Art: Maker of Images

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Rodin Had 30. Moore is in the enviable position of being able now to refuse commissions as he pleases and to work only on what intrigues him. In recent years, he has found a new fascination in what he had scorned in his youth—the intricate drapery of classical Greece. Currently, he is occupied with three larger-than-life reliefs, first worked out in miniature and now being shaped in plaster in one of his two large studios set away from his house. For the routine modelmaking and preliminary shaping, he has two assistants, students who work for a year or two at modest pay to learn what they can from a master and then go off to continue studies or try on their own. "Rodin had 30 assistants," Moore is quick to point out. For the moment, he is preoccupied with pieces for the outdoors. "Sculpture is an art of the open air," he believes. "Daylight, sunlight is necessary to it. I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in or on the most beautiful building I know."

In slacks, sandals, open-throated sports shirt, he may loaf in the garden during nonworking intervals; if it is Sunday, he will stroll to the village pub (The Hoops) for a half-pint of bitter. More often of an afternoon, he will show a visitor about his property, explaining sculptured works in a soft, eager voice almost denuded of its Yorkshire burr, describing with a loving caress along a bronze flank why it takes two or three weeks of rubbing, gouging, sanding and polishing to finish a freshly cast figure: "It's the putting on of skin." In a corner of the studio is the figure whose making reminded him of the days he rubbed his mother's aching shoulder.

Why the odd-shaped, minuscule head on a figure that is otherwise so real? "Do people today find it odd that the figures in Chartres have bodies made of little more than straight sticks?" he asks. "Michelangelo's heads would sometimes go ten or more times into his bodies. This is the head I made when I did the figure. I wondered about it. And experimented. I removed this head and replaced it with one that was more representational. It didn't work. This head is right for this figure." He adds defensively: "Some people have said I make the head unimportant. This is just not so. Because I think the head is the most important, I use the head to give scale to the rest of a figure. If one can give the human meaning of a head without using eyelashes, nostrils and lips, just reduce it to a simplicity—the angle at which it is poised to the neck, say—then by making it small, one can give a monumentality to the rest of the figure that cannot otherwise be given."

After the Fact. Having made his defense, Moore confesses that the finished piece under discussion displeases him. "It is simply too anecdotal, too sentimental," he says, and moves in the studio to a nearby figure, a more distorted yet far more powerful version of the same theme (see second color page, lower right). A woman almost bursting with the life of a new child? An earth bursting with spring? A moment swollen with the pain and hope of living? Were these what he was trying to convey in the figure?