February 19th, 2010 Maev Kennedy
From office blocks to shopping streets, Moore's sculptures are part of the fabric of Britain – so much so that we no longer notice. A new Tate retrospective wants to make us look again
As a new Tate retrospective prepares to open, it can be difficult to judge the reputation of Henry Moore, in his own lifetime one of the most famous and wealthy artists in the world. It's not that Moore has vanished from the public stage in the years since his death in 1986 – far from it, in fact. Moore's problem is that he has become so ubiquitous as to become near-invisible.
Stand on London's Bond Street, just beneath a massive work by Moore – the four-panel Portland stone Time-Life Screen, installed in 1953 as part of the building of the same name – and you guess that of the thousands of people who pass by every day, barely one looks up, still less admires. The nice American couple I found waiting to have their photograph taken on a park bench between a bronze Churchill and bronze Roosevelt looked startled at being asked what they thought of the Henry Moore. "But that's not by him, is it?" the man said in surprise. "Isn't Moore the guy who punches holes through everything?" If only they'd looked up. Like so much of Moore's work, the Time-Life Screen has become so familiar as to disappear into the background texture of 20th-century British urban life.
It's the same story just down the road in Millbank, where smokers shelter behind the gigantic bronze Locking Piece, and use it as a windbreak. Half a mile away there's another thumping great bronze, the two-section 1962 Knife Edge, opposite the House of Lords – a site chosen by Moore for its high visibility. Half a mile again, and you find Moore's very first public commission, made when he was a teacher at the Royal College of Art, the singularly un-airy West Wind high on the facade of the London Underground block over St James's Park tube station. Take a train to Stevenage and you can locate his first family group – one of many made after the death of his mother and the birth of his only child, Mary, named after her – outside a school, and another that used to be out in the precinct but now takes refuge in the civic centre in Harlow.
An elegant interactive website maintained by the Henry Moore Foundation lists scores more works on public display across 30 sites in Britain alone, from the 1944 Family Group in Aberdeen Art Gallery to the memorial to his friend Christopher Martin in the grounds of Dartington Hall, and even more all over the world, in stone, plaster, bronze, wood, on paper, in tapestries – around 800 works in all.
As the Turner prize-winning artist Simon Starling writes in the catalogue to the new Tate show: "From the beginning, Henry Moore seemed omnipresent – a state-endorsed, global player, the first of his kind perhaps. His huge bronzes seemed to drop from the sky in great meteor showers and felt to my young mind rather clumsy and anachronistic, even provincial." Starling, who won the Turner in 2005 for pieces including Shedboatshed – the shed he dismantled, built into a boat, paddled down the Rhine to a museum and reconstructed as a shed – has also made work directly responding to Moore's, and not necessarily with an admiring eye.
In 2006–07, Starling created a work called Infestation Piece for the Toronto Art Gallery of Ontario, a museum and a city with a complex relationship with Moore. In the late 1950s, a go-getting mayor, Philip Givens, commissioned a major Moore sculpture, The Archer, for its new City Hall. Starling's Infestation Piece is a Moore replica, lowered into the lake until it became encrusted with an invasive species of mussels: a hint that the sculpture itself is a form of alien in the landscape.
The Toronto Art Gallery is the Tate's partner in organising this exhibition. Both museums have world-class collections that were acquired in Moore's lifetime, but Toronto's is much the larger – and the story of how that happened is a fascinating insight into attitudes to Moore in his lifetime. Moore donated major sculptures, drawings, maquettes and other works to the Tate, of which he was a trustee. In the late 1960s, there was discussion of creating a special Henry Moore wing at Tate Britain, which would certainly have attracted many more donations – but the project was seen by some artists as memorialising Moore himself, and attracted bitter criticism. One of the show's curators, Chris Stephens, has written of the episode in an article for the Tate magazine, and of what he terms the "final insult" when in 1968, the year of Moore's 70th birthday, a letter appeared in the Times condemning the proposed wing. It was signed by 41 artists, including his former studio assistants Anthony Caro and Phillip King; not much of a birthday present. Moore donated more than 900 pieces – including some of the works he must have intended for the Tate – to Toronto in 1974, before eventually making another donation to the Tate with no strings attached.
In much the way that his public art now seems commonplace, it is easy to see Moore as invincibly nice and decent: the seventh of eight children of a Yorkshire mining engineer, a scholarship boy who never forgot his working-class roots, whose work speaks of home and family, peace and plenty, a man with socialist sympathies and a pacifist heart. When their London home was damaged in the blitz, the Moores moved to a modest two-storey rented farmhouse, Hoglands, at Perry Green in Hertfordshire – still a surprisingly remote and rural corner of the home counties. They eventually bought the house and the surrounding fields. Moore added workshops no grander than his neighbours' farm sheds, and extended the house slightly, but it has none of the grandeur you might expect of an artist who became a millionaire many times over while he lived there. Indeed, the Henry Moore Foundation, which now maintains the estate as a museum, archive and outdoor sculpture park, was established not just to ensure his legacy but to mop up some of the millions he would otherwise have spent in tax.
Visitors to Perry Green can tour the house, the handsome antique-filled dining room, the bright drawing room with Scandinavian-design modern furniture where grander visitors were received – and the claustrophobic sitting room where the Moores actually spent most of their leisure time, a space filled with rickety furniture that you wouldn't be surprised to see in a charity shop. The house reflects the popular image of the artist as "an easygoing, avuncular figure who produced an equally easygoing form of modern sculpture", as Stephens says – an image which the exhibition will attempt to destroy. There is, the curators aim to show, a lot more to Moore than monumental decency, despite his undergoing the national beatification which befell John Betjeman and has almost smothered Alan Bennett.
The exhibition will bring together more than 150 works, from the early white marble Dog carved in 1922, to a Reclining Figure in seductively polished elm, completed in 1978 when Moore was 80. There will be works in stone, bronze and plaster; working drawings and finished works on paper – including the famous blitz sleepers in London's Underground – and his cramped and contorted miners, who are given an archaic grandeur by the artist. Stephens sees anger, darkness and violence in many of these works – born, he believes, from the first-world-war experience that marked Moore for life: the artist was gassed at Cambrai and was among just 52 survivors from a 400-strong battalion. There is a sinister edge to many pieces, he argues, and a raw sexuality in all those holes and protruberances.
The elm reclining figures are exceptional. Moore himself never saw them together: the first was begun in 1935, and in his lifetime they were scattered across different collections. The surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who bought the 1939 version of the sculptures, wrote: "I felt that I was in the presence of the mother earth goddess." The critic David Sylvester was one of many who saw something almost menacing in its form – "the sacrificed and resurrected god of a fertility rite". Such views are a timely reminder that the artist was once seen as so threateningly modern that Roland Penrose's neighbours reacted in outrage when he put a Moore Mother and Child in his Hampstead front garden. And when an Essex new town commissioned a work entitled Harlow Family Group, it provoked a public demonstration by people fearful that the sculpture was an obscene jeer at Harlow's "pram town" nickname.
"In contrast to the dominant idea of Moore, we propose that he presented the body as abject, erotic, vulnerable, violated and visceral," Stephens writes. "They are part of a wider challenge to reason, of the redefinition of the human body as discontinuous, fluid and driven by deep unconscious forces, and of a world characterised by apprehension and anxiety, the uncanny and the absurd. Moore's is a troubled and troubling art that digs into the very essence of modern experience." That would be news to the tourists in Bond Street and the Millbank smokers – but maybe it is indeed time they looked again.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Exhibitions, Features, guardian.co.uk, Henry Moore, Heritage, Sculpture, Tate Britain | Comments Off
February 16th, 2010 Audrey Gillan
Tower Hamlets council has been accused of trying to force through a controversial sculpture against the wishes of locals
It is synonymous with curry and trendy bars, nightclubs and art venues. Now a plan to mark the entry points to London's cosmopolitan Brick Lane with giant arches in the shape of headscarves or hijabs has been condemned as offensive to Muslim women and a waste of £1.85m of public funds.
The proposed arches, part of a "cultural trail" through the street – immortalised in Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane – have been criticised as "misconceived" and "excluding". Locals have said they risk ghettoising a community that considers itself tolerant and diverse. Tracey Emin, who lives just off Brick Lane, is one of a number of residents in the east London area who claim that Tower Hamlets council risks inflaming racial tension by trying to force the "hijab gates" – as they have become known – through without proper consultation. After an outcry, the council has extended the deadline for complaints to 22 February.
One local Muslim woman has told the council that the stainless-steel, illuminated arches "create a stereotypical image of Islam, and endorse the practice of the veil that not all of us are happy with. It is a divisive image and one that in the present climate is highly inappropriate. Tower Hamlets should be seeking to bring communities together at this moment." Another, a hijab wearer, said that to call the gates anything other than a hijab was "just semantics". She said: "It is a huge waste of money. There has been enough conflict and tension since Brick Lane started developing after the yuppies moved in. This looks to me like a tool of aggravation and is taking a step backwards."
The Spitalfields Trust, which helped to save many of the historic Huguenot silk weavers' houses that abut Brick Lane, has urged the council to abandon its "misconceived" idea.
The cultural trail through the area is aimed at celebrating the various migrant communities – including Huguenots, Jews and now Bangladeshis – that have settled there across hundreds of years.
Using planning-gain funds paid to the council following the development of Bishops Square and Spitalfields market, the trail is intended to bring more tourism into the area and smarten it up. But locals complain that the focus has been too much on the Bangladeshi community, which makes up a third of the Tower Hamlets population.
At the centre of the trail is a 29 metre high minaret that has been attached to the Brick Lane mosque, a grade II listed building originally built in 1742 as a Huguenot church, then converted into a synagogue and now the Brick Lane jamme masjid [mosque]. Tower Hamlets council says the structure "is not a minaret" but a "large steel art sculpture".
Brick Lane and its side streets are also home to artists such as Emin, Gilbert and George, Jake Chapman, the actor Samantha Morton, as well as architects, designers, planners, poets, musicians and others. Many were shocked to learn only recently that the council planned to erect the veil-like structures. Some say that given the high concentration of artists in the area, the design should have been open to competition.
In a letter to the council, Emin wrote: "I sincerely object to these proposals … the proposed material has no relevance to the heritage of the area or its future. I understand that the Jewish East End Celebration Society does not approve the concept overall and neither do the Spitalfields Trust nor the Spitalfields Society, as stated in the review of the consultation. I am shocked to learn that the scheme is budgeted at £2m and I strongly feel that rubbish collections, vermin control, education and improved policing are more important to resolve."
Broadcaster John Nicolson, who lives off Brick Lane, said: "Throughout history numerous groups have passed through here and made it home. That's what makes Spitalfields so special. It belongs to all of us – atheists, Muslims and Christian, homosexuals and heterosexuals, men and women. The council's latest wheeze – metal arches in the shape of headscarves – is exclusive and excluding. They'd never dream of crucifix-inspired gates – nor should they – so why an arch that is both Islamic and representing a specifically conservative form of Islam?"
A spokeswoman for the council said the concept behind the arch was "loosely based on the sculptural form of a headscarf, reflecting the many cultural backgrounds that have occupied and sought refuge in and around Brick Lane over the centuries".
She said headscarves were worn for a variety of purposes, "such as for warmth, for sanitation, for fashion or social distinction; with religious significance, to hide baldness, out of modesty, or other forms of social convention", and not only by Muslims.
"Observant married Orthodox Jewish women, for example, are required to cover their hair, often employing scarves for the purpose, and Jewish men will use a kippah or yarmulke to cover their heads for religious purposes." She went on: "Many men and women currently wear headscarves or bandannas as a fashion statement, and with Brick Lane being a cultural melting pot both historically and now at the start of the 21st century, this design reference seems appropriate and fitting."
But Will Palin, secretary of Save Britain's Heritage, and a local resident, said: "The headscarf motif is undoubtedly faith-specific to Islam and therefore does not represent the breadth and richness of the borough's history."
At the Beigel Bake, a few metres from the site of one of the proposed arches, Sammy Minzly had been unaware of the proposals.
He said: "I have been here 50 years, and they haven't even told me about it. This used to be a Jewish area, and all my life I have been here. It is disgusting that they have not shown us the respect to ask us what we think."
Posted in Art, Art and design, Communities, Culture, Heritage, London, Monica Ali, News, Sculpture, Social history, The Guardian, Tracey Emin | Comments Off
February 16th, 2010 Audrey Gillan
Tower Hamlets council has been accused of trying to force through a controversial sculpture against the wishes of locals
It is synonymous with curry and trendy bars, nightclubs and art venues. Now a plan to mark the entry points to London's cosmopolitan Brick Lane with giant arches in the shape of headscarves or hijabs has been condemned as offensive to Muslim women and a waste of £1.85m of public funds.
The proposed arches, part of a "cultural trail" through the street – immortalised in Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane – have been criticised as "misconceived" and "excluding". Locals have said they risk ghettoising a community that considers itself tolerant and diverse. Tracey Emin, who lives just off Brick Lane, is one of a number of residents in the east London area who claim that Tower Hamlets council risks inflaming racial tension by trying to force the "hijab gates" – as they have become known – through without proper consultation. After an outcry, the council has extended the deadline for complaints to 22 February.
One local Muslim woman has told the council that the stainless-steel, illuminated arches "create a stereotypical image of Islam, and endorse the practice of the veil that not all of us are happy with. It is a divisive image and one that in the present climate is highly inappropriate. Tower Hamlets should be seeking to bring communities together at this moment." Another, a hijab wearer, said that to call the gates anything other than a hijab was "just semantics". She said: "It is a huge waste of money. There has been enough conflict and tension since Brick Lane started developing after the yuppies moved in. This looks to me like a tool of aggravation and is taking a step backwards."
The Spitalfields Trust, which helped to save many of the historic Huguenot silk weavers' houses that abut Brick Lane, has urged the council to abandon its "misconceived" idea.
The cultural trail through the area is aimed at celebrating the various migrant communities – including Huguenots, Jews and now Bangladeshis – that have settled there across hundreds of years.
Using planning-gain funds paid to the council following the development of Bishops Square and Spitalfields market, the trail is intended to bring more tourism into the area and smarten it up. But locals complain that the focus has been too much on the Bangladeshi community, which makes up a third of the Tower Hamlets population.
At the centre of the trail is a 29 metre high minaret that has been attached to the Brick Lane mosque, a grade II listed building originally built in 1742 as a Huguenot church, then converted into a synagogue and now the Brick Lane jamme masjid [mosque]. Tower Hamlets council says the structure "is not a minaret" but a "large steel art sculpture".
Brick Lane and its side streets are also home to artists such as Emin, Gilbert and George, Jake Chapman, the actor Samantha Morton, as well as architects, designers, planners, poets, musicians and others. Many were shocked to learn only recently that the council planned to erect the veil-like structures. Some say that given the high concentration of artists in the area, the design should have been open to competition.
In a letter to the council, Emin wrote: "I sincerely object to these proposals … the proposed material has no relevance to the heritage of the area or its future. I understand that the Jewish East End Celebration Society does not approve the concept overall and neither do the Spitalfields Trust nor the Spitalfields Society, as stated in the review of the consultation. I am shocked to learn that the scheme is budgeted at £2m and I strongly feel that rubbish collections, vermin control, education and improved policing are more important to resolve."
Broadcaster John Nicolson, who lives off Brick Lane, said: "Throughout history numerous groups have passed through here and made it home. That's what makes Spitalfields so special. It belongs to all of us – atheists, Muslims and Christian, homosexuals and heterosexuals, men and women. The council's latest wheeze – metal arches in the shape of headscarves – is exclusive and excluding. They'd never dream of crucifix-inspired gates – nor should they – so why an arch that is both Islamic and representing a specifically conservative form of Islam?"
A spokeswoman for the council said the concept behind the arch was "loosely based on the sculptural form of a headscarf, reflecting the many cultural backgrounds that have occupied and sought refuge in and around Brick Lane over the centuries".
She said headscarves were worn for a variety of purposes, "such as for warmth, for sanitation, for fashion or social distinction; with religious significance, to hide baldness, out of modesty, or other forms of social convention", and not only by Muslims.
"Observant married Orthodox Jewish women, for example, are required to cover their hair, often employing scarves for the purpose, and Jewish men will use a kippah or yarmulke to cover their heads for religious purposes." She went on: "Many men and women currently wear headscarves or bandannas as a fashion statement, and with Brick Lane being a cultural melting pot both historically and now at the start of the 21st century, this design reference seems appropriate and fitting."
But Will Palin, secretary of Save Britain's Heritage, and a local resident, said: "The headscarf motif is undoubtedly faith-specific to Islam and therefore does not represent the breadth and richness of the borough's history."
At the Beigel Bake, a few metres from the site of one of the proposed arches, Sammy Minzly had been unaware of the proposals.
He said: "I have been here 50 years, and they haven't even told me about it. This used to be a Jewish area, and all my life I have been here. It is disgusting that they have not shown us the respect to ask us what we think."
Posted in Art, Art and design, Communities, Culture, Heritage, London, Monica Ali, News, Sculpture, Social history, The Guardian, Tracey Emin | Comments Off
February 9th, 2010 Jonathan Jones
I used to believe that Britain's best art should be in public hands, not owned by the Queen. How wrong I was
It is a truth universally acknowledged, at least hereabouts, that the Royal Collection should be nationalised. It's a disgrace that the Queen owns all these marvellous works of art ...
Or is it? I've been having subversive thoughts recently – subversive when it comes to republicanism, that is. I'm just not feeling offended by the Royal Collection any more; it seems to be doing a good job. Its catalogues of drawings at Windsor Castle are exemplary. It loans a lot of works, including for long periods to our public collections. And the Queen's Gallery does put on proper shows. What's to be cross about, really?
I still worry about security: should works precious to humankind be kept in an ancient castle? But apart from that, the Cromwellian passion has died. I don't really mind that the Queen has so many masterpieces. There's one thing I love in art more than anything else: mystery. It is good to be able to chance on treasures, to encounter works of art you never knew or to see old favourites when you don't expect it. And this is what old collections allow us. The sporadic visibility, eccentricity and sheer size of the Royal Collection make it hard to know in total. This means you can be surprised by it again and again.
The other day, I saw some erotic Renaissance paintings in a small room at Hampton Court. I also saw a supreme masterpiece, Holbein's Noli Me Tangere, displayed in the royal gallery above the palace chapel – a perfect and evocative setting. It's so unexpected, at least in Britain, to see a great religious painting actually in a religious setting. If Holbein's painting belonged to the National Gallery, we'd never chance up on it in Henry VIII's private prayer closet juxtaposed with a vista of the knobbly pendants of the chapel's late Gothic ceiling.
I don't want art to be smoothed into modern shapes, and I don't want collections to become the property of bureaucrats who keep everything in storerooms. And so the Royal Collection strikes me as an image not of snobs snaffling up the loot, but of history enduring and flourishing.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Blogposts, Culture, guardian.co.uk, Heritage, Monarchy, Painting | Comments Off
January 26th, 2010 Maev Kennedy
The exact spot from which John Constable painted The Stour Valley and Dedham village almost 200 years ago, one of his best loved scenes, has been traced by a researcher poring over old maps and modern hedges.
It is not just the horse drawn carts and the straw hatted agricultural labourers who have vanished: changes in field boundaries and agricultural use, new lines of hedges and more recent tree planting mean that the serpentine bends of the river and the little village itself have almost disappeared from view.
The scene is a rural idyll with a typical Constable dash of earthy realism. The beloved landscape around Constable's birthplace at East Bergholt provided the artist with inspiration for the rest of his life.
This painting, now in a Boston museum, was commissioned as a gift to comfort the homesickness of an exile: Philadelphia Godfrey, born only a few hundred yards away, who was marrying and moving to north Wales. She would certainly have identified the occupation of the men, and remembered a characteristic country smell: they are breaking up an old dung hill which has been maturing nicely for months, before spreading it as fertiliser on the fields.
The land, like other iconic Constable landscapes on the Suffolk-Essex border, including Flatford Mill and Willy Lott's House – seen in the background of The Hay Wain, once voted Britain's favourite painting – is owned by the National Trust.
The spot where he made the drawings or oil sketches has been traced for most of the paintings, allowing for his trick of sometimes moving features to achieve the effect he wanted, but the high perspective bringing into view two churches, Langham and Dedham, and the Fen Bridge over the river Stour, remained a puzzle until National Trust land agent Martin Atkinson started to compare a copy of the painting with a patchwork of local maps in the Suffolk Records Office.
Atkinson soon realised that the scene changed dramatically even in the artist's lifetime, in the decades after he painted it in 1814-15. Field boundaries shown in an 1817 enclosures map of the area changed dramatically by the time a later map was made in 1830. Some fields had disappeared completely, and new hedges at completely different angles, many now with fully grown trees, plotted the new boundaries.
He was probably painting at the edge of a road which he would later follow down the hill to continue working at Flatford Mill.
Constable's paintings are now among the most beloved and valuable in 19th century British art, but in his lifetime he struggled for financial success and recognition, and could never have married his beloved Maria without money inherited from his corn merchant father. Millions now go on pilgrimage every year to the scenes he painted.
Posted in Art, Art and design, Culture, Heritage, John Constable, News, Painting, The Guardian, UK news | Comments Off