I’m rewatching the BBC programme Carving a Reputation about Henry Moore.
While I really appreciated his work I was never really a huge fan. In later years I have begun to wonder why as I really like it. It seems comfortable and like ‘home’.
My tale I always say about him was to say when I lived on campus at Bretton, I was in a small cottage at the side of a lake and looked back at the mansion building and YSP over the lake. At the time there was a Moore piece, annoyingly I can’t find a pic or even ref to it in the web (think it might have been reclining figure). It used to annoy the pants of me and I used to complain all I could see in the landscape was this “bloody great white hip thing!”
2 things about this are interesting.
That Moore’s interest in figure and sculpture can be, in part, attributed to him having to rub his mother’s hip hourly to relieve her sciatica. Which would explain why I would see bits of it as a hip!
That it disrupted my beautifully natural vista. White, like black, is not a particularly natural colour. And it would jar and distract my attention from the natural beauty around it. (surely the point) but I think that was probably my gripe with him. We were surrounded by Moore’s (our patron) and Hepworth’s (local girl done good) work as the YSP was full of them at the time. And, oddly, I had no objection to any of those pieces that were bronze, and patinaed and blended and co-existed very happily with the landscape.
So Henry, please forgive me for all those years of griping. I get it now!