Art: Maker of Images

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In Moore's main studio, about 100 yards from his home in the small hamlet of Perry Green, there stands a recently completed bronze figure of a woman, her belly distended with an unborn child that could almost be moving, her neck and her back strained so that the bones and ligaments stand out. "As I was making that figure," says Henry Moore, "I was rubbing my mother's shoulder again. She was constantly in my mind. Those moments all become a part of the sculpture."

Most of Moore's works have been of woman or woman with child. Occasionally there have been men in "family groups." "But the man has been there mostly because you can't have a family without a man," says Moore. "He is there mostly as an observer." He reflects on a point on which he has plainly reflected before. "There's no doubt I've had what Freud would call a mother complex."

Vision & Hope. Moore followed his father's wish and became a teacher, but World War I liberated him. He joined the 15th London Regiment, put in a long stretch of monotony in France that culminated in a surrealistic burst of four days' combat at the Battle of Cambrai in November 1917. He was gassed and invalided. Instead of returning to teaching at war's end. he took an ex-soldier's educational grant and enrolled in the School of Art at Leeds.

There, in the library he discovered Roger Fry's Vision and Design, with its contention that there was more power and freedom of form in the sculpture of African savages than in most "civilized" art. The idea struck Moore's imagination as sharply as a chisel striking stone. After two years at Leeds, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London and discovered the primitive sculpture in the British Museum. "I was in a daze of excitement. I would literally float home on the top of an open-deck bus at the end of each visit." He was affected by all-Egyptian, Sumerian. Etruscan, archaic Greek, Norman, Romanesque, and especially by the art of ancient Mexico. One of his first reclining women (1929) is an unabashed descendant of the ancient Mayan Chac-Mool, which Moore saw only as an illustration in a German magazine at the British Museum.

So entranced was he with the primitive and the preclassical that Moore balked momentarily when offered a Royal College of Art traveling scholarship to Italy in 1925. "The Renaissance was what I was trying to get away from." But he went. Once there, he could not, would not shut his eyes, was thrilled to see how different were the real masterpieces of the Renaissance from the plaster copies he had studied in Leeds.

For six months after returning from Italy, Moore was miserable. "That exposure stirred up a violent conflict with my previous ideals. I found myself helpless and unable to work." On one side was the primitive's rude power, on the other the Renaissance's calculated sophistication. He scuffed along with a two-day-a-week job teaching sculpture at the Royal College. Only when he returned to studying the primitives at the British Museum could he gradually begin to work again.