The Sentinels of Nurture

By ROBERT HUGHES

There is ample room to debate the influence that Henry Moore had on modern sculpture. But the sheer pervasiveness of his work is not in doubt. When he died last week at the age of 88 in the farmhouse where he had lived and worked for more than 40 years, near the English village of Much Hadham, Henry Moore, C.H., O.M., was the best-known sculptor in the world.

His public works in marble and bronze, mainly based on the human figure, stood, sat and (especially) reclined on their plinths in cities from London to Chicago, from Melbourne to New York. No other major artist in the past century, not even Auguste Rodin, completed as many public commissions as Moore. At the height of his fame, from 1960 onward, it seemed that every mayor, museum director and chairman of the board in the Western world had simultaneously agreed that a Moore work was the only possible solution to the problem of how to relieve the hardness and social tension of new post-Bauhaus buildings with an organic metaphor, how to dress up a civic space without commemorating anything in particular. At the same time, people in the street found that his work spoke to them in a way that some dull tangle of official I beams could not.

It is also worth remembering, now that everyone takes for granted the rightness of open landscape as a site for sculpture, that he did more than any other artist of his time to rekindle that idea and recover some of its archaic roots. Moore's King and Queen, 1952-53, gazing out over the stony ocean of Scottish moors, are the descendants not of 18th century garden sculpture but of something older, more vital and mysterious: the chthonic spirit of place embodied in the dolmens of Carnac or Stonehenge.

No other sculptor's imagination was more manifestly connected to his past, even to his infancy, than Moore's. Like D.H. Lawrence, he came from a mining village; his father had labored in the pit and risen to become an engineer. His mother bore eight children, and one does not need to be an exegete to realize that it is to her that his work insistently refers -- those broad- backed, maternal figures, like sentinels, their bodies expanded into bosses and swells that suggest an infant's apprehension of the breast, or hollowed into womblike cavities. The fundamental experience of work that every miner's boy knew about -- that of going down into a cramped, cold and dangerous darkness to hew at rock -- was transcended in Moore's work as a man: still cutting stone, but in the light, and in the soothing precinct of his mother's remembered body. What anxiety was to Giacometti or sexual rage to Picasso, nurture and shelter were to Moore. His commitment to sculpture as an act of hollowing, modeling and smoothing the "body" of a single mass ran counter to the pattern of 20th century sculpture, which was to construct from disparate parts a shape that did not need to be felt with the hands, one in which sight preceded touch. (Who ever wanted to stroke a Gonzalez or a David Smith?) His impulse to preserve the traditional values of carving and casting went back to his Yorkshire childhood.

But nothing comes out of childhood without the formal keys to unlock it. Where other art was concerned, Moore (like his lifelong friend and patron Kenneth Clark, who arranged for him to be an official war artist in World War II and was thus partly responsible for the sculptor's best-known early work, the underground-shelter drawings) was a great looker and rememberer. Certain works were fundamental to his art. A stone carving of the Mexican rain-god Chacmool gave him the crankshaft rhythm of shoulders, waist, pelvis and thighs that would surface in his own figures from the late '20s on. Cezanne's ponderous and sculptural Bathers spoke to his own obsessions with the reclining figure. Archaic sculpture of every kind, especially Mayan and Aegean, fortified his lifelong interest in totems and sentinel figures; and then there were Donatello and Michelangelo, the painted figures of Masaccio and, perhaps most challenging to him in his maturity, the sculptures of Giovanni Pisano in Siena and Pisa, not far from the marble quarries at Forte dei Marmi, where he took to working during the summers.

In short, like all conscientious artists, Moore composed his own tribunal, that of the great dead from whose silent judgment there is no appeal. Naturally, his lack of close affinity with the avant-garde -- or even with the idea of avant-gardism -- made him seem like a fuddy-duddy to some younger sculptors, particularly in the '60s. It might have been otherwise had he behaved like the Great English Artist people were always making him out to be, but he was utterly without pretension, and his zeal for public service, as long as it did not get in the way of his work, was genuine. He was consulted by British Prime Ministers, from Anthony Eden to Margaret Thatcher, on museum and art-education policy and never failed to stand up to them on behalf of younger or less successful artists.

Inevitably, so long a working life entailed a certain amount of repetition; to the skeptic, the later Moore seemed to be running a one-man academy of stones and bones. "Less is more, and Moore is a bore" was what one heard from English art students hip to Anthony Caro and David Smith, and the sentiment was echoed by people who had forgotten, or not known, his stubborn efforts to get modernism a hearing among the art-hating English 30 years before. All that is over, but the sculpture remains. When the best of it has been winnowed out -- which will take years, for the oeuvre is huge -- its grandeur of formal diction and intimacy of feeling will leave no doubt at all as to Moore's stature.