Page 37 - Studio International - January 1966

Henry Moore
Nude seated 1930
Pencil and water
14 x 16 in.
By courtesy of Mercury Gallery

Opposite
Auguste Rodin
Dancer c. 1900-2
Pencil and wash
14 3/8 x 10 3/4 in.
By courtesy of
Roland, Browse 8- Delbanco

the spirit ran out into the forms of his sculpture. In their of hills and valleys, rocks and boulders, and even the
immense consistency, their supreme single-minded- textures of earth, bark, rock and stone. Moore's debt
ness, and their crystal relationship to his sculpture, in this respect to the rugged aspect of the Yorkshire
the drawings of Rodin are perhaps the most perfect moorland, the soil from which the substance of his own
illustration of my thesis. life emerges, is apparent in his drawings, which have
No less consistent and single-minded are the drawings always provided the starting-point for the directions
of Henry Moore. They too are the perfect complement and ideas of his sculpture. They are the foundation
to his sculpture. But whereas Rodin accepted the forms upon which all his sculptural concepts are based and
of life as they presented themselves to his eye—'There reveal an unparalleled consistency and single-
is no recipe for improving nature' he once said— mindedness—from the life drawings of his years at the
Moore has always striven to evolve a scheme of Royal College of Art and immediately afterwards, right
arbitrary images—one that will best express his need to through to the near abstract (though always anthropo-
neutralise the concept of the human being as morphic) forms of the 1960's. A central problem has
'individual', while retaining the idea of an impersonal, been the artist's need to reduce, in particular, the
yet always anthropomorphic, monumentality. In his art 'personality' of the face: focal point of the rapacious
this modified, anthropomorphic image is conceived and devouring egotisms of man. Where Bacon, for
primarily as an archetypal figure in some respects example, uses the face as a vital and crucial element in
primitive—Moore acknowledges his debt to primitive his scheme and pattern of communication (the eyes
art forms, those of Mexico especially—stylistic, and and mouth especially), Moore has always sought to
loaded with a profound symbolistic charge. Thus for render it as anonymous and featureless. He has
Moore, any concept of the dignity of man is best resolved the problem in a variety of ingenious ways,
expressed by a stylistic image which emerges and from the creation of primitive style symbolisation to
evolves from the guts of nature. Hence the nature of his the establishment of such unique metaphors as the
formology, which is always an extension of landscape— flattened head which rises almost unwillingly from the