The Rougher Moore

The bronze sculptures that moved into Manhattan's Knoedler Gallery last week bore many of the familiar hallmarks of their famed creator--knobbly heads, voluptuously ballooning figures, forms locked within other forms like embryos inside wombs or heads inside helmets. But these similarities aside, Henry Moore's latest sculptures show him much changed since his last Manhattan show in 1954. His surfaces are rougher, his figures more ungainly, and almost every trace of his former elegance appears to have vanished. This may or may not be progress, but it is still a logical progression. Moore is such a consistent artist that every step he takes flows naturally from the one before.

Though Moore takes his cue from nature--primarily from the human figure, but also from "natural forms such as bones, shells and pebbles"--he has always avoided what he regards as the two major perils in the sculptor's art: the temptation to reproduce only appearances, and the feeling that the artist must pursue some inherited ideal of beauty. What Moore has always been after is not beauty but vitality. "Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function," he believes. "The first aims at pleasing the senses; the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses."

Three-Way Tug. To be true to nature, says Moore, the sculptor must probe, not merely reflect. But he must also be true to his materials, for wood, metal and stone are also a part of nature. Pebbles worn by the sea "show nature's way of working stone. Some of the pebbles I pick up have holes right through them." Moore gouges holes in his sculpture to "make it immediately more three-dimensional." The making of a sculpture becomes a three-way tug of war between the inner life of the subject, the rhythm of the material and the changing associations of the sculptor himself.

For the Knoedler show, Moore sent only bronzes, mostly because he has become more and more interested in outdoor sculpture, and bronze is more durable than either wood or stone. He has also become interested in doing larger and larger sculptures, and that accounts in part for the roughness of the surface. "The bigger the forms, the bigger the tools," he says. "And the bigger the tools, the bigger the marks they leave." But the roughness also reflects the texture of rocks and mountains. The arresting Reclining Figure No. 1 is made up of two craggy shapes that resemble sections of a mountain range. The figure itself becomes part landscape, which is Moore's way of asserting nature's unity.

Controlled Environment. Other figures sit against sculpted walls--an experiment in controlling the figure's environment. Some pieces are not figures at all, but totemlike structures that occasionally seem a bit arbitrary. Moore explains these as his effort to capture vertical movement after doing so many reclining figures. "One does the opposite to understand its opposite," he says.

In some pieces Moore is still his old polished self, and the apparent liberties he takes with his forms turn out to be a graceful liberation. But such sculptures as Woman possess a new bludgeoning rhythm. They are bold, blunt, brutal--sometimes even crude. And they raise a question. Vitality may be a superior goal to a traditional notion of beauty, but there are times when the sculptor seems to surrender too much control. It is one thing to bring nature back alive; it is another to show it too much in the raw.

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