decades, from his earliest student days to his final years of global celebrity.
Moore’s early drawings have a sculptural vitality: the rounded limbs of the Reclining Male Nude, 1922, the great slab of a middle aged woman’s back in Standing Figure: Back View, 1924. Yet while Moore produced endless sketchbooks of working drawings for sculptures – a few of which are displayed here – the show’s emphasis is on Moore’s interest in drawing as an activity in its own right, with many works so highly finished they feel more like small paintings than drawings in the conventional sense.
Moore’s fondness – indeed weakness – for seductive graphic effects with pen and ink, watercolour and crayon is evident in early works that attempt a Picasso-like deconstruction of human form, but have none of the Spanish artist’s fierceness.
Looking again at his shelter drawings from 1941, it’s amazing anyone ever thought these densely worked images could have been produced standing in a tube tunnel. Moore paints dark wash over lighter wax-crayon drawings which “resist” the paint, lending an eerie, spectral glow to the lines of blanketed sleepers in Tube Shelter Perspective or the subject’s clothing in Woman Seated in the Underground, which seems to bind her like a shroud, with her face reduced to a ghostly blur.
A slightly later drawing, Seated Woman, 1948, provides the key to Moore’s thinking over this period, with its flowing drapery clearly derived from the Parthenon Marbles, from which Moore had drawn extensively in the British Museum. He imbues his tube figures with an impersonal, sculptural quality, while the self-conscious tragedy in the woman’s face in Sleeping Shelterer owes more to the Renaissance frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio than to anything Moore observed in the tube.
Yet far from being offended by this airy objectification, ordinary Londoners were delighted by the gravitas Moore lent to their wartime suffering.
In later years, however, his drawing falls painfully off. It’s hard to fault the stylised, but beautifully drawn, Reclining Nude, 1974, except that it looks as though it should have been done forty years earlier, while a series of very conventional pen and charcoal drawings of sheep are even tamer than the animals they portray.
Those wartime drawings, though, still go straight to the gut, as indeed do Moore’s related studies of coal miners, and his drawings for post-war sculptures which capture the mood of exalted desolation – the sense of a world that was exhausted, but determined to rebuild itself. We need artistic images that carry our historical memories, which embody our collective emotions at pivotal moments, even if they are often painfully contradictory. Which is why 33 years on from his death, Henry Moore is still a highly relevant artist.
Henry Moore Studios & Gardens, April 3 until October 29 2019 henry-moore.org