Page 19 - Studio International - March 1965

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no longer recognizable. The modern sculptor must
invent personal idols, whilst we who want neither
religion nor idols resist them. The resultant struggle is so
frustrating to the artist that he often becomes hysterical
in his effort to involve us.
The great modern sculptors are those who have
forged an original idol-figure, or form, which has the
power to communicate. Henry Moore once said 'There
are universal shapes to which everyone is sub­
consciously conditioned and to which they can
respond if their conscious control does not shut them
off. The less articulated, the more mysterious these
forms the better. Words, exactness, literal descriptions,
when probing the mysteries are dangerous and
in the long run destructive.
Moore's great achievement has been that with no
national tradition, in the face of spiritual and tempera­
mental distrust of the three-dimensional form, he
performed the seemingly impossible task of creatirig a
personal sculpture which embodies the English tem­
perament as recognizably as does the art of Constable or
Gainsborough, Wordsworth or Milton. With boldness
and courage he crnated his tradition from many pasts­
Mexico, Greece, Negro art, Mosaccio, Picasso. But a
good borrower does not make a great artist. Like a
medieval alchemist he melted down the gold of the
past to fashion something new and personal, yet at the
same time distinctively English as well as universal. A
basic ingredient is Moore's humanism and the sculp-
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