Bird (1955) 'One of the things I would like to think my sculpture has in force,
a strength, a life,
a vitality from inside...'
Many of Henry Moore's
animal sculptures, especially the animal heads and animal
forms, owe more to the imagination than to observation. The psychological and
mythological element is omnipresent. This differentiates Moore's animal sculptures
from those produced by the observers and recorders of animal subjects, and no less
from the Renaissance artists whose interest in animals centred round man. For
example, the equestrian portrait shows the horse as a noble extension of the rider's
prestige. Although Moore has never ceased to admire the finest manifestations of
this classical kind of art he reacted against it in favour of the art of ancient
civilizations and the primitive artefacts he observed in archeological and ethnological
museums.
Drawing for Moore is
an obsessive activity embracing studies of form of various
kinds, ideas for sculpture, and what may be described as inspired doodles. Even
within the limited subject of this book the drawings display such diversity compared
with the consistency in his sculptural treatment, that it is necessary to distinguish the
main kinds of drawings which here take their place alongside the sculpture under
thematic headings.
There are the rapid
notations of domestic animals — goats, sheep, cows — made
during stays in the country: 'part of my student studies were animals in action'. We
see the continuation of this practice in the studies of goats in a notebook dated 1921.
The now famous Sheep Sketchbook of 1972 has familiarized the public with Moore's
superb skill in his more deliberate studies from life of his favourite animal. Affection
for and insight into the nature of this creature are implicit in all the drawings, which
are mental as well as visual reflections on the various stages of the life of sheep.
They are not difficult to appreciate.
Moore's studies of
bone form, however, demand an imaginative participation from the
viewer, a basic interest in form. They include 'transformation' drawings in which
partly invented bone shapes become a pretext for incorporating other figures or
objects. Some of the Elephant Skull etchings are based on direct observation, others
extract from its convolutions the sculptor's own analogies - caverns and corridors,
even a fantastic creature, the Cyclops - that engage our imagination. We marvel at a
mind so inventive, a hand so assured.
The kind of drawing
grouped under, but not limited to, the heading Fantastic and
Fabulous Animals comes closest in spirit to much of his animal sculpture. One might
label it 'the alternative vision' — what the mind, perhaps rather the unconscious
mind, of the artist discovers. 'I am conscious of the psychological and associational
element in my work,' says Moore. So alongside the fantastic we find also the dark,
the horrendous, unambiguously expressed.
Moore's art is far
from simple; it incorporates many aspects of both his life and
background. First, that of his home, a mining town, grim but friendly, with the
Yorkshire moors not too far distant. There among the grazing sheep and outcrops of
rock Moore would pick up and study a sheep's skull, the breastbone of a bird. 'Since
boyhood I have always been interested in bones.' Not for him as reminders of
mortality but because they have once served a function, borne living weight. As for
the rocks, they are the bones of the earth, the underlying structure on which the
sculptor insists in his interpretations of human and animal form. It therefore comes
as no surprise that among his many variations on the reclining form he should have
invented a Reclining Figure: Bone 1974 carved in Roman travertine - the material that
most resembles bone texture. In Goat's Head 1952 he celebrates the hardness of
bone, its knobbiness; in Standing Figure: Knife Edge 1961 the fineness of bone
combined with tensile strength; whilst in his Elephant Skull etchings he explores its
structural miracles.
Moore's sculpture continually
reminds' us of growth and pressure from within: in
tappeals to him: 'Mexican sculptures have a cruel hardness that is the opposite of
other qualities I like in European art.' Everyone who knows Moore's early Reclining
Figures is aware of the sculptor's debt to the Chacmool Aztec carving which inspired
it. Moore found the multiplicity of view that he favours in other pre-Columbian
carvings, such as the Plumed Serpent.
Bird's head with serpentine
tail; Scythian 5th-4th century BC; gold.
During one of my conversations
with Moore, as we considered other animal
portrayals of the past, Moore was attracted by the Bird's head with serpentine tailof
Scythian origin — a masterly summing-up of the essence of both creatures in a tiny
gold ornament. Ancient Egyptian carvings combine stylization with natural
observation, as illustrated in the Head of a Cow, carved in alabaster. This animal,
deified through its association with Hathor, the protectress of women, has been
carved with evident affection . Moore commented: 'the sculptor has perfectly
captured the soft docility of the young cow. The Egyptians had a great feeling for
animals, and this is one I love.' In view of the tenderness with which Moore has
drawn sheep, one is not surprised that he also admires the Head of a Eweexecuted
in baked clay five thousand years ago.
Head of a ewe; Sumerian,
from Babylonia c. 2900 BC
