Art: Not Beauty

Behind the chrome, glass and marble façade of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, a host of pierced, twisted creatures lay in wait for the public last week. Their featureless pinheads reared from vast bodies shaped like waves, polished tree trunks, and sand-smoothed desert rocks.

They were the carvings of British Sculptor Henry Moore, who, the British think, is something special. Last week he was having his first big U.S. show, and London Times Art Critic Eric Newton tried to explain (in the New York Times) just what sort of person it was who created such distressingly inhuman things.

Wrote Newton: "Imagine a smallish compact man in the only two settings that really suit him. One is in his studio, working steadily but not furiously, with a mildly determined look in his eye and a steady hand holding his chisel. The other ... is in a country lane, deep in the center of Hertfordshire. . . . He's walking slowly, either on his way to the pub with his Russian wife, or on his way back from it. He has either just had a glass of beer before lunch, or he's going to have one ... a smallish, tough, elemental man with unhurried, gentle ways. Doesn't that fit in? Doesn't it exactly explain his sculpture?"

"How Can One Hope?" Most Museum visitors would probably answer no. Even in the flesh, pink-faced, tweedy little Henry Moore (who had come over for the show) seemed hard to connect with his own work. Born the son of a Castleford coal miner in Yorkshire 48 years ago, Moore decided on sculpture when he first heard about Michelangelo at the age of ten. He was gassed in World War I, spent the next six years on a veteran's scholarship, drawing and modeling from life at the Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. "All the modern talk against art schools is silly," says Moore. "There is no tradition now, so of course every sculptor must find his own way, but if one can't even copy from a model, how can one hope to clo anything from imagination?"

If there is any tradition in Moore's carvings, it stems from his childhood memories of the Romanesque sculpture in the local church, and from Aztec idols in the British Museum. But Moore's figures also incorporate the shapes of natural objects like pebbles, rocks, bones, trees and plants. His style, which combines blocky strength with stretched and rubbed roundness, is unmistakable, and unmistakably his own. His men & women are pinheaded, he explains, because "big heads are more humanistic. I prefer little heads, which are more organic."

Essence of Rudeness. With the possible exception of U.S. expatriate Jacob Epstein, Moore is now rated Britain's foremost sculptor. He cheerfully explains that the holes he delights in carving through his sculptured human figures "connect one side with the other, making [them] immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is possible. . . ."