![]() ![]() In a national lecture that Moore gave and wrote up for The Listener in June 1935, he expressed his deep admiration for Mesopotamian art – in particular for an ancient Sumerian sculpture, known as Gudea, Ruler of the City-State of Lagash (3), which was then in the British Museum. Photograph: courtesy of Henry Moore Institute. On the cover is an image of the Sumerian statue of Gudea, the ‘temple-builder’, with his hands clasped – a posture that caught Moore’s imagination and which he used in his own work. The cover of The Listener, 5 June 1935, in which Moore’s lecture on Mesopotamian art was published. His Two Heads (2) of 1924–25 carved in Mansfield stone is directly inspired by an appreciation of the bold and yet refined qualities of Cycladic sculpture, the simplified heads economically animated through the incorporation of the wedge-like nose of Cycladic figures. He apparently ignored the museum’s renowned collections of Classical sculpture from ancient Greece, preferring the archaic works from the Cycladic islands. He describes going there at least twice a week to explore the galleries of Pre-Columbian, African and Oceanic art. To incorporate such influences was to retain a link with archaic art forms that had universal and timeless qualities.įrom his first visit in 1921, the collections of the British Museum shaped Moore’s understanding of sculpture perhaps more than any college class. For Moore, such artwork not only provided simplified and abstracted formal properties that he could assimilate into his own work but it had an immediacy which spoke of essential truths. This rather indiscriminate term was used to describe everything from Aztec stone deities and African masks to medieval statuary and cave painting. He was buoyed by the writings of the painter and art critic Roger Fry and the work of avant-garde artists, such as Epstein, Picasso, Brancusi, Archipenko, Modigliani and others, not least his mentor, the artist Leon Underwood (1890-1975), who championed a new visual language informed by ‘primitive art’. Henry Moore, Seated Figure, alabaster, 1930. Moore’s sketchbooks from this period show a fascination with Assyrian, Egyptian, Babylonian and Byzantine art. Such an academic focus may have left the sculptor decidedly estranged from Classical antiquity but, in seeking alternative inspiration, a more nuanced relationship with the ancient world developed. Moore considered such ‘tired forms of classicism’ as having little to offer and he determined to remove ‘the Greek spectacles from the eyes of the modern sculptor’. ![]() Moreover, it was mediated through casts of antique sculpture that had received an annual whitewash, blurring any sensitivity of form. An engagement with the Graeco-Roman world, which had captured the imagination of the British cultural elite since the 18th century, was unavoidable. In the 1920s, particularly in the environs of British art academies, the Classical ideal and, more specifically, the sculptural style of antiquity held a central position on the syllabus. During his student years, when he began to develop his own style, his relationship with history and tradition was both crystallised and complicated. Moore subsequently went on to the Royal College of Art in London in 1921. In September 1919, he enrolled at Leeds School of Art and was finally able to pursue his dream of becoming a sculptor – this was after an aborted attempt at teacher-training, and active service during the First World War. The nose shows the influence of early Greek art from the Cycladic Islands. Henry Moore, Two heads, 1924–25, Mansfield stone. ![]()
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