Sculpture 1 - Once Britain's most popular sculptor, Henry Moore has become deeply unfashionable. His iconic bronzes are overshadowed by inflatable ketchup bottles
When Tate Modern held an exhibition of Henry Moore's public sculpture last summer, hardly anyone noticed. Granted, the gallery displayed only models of Moore's monumental bronzes. But the real reason the show passed the public by was that all eyes were on Paul McCarthy's temporary public sculptures outside: a 50-foot, pink inflatable ketchup bottle and a black inflatable Pinocchio twice its size. That McCarthy's inflatables overshadowed Moore's bronzes says much about the anxiety surrounding public sculpture today, and the extent to which Moore's reputation has plummeted.
Moore himself never doubted that he belonged to the pantheon of "great artists". He founded the Henry Moore Institute to safeguard his legacy and, since his death, his work has been exported like a national showpiece by the British Council. This summer, the Dulwich Picture Gallery is holding a retrospective including both his famous bronze sculptures and his lesser-known maquettes and drawings (among them his extremely popular wartime London Underground series). But it will take more than this refresher to rejuvenate Moore's reputation: critics are uninterested in him, artists are contemptuous, and the public - in recent years his only real champions - are bored. Compared with the prominence given to Barbara Hepworth's centenary at St Ives last year, the celebrations marking Moore's centenary in 1998 were muted. Vienna hosted a major retrospective; Britain made do with a smattering of small shows.
To some extent, such a decline in interest was inevitable, given the meteor shower of bronzes that Moore rained upon us in the late 1970s. But it goes deeper. His obsessions (Moore always talked in terms of "obsessions" and "fixations") sprang from what now seems like a naive, homespun belief in the benevolence of the natural world. To Moore, humanity was a noble species hewn from the rock of the earth; his figures were made of ancient, weather-beaten stuff; his men tended to be striving, his women sexual and nurturing. Moore was a ruralist, traditionalist, primitivist and surrealist champion of man's heroism - attitudes that have been scorned by the generations following him.
If, today, Moore looks antique, we perhaps forget that he is older than he seems. His moment of popular triumph might have been in the 1970s, but critics have long recognised that he produced his best work in the 1930s and 1940s. Moore's interests at that time were in tune with the avant-garde: he helped his contemporaries navigate such overseas movements as French surrealism and Russian constructivism, and developed an instinctive socialism that would last until his death. Moore was an artist of the war, rather than postwar, years, and many of his beliefs seem entrenched in the values of that time. For example, he once spoke admiringly of "those richly formed, big-limbed, fresh-faced, full-blooded country wenches . . . built for breeding, honest, simple-minded, practical, common-sensed, healthily sexed lasses".
Such opinions, and the men who held them, became unpopular in the 1960s, and Moore's reputation suffered accordingly. Particularly hurtful was the public criticism levelled against him by his former assistant, Anthony Caro. The American-influenced abstract style that Caro adopted in the 1960s represented the most significant leap forward in British sculpture since Moore. But Caro hasn't suffered from the kind of generational patricide he inflicted on his former master. On the contrary, last year's exhibition of contemporary British sculpture was called Early One Morning, after a famous Caro work. The title was apt, since the concerns of many of today's sculptors are identical to those of the young Caro.
To understand Moore's decline, we have to look back, paradoxically, to the years of his greatest success. The 1970s were a polarised, sometimes hysterical decade in the arts, just as they were in politics. If one half of the country was set alight by the Sex Pistols, the other half was clamouring for country houses. In the visual arts, the equivalent of this division was the controversy over the Tate's purchase of Carl Andre's "bricks". Where Moore would have stood on this is clear: "Minimal Art is for minimal minds," he said. With hindsight, it seems he picked the losing side.
Caro once said of Moore that "when you try to think clearly about him you are deafened by the applause". Now that there is silence, it is possible to look soberly at him once again. Today, his contribution to sculpture looks a good deal less important than that of Brancusi, while Picasso - who arguably embodies many of the same now unfashionable qualities - is still an unassailable figure. Hepworth looks more important than Moore, yet when she died and he was required to pay her tribute, he thought so little of her work that, according to his biographer, he couldn't find the words. It is probably just as well that he didn't live to see his own centenary.
Henry Moore is at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London SE21 (020 8693 5254) until 12 September
Modern artists on Moore
Grayson Perry, Turner Prize winner 2003
When I was at art school, Henry Moore was still regarded as the mega-hero of British sculpture. He was churning out those great big knobbly things that stand outside corporate buildings. They were almost joke sculptures to us. I didn't like them, but I did like his earlier work, which summed up a terribly British, bucolic, twee, innocent idea of "good". Those were the days, after all, when artists still wore ties. It makes me think of folk dancing. I suppose Moore didn't have the intellectual edge of artists such as Paul Nash or Eric Ravilious. He's very inoffensive, and the public these days expects more. The beauty of his work is the beauty of a worn pebble or a medieval tomb. I always think the British art world has several roles that need filling at any one time - Antony Gormley fills Henry Moore's role now; maybe Rachel Whiteread fills Barbara Hepworth's; and perhaps Damien Hirst is our Francis Bacon. It was very sad when the heads were hacked off Moore's King and Queen on the Scottish moors - what a change from interwar Britain.
Richard Wentworth, former studio assistant to Moore and master of the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford
I was 19 when I worked for Moore. It was the time of the Beatles's Sgt Pepper album. It was like a family firm; he was very gracious and kind, though he made sure he got a good day's work out of me. I always thought his procedures were rather like gardening - he was one of those people who have no fear of things that grow. They have authority in their hands. When people said: "Oh, but you don't make the work yourself", he'd always say that Michelangelo and Rodin had assistants - of course, he was saying: ". . . et moi". I think he was the headmaster of English modernism. He was a hinge for us into a kind of gentlemanly modernism, and we needed someone to do that, but perhaps now he suffers as a result.
Gavin Turk, artist
Moore's work has become a kind of iconic form of early modernism - you immediately think of Cornwall and pebble beaches. When I was at college, I tried to work away from that, but recently I've become more interested. I think it's about to become fashionable again. His sculpture used to have a stronger charge to it, certainly, and people do wonder what those interconnecting blobs are doing on the landscape, but that doesn't make him irrelevant. Anyway, I think when people say something's unfashionable, that just makes them fashionable again.
Matthew Collings, artist and critic
Henry Moore's influence on the current art scene is zero. The trendy names in sculpture now - Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Gavin Turk, Damien Hirst - are all literalists. They make casts of objects or of themselves. The ruling idea is "reality". Moore, on the other hand, was a dignified expressive artist who came up with semi-abstract shapes that stood for a poetic idea of nature and the human, a merging of the human body with the natural landscape. One exception to today's reality-trendies is Anish Kapoor, although his mix of science fiction and exotic spiritualism, while often very good, is still a long way from Moore's earthy lyricism.
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