Art: Maker of Images

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"Everything explained about a work of art, including what the artist himself says, is likely to be explanation after the fact," says Moore. "To the extent that one has a rough notion, common sense, a craft, an ability to work out a plan, a work, of course, is plotted in advance. But why it comes out that way, and what it is intended to convey, becomes clear as it is being done, or after it is finished."

Moore recalls how he began his 1953 figure of a maimed warrior. "One day I found a small smooth stone about an inch long. It reminded me of a leg, an amputated leg. I couldn't quite conceive of a woman losing a leg. It had to be a man's leg. So I began to build a torso onto the shape of that stone. It was not until I had shaped quite a bit that I knew I was shaping a maimed warrior."

The Human Is Basic. As a young man, Moore dismissed or disdained enough of his predecessors and peers to learn not to be bothered by the fact that today many young sculptors disdain his course and style and think the future of sculpture lies in other directions. He has enjoyed too fat a share of art critics' praise to feel more than fleeting impatience when some critics accuse him of timidly narrowing his subject matter, or tending too far to the humanistic.

"I cannot imagine I'd ever become uninterested in the shape of the human form, the form of woman in particular," he says, when asked why he does not branch out to other subject matter. "I cannot see how I am ever going to drop it, to switch away from something so fundamental. That is the one basic that makes me a sculptor. I interpret everything through the human shape." As for the current preoccupation of sculptors with the geometric and the welding torch, Moore is interested but not beguiled: "I think that the most 'alive' painting and sculpture will eventually go more humanist, though at present there are more 'abstract' artists than ever."

Moore candidly hopes that he has produced a few works that can stand as masterpieces—perhaps four or five, perhaps fewer, perhaps more. But perfection is elusive. Says he: "I am obsessed by the desire to produce something that I know is exactly as I intended it, that is, a piece of nature. But the farther you go on, the more distant the horizon becomes, the more there is to be ventured and to be done. If one lived three lifetimes, it would not be enough."

But in an age that has no agreed ideals of beauty or indeed of aims, Henry Moore's looming women and hollowed men have an authority that forces respect. For like the huge stone heads of Easter Island or the Mayan temple carvings of ancient Mexico, they are not representations but presences, more live themselves than like anything else. Future generations may admire such works or reject them. But they cannot ignore them, for they have a life of their own.