A head of the curve

Moore grew up intensely aware of the rolling contours of the Yorkshire Dales, and decided to become a sculptor at the age of 11 after hearing about Michelangelo’s achievements in a Sunday School class. All of that confirms the mythic sense of Moore as an artist conflating human and landscape forms, and rooted in a confluence of Victorian-style self-improvement, strong moral values and gut-level socialist principles that he hung on to even in the face of global fame and immense wealth. Indeed, on my first visit to the Henry Moore Studios and Gardens at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, I was struck forcefully not by the carefully preserved workspaces or the surrounding fields dotted with enormous sculptures, but the sheer ordinariness of the farmhouse where Moore lived, with its battered armchairs and humdrum kitchen unchanged, since the 1950s. That environment again might seem to conform to Moore’s image as an artist of bluff, uncomplicated physicality. Yet there’s no law that says that a fondness for simple living and a profound identification with one’s formative landscape should militate against a sense of deep moral ambiguity and personal unease.

While Moore’s childhood was, by his own account, “blissfully happy and secure”, his best work emerged, according to his friend and patron, the National Gallery director and broadcaster Kenneth Clark, from a “deep, disturbing well” of troubled thoughts and feelings. Yet this emotional netherworld was, according to Clark, “never referred to, and no one meeting him could have guessed at its existence”.

Moore was undoubtedly traumatised by the experience of being gassed while serving on the Western Front during the First World War. In 1925, he came his closest to a nervous breakdown on a study visit to Florence, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of new experiences and the fact that his best friend’s fiancée – with whom he was in love – did not share his feelings. Yet Moore wasn’t one to allow even the most painful experiences to obstruct his professional development.

By the early 1920s, by which time he had won a scholarship to London’s Royal College of Art, he was breaking free of the Victorian romantic tradition in which he had started out, absorbing the art of a wide range of cultures in the British Museum: Ancient Egyptian, African, Oceanic and, particularly, Meso-American.

The massively weighty but dynamic form of Toltec Maya sculpture known as a chacmool – a reclining figure – fused with the rhythmic flow he had observed in the Parthenon Marbles gave rise to powerful monumental sculptures invariably featuring strong female figures, with mother and child a recurring motif.

Moore’s mother was his most important early influence, with his art teacher from secondary school, Alice Gostick, to whom he was extremely attached, taking on a similar role. “I suppose I have a mother complex,” he admitted to an interviewer late in life. Moore’s only real relationship was with Irina Radetzky, a Royal College of Art student of Russian aristocratic origin, whom he married in 1929. By this time, his work was taking a different turn, having come under the influence of Surrealism and widely disseminated ideas about the unconscious stemming from the then popular interest in psychoanalysis.

The image of woman in the delicate form of Head (1930) appears more vulnerable and fugitive than in the robust forms of the previous decade. The features appear immersed in some semiconscious state, sleep or sensual rapture, the lips parted, eyes reduced to formalised bulges in the highly polished stone.

The streamlined, forward-leaning form bears a faint touch of Art Deco and of modernist sculptors who presaged that style, such as Brancusi and Modigliani. Yet, where their forms tend towards rigid symmetry, Moore’s have a marvellously supple irregularity as he yields to the form of the brown ironstone.

Named for its rust-like colour rather than its durability, ironstone is easy to work and polishes to the sheen of a multi-hued bronze. In the early 1930s, Moore was having crates of the stone carried back to London, as he allowed the structures of nature to actively dictate some of his most uncompromising interpretations of human form.

He managed to pack an extraordinary amount of resonance into this small work: suggestions of abstracted classicism that feel filtered via Picasso, but most of all the sense found in the African and Oceanic art he loved – the Easter Island statues come to mind – of the human form immured in forms of instinctive knowledge that go far beyond the merely human.

Head featured in Moore’s second solo exhibition at London’s Leicester Gallery in 1931, which featured an enthusiastic catalogue introduction from the leading modernist sculptor of the previous generation, Jacob Epstein. While the show initially attracted hostile reviews, Moore was soon acclaimed on London’s emergent Modernist art scene – hailed as a genius at the age of only 33. To the vast majority of the British population, of course – or those that were even aware of it – Moore’s art remained the object of incomprehension and derision. But that is exactly what we’d expect of a truly challenging artist, at the start of an unstoppable ascent experienced by few artists of any period.

Mark Hudson is Chief Art Critic of The Independent.