British artist Henry Moore, once described as the “greatest sculptor since Rodin,” also captured battle through his works. He focused on those who suffered on the home front. “The air raids began–and the war from being an awful worry became a real experience,” he wrote to a friend in 1939. “Tube Shelter Perspective 1941,” a pencil and crayon drawing, shows a horizontal hole swallowing up desperate Londoners trying to escape the nightly ravages of the Blitz. The anonymous faces are disturbing, yet the work itself evokes an inspiring sense that everyone is in this awful experience together.
To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Moore’s death, London’s Imperial War Museum is hosting the exhibition “Henry Moore: War and Utility” (through February 2007). The works in this retrospective, all done between 1938 and 1954, focus on the human face of war. Moore, who fought in the trenches during World War I, loathed the violence. Yet he was so opposed to fascism that on the eve of World War II, he contemplated volunteering for service. “Without war, which directed one’s direction to life itself, I think I would have been a far less sensitive and responsible person,” he once said, according to the exhibition’s catalogue. “The war brought out and encouraged the humanist side of one’s work.”
During the fighting, when the area around his cottage in the country became a restricted military zone and he could no longer carve in the open air, Moore temporarily shifted from sculpture to drawing. Between 1940 and 1942 he produced no three-dimensional work. But his love for the form did not disappear; in “Crashed Aeroplane and Urban Skyline,” a pencil, crayon and ink drawing, sculpted images occupy the foreground, while incongruous sketches of sheep, a skyline wrapped in barbed wire and a crashed plane create a clockwise flow to the pink and yellow work. Moore’s sketches are also littered with notes, giving the viewer a fascinating insight into the artist’s mind and visual imagination. In “Group of Seated Figures in Front of Ruined Buildings,” Moore depicts a family on a bench outside what’s left of their home. The building has been ripped open, yet there is a strange beauty in the destruction; the work is done in warm hues of red, yellow, pink and blue. The family, of all shapes and angles, poses almost proudly in front of the ruins.
The most famous of Moore’s works from this period are his shelter drawings. In 1940 he received a commission from Britain’s War Artists Advisory Committee to capture life in the Underground bomb shelters. One of the show’s most compelling pieces is “Three Sleeping Figures in a Shelter.” In the middle, under a greenish-yellow blanket, a child lies in fitful slumber between two adults, one whose gaping mouth lends his face the otherworldly quality of a death mask. “Falling Buildings” is haunting precisely because the intense picture of devastation and scattered detritus could be superimposed over recent photographs from Beirut.
The same could be said of Moore’s bronzed sculpture “Reclining Warrior–1953”: the wounded soldier has severed arms and is missing a foot. It’s a ghastly image, but there is a beauty in his dignified form. “What images we see today of war are rooted in the past and what Moore witnessed in East End London during the 1940s is something that connects us to the war zones we see around the world today,” says Roger Tolson, head of art at the Imperial War Museum. The decade following the armistice transformed Moore’s work from the mechanical figures he sculpted during the 1930s to more fluid, figurative forms. “In Family Group 1948-1949,” Moore sculpts a mother, father and child out of bronze. The mother seems to be handing the child to the father with a proud, almost defiant air–as if to say we carry on despite the war, and find hope in this child as in the new world order.
It was John Stuart Mill who mused: “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things; the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.” Moore’s touching exhibition shows that for the right cause, there can be beauty in the fight, in the suffering, in the not giving up.
