Don?t Do Any More Henry Moore: Henry Moore and the Chelsea School of Art

Review by Rebecca Lewin

The curators at Tate Britain could be forgiven for thinking that CHELSEA Space is having a dig at the eponymous exhibition of Henry Moore’s early works on show in the Linbury Galleries until August. The Tate’s exhibition aims to reveal the more intimate, darker side of Moore’s work that is often forgotten in the wake of the international success he achieved after World War II. CHELSEA’s show, entitled No More Henry Moore, documents the movement of Moore’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No.1 (1959) from his donation of the work to the college in 1963 up to its projected installation in the McGregor Courtyard later this year.

With sculptures and drawings ranging from the early 1920s to (with one exception) the 1950s, the Tate exhibition confronts Moore’s obsessive use of the mother and child and reclining female figure themes but asks us to reconsider them in a less comfortable light than we might expect. Mother and child groups are included in each room, and this repetition highlights the complex - even aggressive - nature of the relationships Moore creates. The first Mother and Child (1924-5) that we encounter is totemic and unemotional, the block-like figures demonstrating Moore’s interest in ‘truth to materials’. In Room Two, Suckling Child (1930) has reduced the role of the mother to a breast, and the child’s mouth is clamped so tightly to it that any sense of affection between the figures is lost. In the 1950s Moore’s figures become further stretched and contorted, reflecting his experimentations with plaster and bronze on a larger scale, but the sense of unease remains; the figures in the small bronze Mother and Child (1953) seem to be locked in a struggle for survival. The mother appears to be throttling the child in revulsion or self-defence, as the bird-like head of her offspring pecks at her breast.

The title of the CHELSEA Space show could be taken as an echo of the feelings Moore’s work occasionally stirred up in younger artists during his lifetime, most notably when 41 artists (including Paolozzi and Caro) signed a petition in 1968 to protest against the planned construction of a ‘Moore wing’ at the Tate. The intention is actually far less confrontational as the title was lifted from a poem by Dudley Sutton that laments the lot of the Tate art handler when confronted by Moore’s larger sculptures. Having worked on the Tate’s exhibition and witnessed the hard work and precision required by the installation of so many heavy objects, I can testify to the accuracy of Sutton’s words.

Moore had previously broken the human body down into distinct shapes (Composition 1930s alabaster group) but it was not until he embarked upon the series of reclining figures that begins with Chelsea’s Two Piece Reclining Figure No.1 that the body is represented as a single form that has been violently separated. Moore himself compared the components of his ‘Two Piece and Three Piece’ works to vertebrae; shapes that exist independently but which must be conceived as parts of a whole. In many ways this piece epitomises Moore’s ideas about the importance of the way in which art, and particularly sculpture, is viewed. Not only does the circular plinth negate any possibility of a frontal view, the negative space formerly used as an internal element of his pierced forms has here dissected the object entirely, and as we move around the sculpture, defining what is (positive) object and what is (negative) space, we are implicated in that dissection. Always wary of the relationship sculpture has to architecture, Moore gave specific instructions for the sculpture’s first installation in 1964, hoping for a mechanic turntable to be constructed. In the end this part of the project did not come to fruition, but Moore remained involved in the design of the object’s plinth as well as its immediate environment.

The show at CHELSEA Space is a great example of how small art spaces can successfully position themselves in relation to, rather than as distinct from, large museum exhibitions. The display is essentially historical and focuses on the documentary evidence of the sculpture’s movement to and from various sites owned by the art school, but it does so from the point of view of the art handler. The Director, Donald Smith, describes this processual approach as integral to the way the space is used, and as such it provides the perfect setting for this kind of investigation. The sculpture itself is surrounded by architects’ drawings, original letters, photographs and video footage of the work’s arrival at its present location. It has been ‘mounted’ on wooden pallets, with one of the two parts still wrapped in the blanket and sling that would have been used to carry it into the space. Although one might argue that this presentation obstructs a full appreciation of the sculpture, it does also serve to emphasise the theatrical conditions we have come to expect as a context for art.

If you like your art in a specially painted, beautifully lit space, sitting on a custom built plinth, Tate’s show has all the answers. But if you’ve ever wondered how it came to be there, head to CHELSEA Space. In a way, each exhibition justifies its own format; to apply CHELSEA’s approach to every sculpture shown at Tate would produce a somewhat repetitive exhibition, and CHELSEA’s size, if nothing else, would prevent an attempt to reproduce what Tate has done. These are reciprocal rather than comparable exhibitions, and I would strongly recommend that anyone planning to visit one should make sure they see both.