Hoglands, Henry Moore's Hertfordshire home for more than 40 years, was recently opened to the public. It is fascinating to see inside the house of Britain's greatest sculptor, but the reincarnation of this Tudor farmhouse as a museum has a significance beyond the artefacts inside it and the meticulously recreated 1970s interiors: it is a project that many thought would never happen.
Henry Moore's only daughter, Mary Moore, took possession of Hoglands in 1989 when her mother Irina died. And for much of the 1990s Mary was at loggerheads with the Henry Moore Foundation, which owned Perry Green, her late father's estate in which the house is sited. The foundation eventually bought Hoglands from Mary in 2004 for an undisclosed sum.
The foundation was set up 30 years ago, partly on the advice of Mary and her then husband Ray Danowski. By handing over any work he created from that date on and becoming an employee of the foundation, Henry Moore escaped an escalating income tax bill (between 1967 and 1977 he paid £4m in taxes), and safeguarded his legacy.
The foundation has admirably fulfilled the task of taking care of Moore's legacy. With a current operating budget of about £4.8m a year and invested funds of around £100m, it is Britain's richest private patron of the arts, and a blueprint of its kind. It has devoted its energies not only to promoting Henry Moore in particular, but sculpture in general. Its activities include a constant timetable of international exhibitions and supporting institutions such as the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield (which has a collection of Moore sculptures on long-term loan in its grounds). In 1982 the foundation collaborated with Leeds City Council to create the Henry Moore Institute, a flourishing centre that is devoted to scholarly research into sculpture and has a space for sculpture exhibitions attached.
But Mary became unhappy with the foundation's activities after her father's death in 1986. Having ceased to be a trustee a few years earlier, she had little control over what it did with the near-on 12,000 artworks he had left it, far more than she owned.
She would go on to successfully oppose the foundation's early 1990s proposal for new developments at Perry Green, branding it a 'Disneyland with statues'. And around the same time she took it to court, claiming ownership of a large number of sculptures and other artworks in the foundation's possession. There was an acrimonious relationship with the foundation's then director, Alan Bowness, and a great deal of money wasted in legal fees. She lost the case in the high court and then the appeal court.
Commentators at the time wrote of 'irreparable animosity' between Mary and the foundation. An 'enormous breach' that would 'probably never be healed'. But healed it has been: no doubt partly by the passage of time, and the conciliatory reign of Tim Llewellyn, Bowness's successor.
'The whole of my directorship has been how to get from that disastrous moment to this, building and building from very shaky foundations,' says Llewellyn, who was replaced by Richard Calvocoressi, the former director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, earlier this year. 'Hopefully by this stage everyone can see there is a great deal of common ground and interest in making this work.'
David Mitchinson, the head of collections and exhibitions at the foundation, who also worked with Moore at Perry Green for several years, sums it up: 'The hatchet has been buried, and thankfully not in each other.'
Mary, on the day of the press launch, is in customarily elegant attire, and seems satisfied with the outcome. She is uninterested in delving into an unhappy past, and emphasises that her decision to sell Hoglands to the foundation came when her children, to whom the house was also left, were old enough to choose what they wanted to do with it.
'It's a very public place,' Mary says. 'You've got 25 people working for the foundation here; it's open to the public from April to October. I grew up in this very public way.'
It is Mary's very public childhood - among other things - that the display of Hoglands will provide insight into. 'Hoglands was the nerve centre of what happened at Perry Green,' says Llewellyn. 'It throws a lot of light on how life happened here.'
With this in mind the ground floor of the house has been restored to how it would have looked in 1970, with a mixture of original furniture and artefacts on long loan from Mary's family, and a few clever copies. The building - in fact two cottages joined together, with a modern extension out the back - has had considerable structural work. There's also been the odd tweak, visible only to those who know the place well, for the sake of 21st-century visiting: room levels have been brought up and down to facilitate wheelchair use, and the front door widened two inches for the same reason.
Every detail has been thought of. The curtains in the large sitting room are exact copies of the originals. The distinctive canary-yellow carpet is, again, a copy of the one that Irina chose for the house. Even Irina's prized greenhouses of cactuses have been replicated, although Mary says the plants never looked like that in her mother's day. 'They've been put on steroids,' she laughs.
A wander through the house reveals the modesty of the Moore family's life for many years. Spaces are narrow, ceilings low. Private life went on in the smaller, darker sitting room, dominated by a television, and where now even the art looks murky. Only after a closer look do you realise that Courbet, Degas and Sickert, three favourites of Moore's, are represented. There's only a fairly basic stove and cooking equipment in what is really no more than a galley kitchen.
Yet it is here that the Moores entertained an enviable roll call of guests, first in a small sun room, and then in the yellow-floored living room. As well as the art world glitterati, Moore hosted visits from film star fans such as Lauren Bacall and Sophia Loren, and politicians including Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand. All would pay court, weaving in among Moore's prized collections of ethnographic objects, again recreated here, and following the frugal rules of the home of a son of a Yorkshire miner who never forgot his roots.
Mary remembers her mother insisting Mitterand take off his shoes for fear of mud in the house. (It was her idea that visitors to the restored house will have to wear plastic socks over their shoes.) 'It was really a very normal modest way of growing up, but tied in with these utterly extraordinary situations,' she says.
The museum is also tribute to an extraordinary man. 'Twenty-five people at the foundation now do what my father did with two secretaries and two sculpture assistants in a year,' says Mary. 'In any one day he'd be paying the electricity bill, moving a piece of sculpture, deciding what pieces were going into an exhibition. He'd see people in that sitting room at teatime, or at six in the evening. But what strikes me as truly remarkable is that in the middle of all that he could walk out into the times that he'd set himself to work in the studio, and in closing that door be actually able to access his subliminal self.'
Hoglands is the final piece of the jigsaw at Perry Green, the 70-acre motley collection of gardens, houses and converted sheds near Much Hadham that Moore used as his studios and storage spaces. Mary's memories, of course, extend to all these. 'I used to sit beside [my father] in the studio and make little things,' she reminisces. 'The best kind of artist father is a sculptor - very physical, very practical, not very moody. They are the ideal dads.'
As if in suitable celebration for this happy reconciliation of Moore's only daughter with the foundation that bears his name, this year not only sees the opening of Hoglands but also a huge Henry Moore exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which will be unveiled next month.
Serena Davies is a freelance arts journalist
Henry Moore's only daughter, Mary Moore, took possession of Hoglands in 1989 when her mother Irina died. And for much of the 1990s Mary was at loggerheads with the Henry Moore Foundation, which owned Perry Green, her late father's estate in which the house is sited. The foundation eventually bought Hoglands from Mary in 2004 for an undisclosed sum.
The foundation was set up 30 years ago, partly on the advice of Mary and her then husband Ray Danowski. By handing over any work he created from that date on and becoming an employee of the foundation, Henry Moore escaped an escalating income tax bill (between 1967 and 1977 he paid £4m in taxes), and safeguarded his legacy.
The foundation has admirably fulfilled the task of taking care of Moore's legacy. With a current operating budget of about £4.8m a year and invested funds of around £100m, it is Britain's richest private patron of the arts, and a blueprint of its kind. It has devoted its energies not only to promoting Henry Moore in particular, but sculpture in general. Its activities include a constant timetable of international exhibitions and supporting institutions such as the Yorkshire Sculpture Park near Wakefield (which has a collection of Moore sculptures on long-term loan in its grounds). In 1982 the foundation collaborated with Leeds City Council to create the Henry Moore Institute, a flourishing centre that is devoted to scholarly research into sculpture and has a space for sculpture exhibitions attached.
But Mary became unhappy with the foundation's activities after her father's death in 1986. Having ceased to be a trustee a few years earlier, she had little control over what it did with the near-on 12,000 artworks he had left it, far more than she owned.
She would go on to successfully oppose the foundation's early 1990s proposal for new developments at Perry Green, branding it a 'Disneyland with statues'. And around the same time she took it to court, claiming ownership of a large number of sculptures and other artworks in the foundation's possession. There was an acrimonious relationship with the foundation's then director, Alan Bowness, and a great deal of money wasted in legal fees. She lost the case in the high court and then the appeal court.
Commentators at the time wrote of 'irreparable animosity' between Mary and the foundation. An 'enormous breach' that would 'probably never be healed'. But healed it has been: no doubt partly by the passage of time, and the conciliatory reign of Tim Llewellyn, Bowness's successor.
'The whole of my directorship has been how to get from that disastrous moment to this, building and building from very shaky foundations,' says Llewellyn, who was replaced by Richard Calvocoressi, the former director of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, earlier this year. 'Hopefully by this stage everyone can see there is a great deal of common ground and interest in making this work.'
David Mitchinson, the head of collections and exhibitions at the foundation, who also worked with Moore at Perry Green for several years, sums it up: 'The hatchet has been buried, and thankfully not in each other.'
Mary, on the day of the press launch, is in customarily elegant attire, and seems satisfied with the outcome. She is uninterested in delving into an unhappy past, and emphasises that her decision to sell Hoglands to the foundation came when her children, to whom the house was also left, were old enough to choose what they wanted to do with it.
'It's a very public place,' Mary says. 'You've got 25 people working for the foundation here; it's open to the public from April to October. I grew up in this very public way.'
It is Mary's very public childhood - among other things - that the display of Hoglands will provide insight into. 'Hoglands was the nerve centre of what happened at Perry Green,' says Llewellyn. 'It throws a lot of light on how life happened here.'
With this in mind the ground floor of the house has been restored to how it would have looked in 1970, with a mixture of original furniture and artefacts on long loan from Mary's family, and a few clever copies. The building - in fact two cottages joined together, with a modern extension out the back - has had considerable structural work. There's also been the odd tweak, visible only to those who know the place well, for the sake of 21st-century visiting: room levels have been brought up and down to facilitate wheelchair use, and the front door widened two inches for the same reason.
Every detail has been thought of. The curtains in the large sitting room are exact copies of the originals. The distinctive canary-yellow carpet is, again, a copy of the one that Irina chose for the house. Even Irina's prized greenhouses of cactuses have been replicated, although Mary says the plants never looked like that in her mother's day. 'They've been put on steroids,' she laughs.
A wander through the house reveals the modesty of the Moore family's life for many years. Spaces are narrow, ceilings low. Private life went on in the smaller, darker sitting room, dominated by a television, and where now even the art looks murky. Only after a closer look do you realise that Courbet, Degas and Sickert, three favourites of Moore's, are represented. There's only a fairly basic stove and cooking equipment in what is really no more than a galley kitchen.
Yet it is here that the Moores entertained an enviable roll call of guests, first in a small sun room, and then in the yellow-floored living room. As well as the art world glitterati, Moore hosted visits from film star fans such as Lauren Bacall and Sophia Loren, and politicians including Helmut Kohl and François Mitterand. All would pay court, weaving in among Moore's prized collections of ethnographic objects, again recreated here, and following the frugal rules of the home of a son of a Yorkshire miner who never forgot his roots.
Mary remembers her mother insisting Mitterand take off his shoes for fear of mud in the house. (It was her idea that visitors to the restored house will have to wear plastic socks over their shoes.) 'It was really a very normal modest way of growing up, but tied in with these utterly extraordinary situations,' she says.
The museum is also tribute to an extraordinary man. 'Twenty-five people at the foundation now do what my father did with two secretaries and two sculpture assistants in a year,' says Mary. 'In any one day he'd be paying the electricity bill, moving a piece of sculpture, deciding what pieces were going into an exhibition. He'd see people in that sitting room at teatime, or at six in the evening. But what strikes me as truly remarkable is that in the middle of all that he could walk out into the times that he'd set himself to work in the studio, and in closing that door be actually able to access his subliminal self.'
Hoglands is the final piece of the jigsaw at Perry Green, the 70-acre motley collection of gardens, houses and converted sheds near Much Hadham that Moore used as his studios and storage spaces. Mary's memories, of course, extend to all these. 'I used to sit beside [my father] in the studio and make little things,' she reminisces. 'The best kind of artist father is a sculptor - very physical, very practical, not very moody. They are the ideal dads.'
As if in suitable celebration for this happy reconciliation of Moore's only daughter with the foundation that bears his name, this year not only sees the opening of Hoglands but also a huge Henry Moore exhibition at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which will be unveiled next month.
Serena Davies is a freelance arts journalist
