England's Moore

"His sketchbooks are filled with . . . an abundance of exciting shapes swimming over the pages, first one, then another, leaping to the eye and then vanishing like salamanders into flame."

With these words, London's National Gallery Director Sir Kenneth Clark introduced to the U.S. England's foremost modernist sculptor, Henry Moore, 44. His recent drawings, packed into two tubes and sent by Clipper, were on view last week at Manhattan's Buchholz Gallery. The drawings, suggestive of his sculpture, were mostly of figures. For years Moore has been famous in Britain for sculpture as unorthodox and experimental as Pablo Picasso's painting.

Moore's carvings -- smooth, cratered shapes often derived from the female figure--suggest streamlined prehistoric rocks taken, after eons under water, from a river bed. In these pocked and fissured forms, Moore tries to emphasize the sculptor's intense feeling for his medium. Says he : "The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation. The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional." The child "has to develop . . . the ability to judge roughly three-dimensional distances." But most adults "do not make the further intellectual and emotional effort needed to comprehend form in its full spatial existence. This is what the sculptor must do."

Bird Scarer. Short, blue-eyed Henry Moore is the son of a self-educated Yorkshire miner. Henry's first work was scaring birds out of grain fields at the age of nine. His first piece of sculpture was his school's (Castleford Grammar) World War I roll of honor, which he did before joining the British Army himself.

He served through two years of the war, in 1921 won the Royal Exhibition Scholarship to London's Royal College of Art. Shortly he decided that, unlike most sculptors, he would always carve his sculpture direct, never model it in other materials first. Says he: "It is a happier job using the hammer and chisel. . . . Carving has a condensed, powerful, tense vitality and life through the resistance of the material, which modeling misses."

When Moore held his first London exhibition in 1928, Artists Augustus John and Jacob Epstein helped by buying drawings. England's conservative critics did not share their enthusiasm. Said London's Morning Post of early Moore exhibitions of carvings: "They are not 'art'; they should come under the heading of 'Embryology and Morphology.'. . . Sensitive people, especially women, must shudder in the face of these monstrosities." But Moore has continued for years to use the female figure as a base for fantastic exercises in form.

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