Art: Maker of Images

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This near ecstasy over the uses of the visible invisible demonstrates how important to Moore was his discovery of its potentialities. But today he avoids the word hole. "I have attempted to make the forms and the spaces [not holes] inseparable, neither being more important than the other," he insists. In many late works he has all but abandoned the hole. But through those first apertures Moore traveled like Alice through her rabbit burrow into a most fertile wonderland of sculptural invention.

Brooding Presence. The results were not beautiful in the simple sense. Few Moore works are, and Moore makes no apologies. "Most people wouldn't say that a bulldog or a bull is beautiful in the sense that they would say a gazelle is beautiful or a deer," he explains. "But a bulldog, or a bull, or a rhinoceros has a terrific force in him, a strength that even if you don't immediately realize it, you come to recognize as beautiful and important. I find a bull much more beautiful than a frisking lamb, or a fleshy beechtree trunk more beautiful than an orchid."

Beautiful or not, his works took on a brooding presence, seemed inhabited by a nameless spirit in a way that a savage artist would recognize. The swelling curves of a woman also suggested the surge of a hillside, the texture of water-shaped stones. The figures swallowed the light here, emitted it there, and a viewer walked away feeling that he had seen stone or wood or bronze touched with life.

World War II brought him a special kind of recognition he never aspired to, when he went down into London's underground as a war artist to do a series of air-raid "shelter drawings." These, unique in their shrouded, sallow-hued style, conveyed with Dantean impact the spectacle of humanity huddled in refuge, yet fated to stir again, to live and to work on. Londoners, who would have blanched at the sight of his statues, recognized themselves in his swaddled figures, and hailed him as one of their own.

Out of Limbo. Since then, none of the superficial necessities or reasonable rewards of life have eluded Sculptor Moore. Always a good businessman, Moore is selling as fast as he cares to produce, at prices ranging from about $1,000 for foot-long figures to about $15,000 for each of five bronze casts being made of his UNESCO working model. He has a new car (a Rover) in the garage, a secretary to handle his correspondence, and a 13-year-old daughter, Mary, that he dotes on.

This spring he built a second greenhouse to indulge his wife's horticultural hobby. He is content to live out his life in the nonbohemian tranquillity of his Hertfordshire home, with only an array inside of small Henry Moore statues and Irina Moore's fine collection of primitive sculpture to show that it is the place of an unconventional family. He also has the satisfaction of knowing that his own breakthrough has opened the way to public acceptance for a whole generation of radical young British sculptors, topped by such bright new talents as Kenneth Armitage, Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, although they follow conceptions far different from Moore's own. Says a London art dealer: "It is not a Renaissance in British sculpture. It's a naissance, because before Moore there was almost none."