Dialogue in Stone

The Forte di Belvedere straddles a hill to the south of Florence. From the air, its weathered bastions and parapets give it the shape of an immense starfish. Completed in the 16th century, it gradually lost its strategic value and nobody ever found much civilian use for it. After the disastrous flood of 1966, it became a storehouse for damaged books from Florence's national library. But a problem remained: how to integrate this masterpiece of obsolete military building with the tourist life of the city below? The answer was to turn it into an exhibition center. The fortress's ancient terraces, overlooking Florence to the north and the tranquil, cypress-dotted hills behind San Miniato to the south, were potentially a superb site for the open-air installation of large-scale sculpture--provided that a sculptor could be found whose work could confront, and survive, the austere monumentality of the building itself. To Florence's civic leaders, there was only one choice: Henry Moore.

A Moore retrospective--containing 289 works (drawings and gouaches as well as sculpture), arranged according to basic themes and covering 50 years of Moore's activity--is currently on view at the Forte di Belvedere. It runs through the summer, until Sept. 30, and no matter how familiar Henry Moore's work may be to the international art audience, this is perhaps the most important show to be held in Italy this year. Certainly it is the most spectacular. "If a sculptor had -L-20 million to build the ideal site for his work," says Moore, now 74, "it wouldn't be as good as this."

Under the searching Tuscan sunlight, the dialogue between the vast, worn stones of the fortress and Moore's luminously translucent Seravezza marble becomes a public conversation between two old friends. This is appropriate, considering how deeply embedded Moore's work is in the Italian tradition of monumental form. To see his largest piece, the 18-foot high, 170-ton Square Form with Cut, 1969-70, against Brunelleschi's apricot-colored dome of Santa Maria del Fiore is to realize how completely Moore has conquered the problems of architectonic scale, and how little the basic forms that satisfy the desire for "monumentality" have changed in the intervening 600 years. To Moore, who first visited Florence on a traveling scholarship in 1925, the city is "my artistic home." The shapes of Tuscany--from the consoling, breastlike curves of its domes to the muscular run and clench of the Apennine horizon--have remained fundamental in his lexicon of form, giving it a stringency as well as a sense of humanistic presence that is unique in contemporary sculpture. One does not look to Moore's work for surprises but for a sense of continuity.

"Art," he declares, "is a universal continuous activity with no separation between past and present." In this respect, his preoccupation has not wavered. "Keep ever prominent the world tradition," the 27-year-old student scribbled in a notebook on May 4, 1926, "the big view of sculpture." This world tradition included both the smooth, delicately inflected modeling of 15th century Florentines like Domenico Rosselli--whose work Moore imitated, with some precocity, in the 1922 Head of a Virgin that begins the retrospective --and a Mexican sculpture of the god Chac-Mool that Moore saw in the British Museum. "Its 'stoniness,' " he later wrote of Mexican carving, "its tremendous power without loss of sensitiveness makes it unsurpassed by any other period of stone sculpture."

Mexican art provided Moore with what seems to be his main formal signature--a ponderous, square-end, crankshaft-like movement for the recumbent form, which still pervades even such recent bronzes as Reclining Figure, 1969-70, and Two-Piece Reclining Figure: Points. But as a model of sculptural effort, it is Michelangelo who presides over Moore's ambitions. "He engaged me most," says Moore, "and has remained an ideal ever since."

There is a gouache, dated 1942, which unwittingly prophesied a certain public view of Moore's work. Entitled Crowd Looking at a Tied-Up Object, it shows a deserted heath on which a huge monument stands, swaddled in tarpaulin and rope. Onlookers regard it with reverent expectation. No doubt this drawing, when Moore made it, was a tribute to the surrealist idea of the "enigmatic object," but in 1972 it looks like an official unveiling--all it needs is a Midwestern bank in the background.

Anachronism. Old Fred Flintstone, as one of Moore's Australian assistants irreverently nicknamed him, is the official sculptor of the mid-20th century, par excellence, and this inevitably provokes a reaction among younger artists, who are apt to see his work as anachronistic and rhetorical. This happens because Moore's art sets its face against the main current of recent sculpture, a current that runs away from solid form, toward open linear or planar construction. Moore is a modeler and carver, not a welder and fitter. His work is about mass, volume, the weighty displacement of air by a heavier medium. In that area he has no living peer.

Ultimately, an artist is to be judged in terms of what he chose to do, not whether history followed him or not. The dicta that surround Moore's art have become a veritable armor of cliches--for instance, the idea of "truth to material"--but they no longer seem essential to sculpture, or even very germane to Moore's best work. They have withered, as the 1960s' obsession with the flatness of the picture plane is withering. What remains, in Moore's case, is a body of work so massive in its consistency, and so ambitious in its scope, that it almost seems the product of another culture. And so it is. Moore is one of the last survivors of that early stage of modernism when the making of art was held to be a crucial, ethically charged activity, rather than a game or an exercise in information theory. If he seems a dinosaur, so much the worse for the geckos.

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