Close your eyes and think of Henry Moore. What do you see? A reclining figure? A mother and child? We’re so familiar with his work, we believe, and we readily get the picture.
Moore certainly developed a distinctive and recognisable style and he attracted attention early on in a long, successful and prolific career. He is still well-known from town squares and public collections around the world after entering the public consciousness in the 1950s in a way that no other British artist had done before or since.
Moore has also been very well served by temporary exhibitions. From Brasilia to Barcelona, large surveys have been regularly transported around the globe by his eponymous foundation.
Closer to home, you could have seen Moore’s work at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and the gardens of Kew. There was also the chance to look at his textile designs, his drawings, to visit his home and to read his writings.
So, while you might be feeling that you already know Moore’s work well enough and that another exhibition and book is unnecessary, this new show at Tate Britain sets out to challenge all our preconceptions with an image of the artist that is “darker, edgier and more complex” than we’ve known before.
So why now? With such sterling work already done, why is Moore ripe for reappraisal? Perhaps it is the simple fact that we have had time since his death in 1986 to consider his reputation.
Of late, there has also been a growing number of contemporary artists who have returned to the modern era and found inspiration in the works of its artists and architects. Moore has figured directly in works by Simon Starling and Keith Coventry and has been referenced by Gavin Turk and Thomas Schütte, among many others.
Where artists go, we gallery curators surely follow. But it remains a constant challenge for art galleries and museums to reinvent and reinvigorate the “greats” of any generation for an increasingly demanding modern audience that seems to crave novelty in order to sustain its interest.
Making an artist seem relevant and current to the public is a tall order, but Tate Britain tackles its revisionist role with aplomb and I think the majority of visitors will be convinced by its presentation of Moore in terms of 20th-century obsessions with sex, surrealism, psychoanalysis, primitive art and warfare.
Mother and child
Women, reclining or with children, predominate among the 153 exhibits, as you might imagine. These are divided into six sections over seven rooms exploring the themes of World Cultures, Mother and Child, Modernism, Wartime and Postwar.
The last room is devoted to four works in one material – Elm – which gives the show an ecological twist, as this once widespread wood has since been blighted by disease.
Moore’s bomb shelter drawings from the second world war remain disturbing and depressing. The sculptures can be surprisingly strange, sinister and sensual – the slippery surfaces, gaping holes and engorged forms of Moore’s naked figures are still sexy.
Yet despite allusion to greater concerns in its critical analysis of the work, this is also a very traditional show. There’s no extraneous drama or theatricality; instead there is a large selection of works displayed simply and beautifully.
On the walls, pithy quotes about and by Moore elucidate the main themes of the exhibition and well-chosen paint colours form contrasting backdrops to the variety of materials on show.
Works of all sizes have been drawn from major collections across the world, with particularly fine and important examples from Leeds and Wakefield, and many works from Tate’s own resources.
Within the gallery spaces, these are generally given the room needed to appreciate them fully and there are lots of clever juxtapositions and groupings. The range of work emphasises the diversity of Moore’s output.
Each of the six sections is explained clearly in wall texts, combining the right balance of facts and interpretation and labels are easily spotted. The accompanying catalogue has been produced handsomely and presents the main arguments of the exhibition with the addition of short but illuminating comments by Anthony Caro (one-time assistant to Moore), Antony Gormley, Bruce McLean, Lucy Skaer and Starling.
Experimental
With all that said, if you know this period of art, then Tate Britain’s reappraisal will not come as much of a surprise. Moore was affected by the turbulent events of 20th-century history, but so were any number of artists who emerged before and after him.
He, like any other artist that chose to, plugged into the zeitgeist for influence as well as looking to the work of his predecessors and his peers and to popular culture.
It is also hard to associate the appearance of the man himself – rather genial and cuddly – with the image the exhibition presents of a dark and dangerous character.
However, there are works that will surprise visitors: a primordial group of “figures” and “compositions” of 1930-34 (particularly the examples in African wonderstone and carved concrete); the ridged-back of Two Forms; the duck-faced Mother and Child; the terrifying bird-like baby in the Maquette for Mother and Child; the wonder and horror of the Animal Head and the striated muscles of Reclining Figure.
Ultimately, the exhibition succeeds, not because it sheds new light on a familiar master but because it gives us the chance to look at work we might otherwise have thought safe and formulaic; the selection commands our attention and questions erroneous preconceptions.
What emerges are works in every conceivable material by an artist more powerful, diverse and experimental than we have given him credit for. The exhibition is therefore less a controversial reassessment than a reminder of just how good Moore can be.
Stephen Feeke is the curator at the New Art Centre in Salisbury, Wiltshire, and is a former curator at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds
Project data
Cost Undisclosed
Supporters Henry Moore Foundation, with additional support by Tate Patrons
Curators Chris Stephens, head of displays at Tate Britain, Michael Parke-Taylor, associate curator of European art, Art Gallery of Ontario
Exhibition ends 15 August
