In March 1965, Time magazine reported that, “Great Britain has become a hotbed of new sculptors, with three museum shows in London currently devoted to their renaissance.” It opened the article with a quote from one of them: “Forty years ago, the idea of there being a great English sculptor was as remote as a Hottentot becoming prime minister of Scotland.”
Leave aside the self-consciously satirical, post-colonial tone so revealing of the Sixties; the great sculptor, “the oak towering above them all”, so described in the article, was Henry Moore, then 66. Six years previously he had been garlanded by Time with his own richly illustrated cover feature.
What happened in England between 1925 and 1965 that led to the country being seen in the eyes of the world as the home of a “great” modern sculptor? This is a question about Moore’s sculptures and drawing, as much as what happened to England. And what has happened to us now that discussion of public sculpture, and not just Moore’s, appears irrelevant or marginal, as if we had nothing to learn from it? This is a question that defies the claim of contemporary political culture that “the market knows best”.
The original surprise cannot be overstated. Moore emerged in a country with no tradition whatsoever in his art form. Also, this was achieved by a northern prole. Moore was the seventh child of a Yorkshire miner. How could a stuffy, hierarchical country where sculpture meant the narrative clichés of Victorian allegory, elevate him and his distorted, reclining figures into an artist who personified modern art around the globe? Forty years on from his death, and with the largest-ever exhibition of Moore’s sculptures showing at Kew Gardens, it is a good time to re-pose the question.
At the peak of his worldwide fame, from the Fifties through to the Eighties, Moore’s monumental sculptures were acquired for public collections in more than 34 countries. Over a hundred US museums alone had one in their collections. Large shows of his work were organised, from Mexico to India to Tokyo; 345,000 visited his 1972 exhibition in Florence. Huge works were installed in Paris, New York, Singapore, Dallas, Chicago, Tokyo, Caracas, Jerusalem and outside the West German Chancellery in Bonn. Despite vicious rearguard actions in Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya, Aden, Borneo and Suez, the British empire was passing away forever. Nonetheless, it could be still said that “the sun never sets on Henry Moores”. (To prove the point, the Henry Moore Foundation now has an interactive map of them all.) Indeed, that is what I wrote in 1986, shortly after his death.
Back then, towards the end of the Eighties, his inflated reputation needed to be punctured. Since the start of his rise to fame his “greatness” was celebrated as a universalism that reconnected the English soul to the primitive – from the Cycladic to the pre-Columbian. Herbert Read wrote that, “Moore has not only created a corpus of great works of art but is helping a new age into being,” and claimed that his sculpture expressed a “modern consciousness… of the sublime”. Later, he described Moore’s monumental reclining figure, commissioned for the Unesco building in Paris in 1957, as “the feminine earth archetype, the mother of life itself”. The man himself was eulogised too. Kenneth Clark, the acme of the cultural establishment, declared that if we had to send one person to another planet to represent the human race, no one could better personify our species than Henry Moore.
In 1954, John Berger, then the New Statesman’s art critic, had the temerity to describe Moore’s King and Queen as “lifeless”, “smacked flat like kippers”, and suggested that his work was popular due to the “present sentimental, high-brow fashion for projecting crises of conscience and introspection on to the timeless processes of nature”. Berger was roundly assaulted as if he were “a national traitor” and nearly “lost his job”. The British Council demanded an official apology and reproaches filled the letter columns for more than two months.
It was an act of treason. Moore was already Britain’s artistic representative on Earth. His humanistic modernism made him the ambassador of the country’s postwar recovery as a world influence. In my research on Moore I went to Paris to look at the Unesco figure with Berger. He never resiled from his criticism of Moore’s work, but he emphasised that in his early pieces Moore’s “genius… did invent a vocabulary of forms which were unmistakably his – a great achievement”. Berger had worked in life classes alongside Moore in Chelsea School of Art and added, “Don’t forget, Britain needed him. It needed a great artist.” I was fascinated by the nature of that “need” and the nature of the relationship between Moore and my country: if he was its representative, what was he representing, and why him?
Writing in Art Monthly in 1986, I pitched against the bloated aesthetic encomiums to assert that Moore should be seen as a figure of English history. In the First World War he was a machine-gunner at Cambrai in 1917, one of 50 survivors from a battalion of 400 – many of his sculptures, especially their faces, surely reflect this. After recovering from being gassed, he was made a bayonet instructor – the man whose trademark was putting holes in sculptures. Moore, son of a tough trade unionist, voted for Labour all his life, but was ignored by its philistine party leaders despite his global fame. Perhaps the conservatism as well as the solidarity of the British Labour movement, the world’s largest and most unified, was uncomfortably symbolised in Moore’s colossal reclining figures, “which have the strength but not the will to rise”.
At the time, I saw my arguments as an attempt to demystify our own history and British self-aggrandisement. They led to a 60-minute Channel 4 documentary, directed by Hugh Brody, England’s Henry Moore. It was commissioned by Michael Kustow and produced by Lisa Appignanesi at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. The Henry Moore Foundation put up half the funding thanks to Bernard Meadows, who was its director at the time. Meadows, a sculptor in his own right (and one of those mentioned in the Time article) had been Moore’s first serious assistant, from 1936-39. He’d read my article and was fully aware of the film’s intentions; indeed, he was quietly relieved.
Hitherto, Moore had been the hero of six BBC documentaries, all directed by John Read, Herbert’s son. All were uncritical celebrations of Moore and his work, some showing him carving pieces he had not in fact touched. None recognised the significance of his assistants. While our seriousness was welcomed by most of the film’s reviewers, it was denounced in a long letter to the Times, as a “tendentious collage of political history” by Stephen Spender, whom we had filmed. Peter Fuller, editor of the magazine Modern Painters, denounced the “Marxist” nature of our project and was given a full page of the Sunday Telegraph to argue that the “film did not need to be taken seriously”, because “Moore’s sculptures may be the nearest things to the great gothic cathedrals that a secular age such as ours can produce”.
Today, I look back on that period, 40 years ago, as a golden age. We did not know how fortunate we were. It was still a time when one-hour documentaries on art were transmitted on British television; ours had more than 600,000 viewers. Today, Channel 4 seems to feel that it would be inappropriate for the channel to transmit even a digital version. As important, it was then still possible, if only just, to have a non-specialist debate about the significance of a sculptor’s work for the country that was neither a celebration of money nor sensationalist – the two media narratives of this century’s Brit-art.
A fresh consideration of Moore’s legacy needs to break free of these vices. It will need to move on from my and Brody’s 1988 effort to demystify the cult, as well as the ludicrous prolixity of Fuller and Read. We can look at Henry Moore anew as an exceptionally original artist who also was formed by and responded to the two World Wars, to see how they shaped our country’s sense of itself. Today, we can see them as a single, 30 years’ war. Between 1914 and 1945, in half a lifetime, Britain went from governing the world’s largest empire to becoming an outrider of US power as it mobilised against communism. It was a crushing collapse, experienced as victory, not least by the ruling class, as the domestic regime survived unconquered. Ever since, the country has been unable to escape the gravitational pull of this profoundly conflicted legacy.
The intense and defiant, left-wing modernism of Moore’s sculpture after he returned from the front, during the long ceasefire between 1918 and 1939; his work during the Blitz which reverberated with the progressive paternalism of the institutions that helped define the country after 1945; the “greatness” of his work thereafter, as the small maquettes he shaped were blown into vast monuments distributed around the globe – all these factors need to be considered as a single, sweeping expression of a history we must no longer allow to define us. Throughout, Moore, his collaborators and sponsors insisted on the universalism of his work and repudiated any attempt to see it as an expression of its time. This attitude was admirably defiant in an age of rampant fascism but became self-aggrandisement as colonialism morphed into globalisation.
Briefly, Moore was born in 1898 and grew up in the confines of a two-up, two-down terraced house in Castleford, West Yorkshire, with a disciplined father determined to prevent his sons from going down the mines. His mother, Mary, protected him, as the youngest boy, from his elder sisters. At times, she obliged him to massage her rheumatic back with a pungent ointment – an experience he often mentioned later. As he relates it, when he was ten or 11, a passage on Michelangelo in Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopaedia inspired him to become a sculptor. He was aided at his school by an Anglo-French art teacher who recognised his artistic talent. Crucially, in 1919, after he returned from the war, she organised for him to get an ex-serviceman’s scholarship that took him to art college in Leeds.
Moore was tagged for conscription into a local regiment to fight in the Great War. In 1916 his father decided it would be best for him to get away, to go south and volunteer for a London regiment. On the train he found himself next to the son of a lacemaker from Nottingham on a similar mission. They decided to stick together. The first regiments they approached, the Artists’ Rifles and the Honorary Artillery Company, turned them down. Even as privates there was prejudice against the sons of northern workers. Finally, the Civil Service Rifles took them on. His new friend was Douglas Houghton. He too survived the war and his ambition took him into parliament and the Labour cabinet of Harold Wilson, whom Houghton despised, and then to the Lords. We interviewed Houghton for the film and I’ve never forgotten his description of the trenches and duckboards of Passchendaele, and how it ended his religious belief.
Moore had a different war. He was at the front for just two months as a Lewis machine gunner. Then his battalion was sent into action at Cambrai where the British had secured the largest ever tank-led advance. But the Germans were prepared. Moore was part of the follow-up and experienced the full force of a huge German counter-attack. After three days of fighting his battalion was relieved. Moore was unwounded but gassed. Seven out of every eight of his comrades were slaughtered.
This brief but traumatic experience is the starting point for appreciating Moore’s sculpture. He never directly addressed the narrative of death under modern bombardment, except for one moment in 1940 in what became known as his “Shelter drawings”. His was a work of defiance and recovery, driven by what his biographer calls his “vaunting ambition”. But the experience of survival and endurance haunts his figures.
His daughter Mary told an interviewer (in 2012) “I think my father’s shelter drawings of World War II – and actually, even when I look at family groups, plug into his seeing people dead and dying in the trenches, with their faces held in a rigor mortis.”
Indeed, almost without exception, if you look at the heads and faces of Henry Moore’s sculptures they are looking inwards, as if in shock. The famous reclining figures that were celebrated as representing the universality of his humanism are mostly in trauma.
Almost all Moore’s single figures are female. The few male ones he often described as “warriors”. One of them started life as a found object that reminded Moore of a severed limb. He added a shield, which gives it a sort of ancient feel. But no ancient artist would have created such a sculpture (see the photograph below). Although it looks alive it cannot be.
Moore told an interviewer: “I remember seeing my first dead body – which is the first that I’ve seen. Which was a shock – I didn’t know that the person was dead until I went up and shook him and he fell over. This was in a little dugout – as I say, to begin with we used to say, ‘Ah, and I was only talking to him yesterday.’ And so on. Like somebody in the village being run over. So no, I wasn’t – I mean, I was a boy of 18. I meant to win a medal – so it wasn’t this kind of super sensitive, young people. It was an adventure. I enjoyed it all.”
Moore talked about how he tried and failed to machine-gun the German planes that were strafing the British positions. He lifted his uncomfortable gas mask, to sniff to see if the air was breathable. When the remnants of the battalion were relieved, he was stretchered back to Blighty to recover, his throat remained scarred by the gas. Sixty years later, Houghton told me, “You can’t get the bodies out of your mind, even at this distance.”
Today, it can be fashionable to talk about “hauntology”, but when I say that Moore was haunted by the experience of Cambrai, I don’t mean that his work is “about” it or that it can be reduced to a response to the awfulness of battle. On the contrary. When he claims he “enjoyed it all” this is not completely untrue, at least in retrospect. It proved to be a positive episode in his life. One that freed him from the oppressive dominance of his father. Certainly, Moore enjoyed surviving the horror and escaping death.
What I mean by haunted is that the spirit of survival occupies his work; a humanity determined to survive and outlast the onslaught. It leads to “the containment of inner perturbation” that Hilary Spurling described as his speciality. Perhaps we can best witness this in the stubborn defiance that characterises his late, most broken, two- and three-piece figures, where the entire body has been severed yet retains its unity.
Determination was also an attitude rooted in the spirit of his class. Son of a miner only partly describes it. Not all sons of miners were Henry Moore. His family was resolved to ensure its children escaped the life sentence of proletarian oppression. The boys were not to be consigned to a life of hewing coal underground. The girls, too, were to be educated and committed to self-improvement. Such ambition may include recognition of where one comes from, and perhaps a pride in this, but only after escape has been achieved. The overriding determination is not to be confined to or defined as “working class”. Hence, when Moore talked about his background, it was the craggy landscape of his part of Yorkshire that he mythologised, not the terraced streets. It’s a classic English trope: turning to pastoralism for meaning, in this the most industrialised land on Earth.
Demobbed in 1919, Moore returned “as a man” to the home he had left as a boy. No longer could his father’s insistence decide his fate. Instead, he headed to art college in Leeds – and the swinging Twenties. Leeds Art College was part of the university, whose vice-chancellor, Michael Sadler, collected European art, from Cézanne to Matisse, as well as African art, and invited students to see them. Apparently, Moore was especially impressed with his first sight of Van Gogh and Gauguin. He read Roger Fry’s Vision and Design with its praise of primitive sculpture, later saying that “the whole thing was there”. In one chapter, Fry writes what could be a manifesto for Moore’s sculpture:
“Generally speaking, one may say that [an African artist’s] plastic sense leads him to give its utmost amplitude and relief to all the protuberant parts of the body, and to get thereby an extraordinarily emphatic and impressive sequence of planes. So far from clinging to two dimensions, as we [the West] tend to do, he actually underlines, as it were, the three-dimensionalness of his forms. It is in some such way, I suspect, that he manages to give to his forms their disconcerting vitality, the suggestion that they make of being not mere echoes of actual figures, but of possessing an inner life of their own.”
A year after Moore went to Leeds, Barbara Hepworth arrived at the art college. The two Yorkshire students would come to define modern sculpture in the country. They had a brief affair and remained socially close and professionally competitive for two decades, developing their early modernism together. As both were ferociously hard-working, the inter-war creation of England’s sculptural modernism was, in effect, their joint enterprise. Prize scholarships to London and the Royal College of Art, and trips to Paris also gave Moore the opportunity to draw and absorb the holdings of the capital’s museums.
By the end of the Twenties he was married to Irina Radetsky, working from a studio flat in South Hampstead that Hepworth had found for them, down the road from her own. He had his first small exhibition of sculpture and drawings in 1931. The tiny catalogue opened with a note by Jacob Epstein: “A vision rich in sculptural invention, avoiding the banalities of abstraction, concentrating upon those enduring elements that constitute great sculpture… something to startle all the unthinking out of their complacency. Sculpture in England is without imagination or direction. Here in Henry Moore’s work are both qualities… For the future of sculpture in England, Henry Moore is vitally important.”
Some time after this, visiting Hepworth, Moore saw in her studio “a small, near-abstract sculpture, Pierced Form, in alabaster, the dominant feature of which was a large hole in the centre”. After seeing what she had audaciously pioneered, his work was never the same again. His marvellous reclining figures, with holes, from the 1930s, first in stone and then the less arduous elmwood, became his signature achievement and developed his distinct sculptural language.
What he took from Hepworth he made his own. In a short reflection, written in 1937, Moore maintained: “The sculptor… must strive continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness… The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation. The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is possible, where the stone contains only the hole, which is the intended and considered form.”
At the same time he reflected: “For me, a work must first have a vitality of its own… a pent-up energy… independent of the object it may represent… because a work does not aim at reproducing natural appearances it is not, therefore, an escape from life… not just the exercise of good taste, the provision of pleasant shapes and colours in a pleasing combination.” You can see Fry’s influence. And he emphasised: “I think the humanist organic element will always be for me of fundamental importance in sculpture, giving sculpture its vitality.”
This commitment to a humanist element separated him from Hepworth, whose work took on a radical abstraction. In the middle of the Second World War, Moore completed a Madonna and Child for a church in Northampton. It was much celebrated and then became notorious in 1949 when it was singled out in the drunken rant of the then head of the Royal Academy, Alfred Munnings, in his farewell speech as the Academy’s president. At one point he said, “And on my left, I have a newly elected extraordinary member of the Academy, Mr Winston Churchill, and I know he is beside me because once he said to me ‘Alfred, if you meet Picasso coming down the street, would you join me in kicking his something something something’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir, I would.’” As for Moore’s Madonna and Child, which Munnings singled out, “I am damned sure that isn’t right.” For modernists like Hepworth, however, the work was all too pleasant and close to good taste. She wrote to her close friend and patron, Margaret Gardiner, that “Moore’s Virgin and Child… disturbed me profoundly.”
Photo via Alamy
It marked the start of Moore’s becoming a “national institution”. To understand how this happened it is necessary to comprehend the double challenge of being a contemporary artist in the 1930s. You would be hard-up, and anti-fascist. There was an inevitable politics to being avant-garde after the rise of Nazism. Moore’s network was involved in supporting the republican government in Spain against Franco and he was close to the communists. Later, when famous and wealthy, he insisted, “It’s not in my bones to vote anything but Labour.” At the time, earning money was very difficult. In 1933, when Robert Sainsbury bought a large carved, and radically modern, Mother and Child, he paid £160. It was, he wrote, “half of Moore’s income for the year”.
The man who ensured Moore found buyers at the end of the Thirties, and became the main influence on his life after 1940, was Kenneth Clark. In 1933 Clark, a fabulously wealthy connoisseur and collector, became director of the National Gallery at the age of 30. For the next 40 years he was an impresario of the UK’s artistic culture. Oddly, like Moore, he was a lifelong Labour voter. Paternalist to his fingertips, his radicalism resided in his two-fold belief in the significance of contemporary art and that everyone, in all classes, should be able to appreciate the finest aspects of culture. Naturally, his personal network of contacts included leading galleries in London and New York. He was among the early acquirers of Moore’s drawings. (At the conclusion of his much later BBC series Civilisation he is filmed standing in his resplendent study and pats a Henry Moore that he owned, as if it was his cat.) Towards the end of the Thirties he went to meet Moore in his studio, where he was working on a large reclining elmwood figure, mostly carved by Bernard Meadows. Meadows told me, “After Clark it was never difficult to make a living.”
When war was declared in 1939, Clark oversaw the evacuation of the National Gallery’s masterpieces into the Welsh hills and then opened the building to packed lunchtime music concerts (the evenings were too dangerous with blackouts). He also exhibited contemporary wartime art. For his main achievement was organising, and getting the Treasury to fund, the creation of a war-artists scheme. Its aim was to record the experience of the war, provide artists with some income, and protect them from conscription. More than 200 were recruited. Moore immediately turned down the offer to join, “I had enough of soldiers.” As there ceased to be income from sculpture, he applied to become a precision engineer, and ceased carving – but drew ceaselessly.
One evening, in the deep platform of the Hampstead Tube station, he saw sleeping figures sheltering from the Blitz. He noted a description and hurried to his studio to draw and colour the image he’d identified. He filled 68 pages of what became known as his first “Shelter Sketchbook”. He brought it to Clark, who declared he was now a war-artist. It became a turning point for Moore, for his art, his success and his international greatness.
Moore filled two intense sketchbooks with coloured drawings. From them he developed more than 75 larger drawings which could be hung or sold separately, some of which were exhibited at the National Gallery. These finished works focused on sleeping figures such as Green and Red Sleepers, and figures in a stretch of Underground in east London, where a tunnel did not yet have railway lines and people could sleep safely away from platforms. His daughter, Mary Moore, is surely right to say, “To me, those sleepers also represent the sleep of death. I’m saying that what we need is a rigorous reappraisal of his work. Because, actually, it’s not all just syrupy or touchy-feely.”
The shelter drawings, made to be publicly displayed, were the only time that Moore turned his hand to narrative art. But the figures still look sculptural and have a monumental quality. Along with their drapery they laid the basis for Moore’s softer and more clichéd work of the Fifties and Sixties, which would make him immensely rich, thanks to their accessible character that linked the “modern” to the timeless.
The sketchbooks, however, have a quite different, rough and intense immediacy. Many show above-ground scenes of destruction from the Blitz, barbed wire and crashed aeroplanes. On some, he notes possible “war subjects”. At the bottom of one short list to himself, he writes, “Composite picture of devastated buildings and shelters and London skyline.” A later page in the same sketchbook shows what he describes as “figure pinned under debris”. She has clearly been killed. Another shows a woman, sitting on an outside pavement, “rescued from debris, hair filled with plaster etc”. Another shows a “rescue party”.
One is simply wild. A sheet towards the end of the sketchbook combines a powerful image of a woman and child lying underground with a heavily bombed street above, as if probing how to create a “composite picture”. It seems that Moore contemplated the creation of a monumental canvas of London at war. From the searchlights in the night sky (which appear in a separate set of sketches) to devastated and burning buildings and their victims on the surface, to figures sheltering in the Underground. Only three years before he had been with a small group to visit Picasso as he was working on the huge canvas of Guernica. It became famous as a protest against the first aerial bombardment of a Western city. It would have been natural for Moore, who did not lack ambition, to wonder whether he might create an equivalent masterpiece of London’s Blitz.
Most Londoners hated the shelter pictures displayed in the National Gallery. They “felt baffled and insulted. Here is a whole new underground world from which they found themselves totally excluded, [the drawings] morbid and unreal.” It was an understandable response. The wilfulness, agency and resistance of the regular Londoners who took to the Underground in their tens of thousands is entirely missing. Steve McQueen’s unsung masterpiece Blitz, which came out in 2024, captures how they occupied the Tube stations in defiance of officialdom. Moore’s images are devoid of this excitement, spirit of collective agency and, initially, of rebelliousness, which was part of the escape to safety.
Instead, Moore captures something else which was to give the shelter drawings their talismanic quality: the experience of endurance and self-respect, qualities the English embraced despite themselves, that became part of our sense of national identity with the First World War and then foundational to what became known as “consensus politics” after the Second. Moore was the artist of this profound social experience – its mix of suffering, deference and defiance.
One of the non-Londoners who saw the reworked shelter compositions in the National Gallery in 1942 was the vicar of St Matthew’s Church in Northampton. He commissioned the notorious Madonna and Child. Moore resigned as a War Artist, and turned back to sculpture. It was unveiled in 1944 to the widespread acclaim, not least in the Daily Mirror, that enraged Alfred Munnings. Not, as we have seen, because of any radical abstraction but because it signalled the replacement of his Blimpish Toryism and style of class rule by progressive Keynesianism. Thus began Moore’s ascent into becoming a national institution.
It was an ascent aided by three crucial factors. First, Moore’s canny collaboration with the official art world. He became a trustee of the Tate in 1941, and in 1942 a founder member of the arts panel that became the Arts Council. He made his practical presence known and available to official circles. Doubtless guided by Kenneth Clark, this integrated him into the network of state patronage.
Second, he may not have been a “chap” but for an artist he was remarkably dependable. Jill Craigie, Michael Foot’s wife, told Hugh Brody how she fell in love with Moore when they were filming a recreation of his work on the shelter drawings towards the end of the war. In a tender recollection she describes how he was tempted to reciprocate, but after a stiff walk in the garden decided that marriage to Irina would not be betrayed. Rather than being dangerously bohemian – like Picasso – he could be revered as a steadfast family man and ambassador for “our way of life”, all the more so as he had moved to live in the countryside and almost always wore a tie.
Third, and most important, America loved his work. Moore’s first retrospective was held in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in November 1946. It was the first time MoMA devoted a show to a British artist. It included 58 sculptures and 48 drawings and with lots of media coverage it drew 158,000 visitors in three months, before going to Chicago and then San Francisco. As important, Americans began to buy as well as display his work.
The late Forties were the years that birthed the “special relationship” between the US and UK. For the “mother country” it meant a cultural reimagination that provided a route out of identification with empire and into an English-speaking “free world”; in which we retained our greatness by redefining our world influence within the hegemony of America. (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s superb A Matter of Life and Death from 1946 is the movie of this transition.) Moore’s transcendent success in the decades that followed was inconceivable without the media and financial endorsement of New York. He became a purveyor and a beneficiary of a transatlantic modernism that was a counterpoint to the socialist realism of the Soviet Union (in his case probably without help from the CIA). Success then followed success. Chosen, along with JMW Turner, as the country’s representative artist at the first Venice Biennale after the war in 1948, he was awarded the prize for best sculpture. His official biographer wrote: “The great impact of the show on visiting museum directors, dealers and critics, transformed his reputation in Europe as suddenly as the MoMA show had in the US. Henry always recognised this, and it confirmed his view that ‘the British Council did more for me as an artist than any dealer’.”
It was time to consolidate Moore’s position at home. In 1951 the Festival of Britain was also a “Festival of Moore”. On the centenary of the Great Exhibition, when Victorian England introduced the world to the glories of the Industrial Revolution, London’s South Bank was dedicated to a celebration of domestic achievement. From the Dome of Discovery and Skylon to pavilions of modern domestic life, it introduced the public to postwar progress and the country’s best design, art and manufacturing. Across the summer of 1951, more than eight million visitors drank in the prospects of a friendly, colourful and scientific future – I was taken as a nine-year-old, my first social memory, and I can still taste the impression and delight.
Moore completed a stark Reclining Figure, which was placed at the entrance to the festival site. In parallel, his first British retrospective was curated at the Tate. In addition, the first-ever TV documentary art film was made – about him and only him. It showed the Reclining Figure being created from a maquette to the plaster, from which the bronze was cast. To stirring music, Moore was filmed impersonating himself at work in a hagiography free from any debate or discussion.
The decade that followed filled the world with Moores. His work was not without serious criticism. In the US, Clement Greenberg, the Pied Piper of abstractionism, wrote that, “I’ve had my fill of Henry Moore and artists like him,” as he claimed that today’s art “should have almost no historical associations whatsoever” and completely “avoid naturalism”. Perhaps the most canny criticism also explained Moore’s success. Hilton Kramer, art critic of the New York Times, wrote about a piece installed at Columbia University in 1967, “There is something about the recent work of the celebrated English artist – something about its massive but gentle forms, its bronze glitter and high style rhetoric, its quality of being at once eminently modern and yet vaguely traditional – that makes it the inevitable choice of civic-minded patronage. Not every such patron manages to get himself a Moore, but everyone seems to want one.” In America. Few architects, owners of corporate headquarters and civic patrons in England clamoured to have a Moore installed.
The Festival of Britain was far from being just a “Festival of Moore”. A whole range of artists were commissioned, including Hepworth who created two major pieces. One was Two Contrapuntal Forms. Three years later, in a review of a large retrospective of her work, headlined “Sculptural Vacuum”, Berger, again in the New Statesman, criticised the technical formalism and “emptiness” of her work. As a young artist he was allowed to draw on the festival site as it was being constructed. To make his argument he recounted how “when Miss Hepworth’s two monumental figures arrived at the South Bank for the festival, the workmen who unloaded them spent a long time searching for an opening or a hinge because they believed that the real figures must be inside”. Their search was fruitless, because those pieces and her work in general lacked real content and she had “retreated into abstraction”. As a verdict I think this unfair: there is an energy and beauty as well as exploration to her abstraction. But Moore’s allegiance to the human form ensured his acclaim.
After the festival, Moore’s Reclining Figure went to Leeds. There it was blasted in the columns of the Yorkshire Post as “a human form in an advanced stage of decomposition which has been disembodied, partially decapitated and had both feet severed”. The author went on to compare it to “the victims of Belsen and Hiroshima”. This was written to dismiss, indeed excoriate it, in contrast to John Read’s film which lauds its eternal beauty. The two reactions delineate the spectrum of the responses to Moore’s work, from eulogy to denunciation. In this case the latter is not a mere reactionary fart like Munnings. The correspondent of the Yorkshire Post has actually looked at the sculpture. Unlike Read, he relates what he sees, not what the official Moore cult would like him to think.
When it comes to Moore’s sculptures we need to start from the truth delineated by Moore’s disgusted critic in the Yorkshire Post. Yes, the figures in Moore’s major works are profoundly injured, disembodied, and often even partially decapitated. However, they are recomposing themselves, not decomposing. The best of Moore’s sculptures, even when catastrophically disfigured, have an inner life. They are works of survival and endurance under the most intense and violent pressure. The Shelter Sketchbooks can be seen as their collective label.
You can look on his work as a romantic incorporation of the crags, hills and caves of the English landscape if you wish. But the sentiment that drives them is no more pastoral than the landscape that surrounded Moore’s dugout at Cambrai from which, he observed, every blade of grass had been blasted. His human figures display a persistence: a refusal to be completely crushed by the multiple implosions of the 20th century.
Although industrial survival is not without Romanticism, all such specific, historical interpretation would have been anathema to Moore himself. He encouraged every effort to regard his work was an ahistorical resurrection – a notable example being the 1948 London exhibition “40,000 years of Modern Art”, co-curated by Herbert Read. As we have seen, this fitted perfectly with the role of the British Council and other official bodies, that wanted to project the country as still great and fundamentally unchanging. A belief that has rolled down through interminable decade after decade to our own.
So this is my answer to the question of what happened between 1925 and 1965 to make the UK the home of great global sculptor. In the 1920s, modern sculptors in London participated in European experiments, including the abstract work of constructivism and the organic distortions of surrealism. Moore was a particularly hard-working and original member of this scene and one who, crucially, had undergone the calvary of the trenches and survived. Unlike Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, for example, only seven years older than Moore, a precocious member of the London Group who was killed fighting for France in 1915. Had the supremacy of Hitler been prevented; had there been no Second World War and no American alliance to fold the British empire into Washington’s domination, Moore’s unique but obsessive vision is unlikely to have made him a world famous. Instead, the London Blitz triggered an artistic response that made him a nationally, and then, thanks to the US, internationally renowned. An implacable ambition, rooted in a working-class determination to prove he was a good as anyone, then allowed him to cannily ride his postwar success to fund and inflate his works and their reputation. Despite this, a “pent-up energy” in his best, instantly recognisable sculpture, continues to demand our attention.
Which brings us to how we should assess Moore now, as we head towards the 2030s. Which is in itself a new question. What has happened across the 40 years between 1986 when Moore died and today, to explain why Britain has lost the need for artistic representatives?
To put it in terms of Moore and the new exhibition of his work at Kew Gardens, first we must free ourselves from interpreting his work as the expression of eternal truths of landscape and motherhood that condemn us to waffle on about his enduring importance. Second, we should see him as carving, shaping and monumentalising human resistance to the violent implosions of empire. Third, we can assess his achievements and failures as a way to engage with the taproots of our modern history, the 30-year conflict of 1914-45.
In what ways, then, does his work still represent us, if at all? A question that strikes into the structures of what it means to feel British and be English. It can’t be answered satisfactorily without a recognition of the public importance of sculpture, something that is close to being evaporated. Those who create monuments for us should be as formative a part of our conversation about “who we are” – something England especially needs in the wake of Brexit – as any public intellectual or magazine. Nor is there any shortage of significant sculptors who could be part of our reflections about England’s future – indeed, there are four in particular worth consideration.
Tony Cragg, was born in Liverpool in 1949 and is perhaps the closest to Moore in that he has developed his own languages of form. His reputation took off with his marvellous 1981 Britain Seen from the North, which reproduced the island with plastic detritus. In 2013 he completed Tommy, an extraordinary piece that changes its nature as you walk around it, one angle echoing Winged Victory, another a figure in mourning. He works in Wupperthal, became a German citizen after Brexit, and is a truly European artist with permanent public sculptures across the Continent but not in his native land. While they must exist, I have yet to meet anyone in the UK outside the art world who has heard of him.
Hew Locke, a Londoner, born in 1959 in Scotland with a Guyanese father, is an amazing sculpture of the vibrations of empire. His Procession filled Tate Britain’s main gallery in 2022. He created The Jurors at Runnymede in 2014, commissioned to celebrate the 800th anniversary of King John putting his seal to Magna Carta. Until now, only Americans have commemorated the birthplace of England’s still far from complete efforts to secure its liberties. Locke’s conception is 12 chairs on which we can sit. They are in an oval, at the centre of the meadow, each inscribed with representations of a specific struggle for freedom and human rights, from Magna Carta’s assertion that no man shall be imprisoned “except by the lawful judgement of his peers”, to struggles against slavery and for women’s rights. It is a brilliantly conceived public commemoration at a defining, historic national site. But I’m confident few know about it.
Rachel Whiteread’s Nameless Library in Vienna is a profoundly powerful monument to the victims of the Holocaust. Situated in the Judenplatz near the old synagogue, the plinth around it is embossed with the names of the camps to which the Jews of the city were transported. Its completion made her a European sculptor. Born in 1963 in Essex, her casts create an extraordinary relationship to time. In 1993 she completed House, the cast of the interior of an entire Victorian terrace house in Tower Hamlets. Going to see it was the only time I had an argument in a bus about a work of art. It was demolished.
At least Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North has secured him a public significance. Is it a memorial to the loss of industry in what was once an epicentre of production? Is it a commitment to the rebirth of a once-ignored region? Unmissable from road and rail, its gigantic 54-metre wingspan makes the Angel there in a way few sculptures achieve. Born in Hampstead in 1950, of German-Irish descent, Gormley explores the relationships of the human body in space, from roofs to the sea shore. He too, disgusted with Brexit, has become a German citizen, while working in London.
The four have proved they are capable of engaging with public experience through work that is commanding yet not strident. Britain should have welcomed them with lots of interest. That it does not poses a question about what has happened to our wider political culture. Where is it?
One way to track how this has happened is through the obsession with greatness; holding in mind that the inflation of Moore’s sculptures and reputation was part of this. It was the organising pathology of “Great Britain’s” political culture. A good place to start is Oliver Franks’s 1954 Reith lectures. He had just returned from being ambassador in Washington. He praised the cross-party consensus on issues such as the creation of Nato and nuclear weapons and emphasised that it stemmed from a shared principle. “It can be stated very simply. Britain is going to continue to be what she has been, a Great Power.” (His capitals.) The Commonwealth was also an essential part of this because it “enables us to play in the big league”. Otherwise, he asked, “What is this small island with its 50 million inhabitants if it has to go it alone?”
The key to understanding the congenital mentality of Westminster and Whitehall is locked in this sentence. We many millions, we natives, are insufficient to ensure the country’s true nature. At that time, however repulsive it is to us now, the sentiment expressed by Franks – imperial, self-important, supremacist – was tangible. Britain was one of the “big three” with nuclear weapons and military bases. The “Sterling area” did have global economic significance. British companies were among Europe’s largest. The Labour government had played a key role in the creation of Nato.
In the years that followed, from the humiliation of the 1956 Suez invasion to the “Winter of Discontent” in 1978-79, “greatness” was battered to the edge of termination. What was then needed was to confront the loss, dust ourselves down and become a European country sharing sovereignties. Instead, in 1982, the Argentinians gifted Margaret Thatcher the Falklands War. Victory allowed her to claim that “today has put the Great back into Britain”, as she spat out her joy at the return of the repressed:
“There were those who would not admit it – people who would have strenuously denied the suggestion but – in their heart of hearts they too had their secret fears that it was true: that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well, they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history.”
Britain did change hugely, in terms of its economy and society. Thatcher’s policies saw to that. But the transformation she oversaw preserved both the role of the Victorian state and a rejuvenation of what can be termed its structure of fantasy. It seems a paradox. She undid the blundering, Churchillist form of postwar consensus politics, in order to marketise the country in the name of Churchill. In so doing, she reasserted the imperial ethos of what she herself called the “regime”.
However, the “greatness” she reinvigorated was now a much thinner thing than Franks’s, far more dependent on America. Finally, in 1989, she sought to prevent the reunification of Germany, sensing it would undermine Britain’s unique role in the Cold War. She showed maps of the Third Reich to a bemused President George Bush to warn him against it. He realised that she had lost her way. Instead of seizing the historic opportunity to turn the reunification of Europe into a British success, she took it out on the EU instead. Moore’s Two Large Forms outside the Chancellery in Bonn did not travel to the new capital of Berlin.
What Thatcher initiated, Tony Blair consolidated: at home, he modernised her marketisation. This has proved all the more important because it is more difficult to reverse. When Thatcher claimed “there is no alternative”, it was a provocation, one to which we could – and did – reply, “Oh, yes there is!” When, guided by Mandelson, New Labour shut down the creativity of the early Nineties with a manipulated populism, resistance was demobilised. “I hear people say we have to stop and debate globalisation,” Blair said later, summing up his attitude to public engagement. “You might as well debate whether autumn should follow summer.”
In the Treasury, Gordon Brown softened Thatcherism’s cruelties. An important set of democratic reforms were implemented, but treated as a legacy inherited from Blair’s short-lived predecessor as Labour leader, John Smith. The defining “project” for Blair was to further centralise the British state, on the model of corporate power, and to intensify the American alliance. Aware that mere British greatness had become a relic, like hereditary peers, Blair doubled the bluff. The relative strength of Britain in world terms headed downwards, as it had to. To compensate, as the UK’s armed forces aided the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, he telegrammed Bush: “Our ambition is big: to construct a global agenda around which we can unite the world.”
Depth of some kind is essential to counter such shallowness. Blair’s allegiance to global greatness ensured his complete failure on this score. In July 2003, when it seemed as if the Iraq invasion four months previously was “mission accomplished”, even an idiot would have counselled caution. Instead, Blair addressed the Joint Houses of Congress and declared, “There never has been a time when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood, or when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day.”
He had just invaded Mesopotamia, the oldest graveyard of civilisations, only to declare there is little to learn from history. Even 20 years later, the hubris is extraordinary. He was wrong, just as historians of the Middle East had forewarned him. But this is a narrow point. The larger cultural lesson was never learned, for which many more are responsible. No sustained, cultural intelligentsia rose up to denounce Blair’s sheer vacuousness. His “sincere” self-confidence was accepted at face value. The prime minister committed the country to superficiality bordering on nothingness; few objected, while the BBC was battered into submission.
Meanwhile, culturally, calamity was inscribed in Britain’s all-important, post-Cold War European policy. At the turn of the millenium, the optimism of early New Labour also saw a high point for the EU’s popularity in Britain. It held the promise of growing into a genuinely European society. Blair was greedy for any power and influence he might gain from Brussels. But unlike the relationship with Washington, its value was purely transactional, shorn of identification with its project. In Between the Waves, Tom McTague has shown how opposition to EU membership, from Enoch Powell to Roger Scruton, was rooted in a belief in “our home”, one that was umbilically attached to a defensive sense of greatness. Shallow and monomaniac, the strength of this ideology was its persistence. Something that could only be squashed by an equally tenacious commitment to “our continental home” that still awaits wholehearted cultivation.
New Labour’s combination of marketisation, modernisation and a obsession with global greatness amputated Britain’s public culture from the realities of our past experience. History, especially recent, relevant history, became a “sunk cost”, the capitalist description for writing off investments. Corruption in all its forms followed, as allegiance to traditions of integrity were vapourised. With wisdom binned and greed extolled, the stage was set for the crown prince of superficiality, Boris Johnson. He had been 18 when the Falklands triumph blew his mind. Now, he sought to reverse-modernise us back to that heady time, with what he termed the “Liberation Day” of Brexit – as “Take back control” was hailed as the way to “Put the ‘Great’ back into Britain”.
The desire for greatness has become transmogrified into the opposite of Franks’s 1954 articulation of it: into isolation camouflaged with talk of trade deals. Keir Starmer sought to keep the wreckage on the road. Failure was baked into his Labour’s 2024 manifesto with its pledge to “make Brexit work”. For two years, just like those workers at the Festival of Britain, many searched fruitlessly for the opening that might reveal what is inside Starmer’s premiership, such as a project, plan, or way forward. There was nothing there. Not even the grandeur of Hepworth’s late failure.
Suddenly, a northerner seems to have swept to the rescue. The sense of hopelessness, implosion and fin de régime Faragism has been lifted. The Financial Times had reported that “Britain’s traditional two-party duopoly… is being smashed.” An unusually frank assessment. Do we want Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch to put it back together? The Prime Minister has an attachment to Tony Harrison, another Yorkshire artist who was deeply English but utterly un-parochial. It should be turned into an opportunity. It’s time for a high-energy engagement with England’s political culture to break apart the philistine conservatism of a residual Labourism, now penetrated by money and corporate power. Something that can’t succeed without a revival in the relevance of painting and sculpture as well as theatre, movies and literature.
Which means engaging in the discomforting questions of the nature of our home in the world. It was a form of denial to hail Moore’s greatness as sublime and universal. It expressed British society’s stubborn refusal to accept being reduced to “a small island”. And it made subordination to America seem more acceptable. Today, Washington has declared a wrap on its ambition to be the capital of an inclusive, international civilisation of which we can be a part. There is no rescue from this. Were even an anti-racist, democratic majority, capable of reining in the monsters of Silicon Valley, to sweep away the Trumpite grip on America’s institutions, we would still be on our own.
In the decades after 1945 that made Moore’s fortune, the attachment to “greatness” and the “special relationship” may have been a fantasy, but it was an actually existing one shaping desires and perspectives. It was central to Moore’s public achievement. Now we need to engage with his legacy for ourselves, without bloviating or help from America. This can assist a coming to terms with, and moving on from, our Thirty Years War with Germany. We need to do so as the European country that we are, capable of benefiting from egalitarian investment in our shared cultures.
It is a delicious irony that the Henry Moore Foundation, co-created by his daughter in 1977 to shield him from huge tax bills, survives like an island from the past, a social democratic public interest institution whose objectives are to assist sculpture in all its expressions. It does not have the power to wake up England. But it can ring the bell, as it is doing at Kew Gardens.
Anthony Barnett’s documentary, England’s Henry Moore, directed by Hugh Brody, will be showing at the Warburg Institute on 7 January 2027
[Further reading: The late harvest of John Constable]
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