Art: Maker of Images

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Book in Hand. It was then that he met Irina Radetzky, an Austro-Russian who was studying painting at the college. Moore was then 31 and she 21. Irina gave up her painting ("And she could have been a fine painter," says Moore) to become Moore's wife. Their small house and studio in London's Hampstead cost $650 of Moore's yearly $1,100 teaching income. Occasional sales of sculpture, gifts of random blocks of stone or carvable logs from friends helped ends to meet. Moore set a goal of 30 pieces a year, and Irina tried to keep him to it. Some days he would lag, and she, hearing no sound from the studio, would ask, "What are you doing?" "Thinking," Moore would reply. After that dodge wore out, Moore, when the urge was not in him, would read a book with one hand and with the other pound on a block with hammer or chisel to give the pretense of working.

For an artist, there was much in the air of those times. Lipchitz was experimenting with his "bronze transparents." Gonzales with his spiky metal abstractions—adventures that, while they left the vast public admiring Meissen figurines or Rodin's Thinker, had the art world in a swirl of healthy controversy. This heady atmosphere fired Moore's imagination, helped him grow away from the blocky, derivative primitivism of his work in the 1920s. Among his elders, Moore particularly admits an obligation to Constantin Brancusi. "Since Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds —all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It was Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth and to make us once more shape conscious."

With an obsessiveness that has not wavered since, Moore concentrated on the organic ripeness that suggests, even in his most abstract or most surrealism-tinged moments, the human body. Early "compositions" made of two or three carefully placed objects were designed to make the space between them a part of the whole. Constructions of smooth-rounded wood and string carried this further, suggesting half-human harps and lyres built to play silently for the eyes and mind. Finally, "the search that is discovery" led Moore to the hole.

Outraging nature, Moore's holes drove right through his bodies. "At first holes were made for their own sakes," says Moore, "because I was trying to become conscious of spaces in sculpture. I made the hole have a shape in its own right; the solid body was encroached upon, eaten into, and sometimes the form was only the shell."

The hole as such was not by any means a Moore invention. The primitives had used it. Picasso. Archipenko and others had been experimenting with it. Moore's contribution came in his single-minded conception of the hole as a tunneling into material to carry the eye into and through and around, and to bring the inside of the work out to view.

"The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation," he wrote. "The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is possible. The mystery of the hole—the mysterious fascination of caves in hillsides and cliffs."