Wikipedista:Aida/Moore

Henry Spencer Moore OM CH, (30. července 1898 – 31. srpna 1986) byl britský sochař a umělec. Tento syn důlního inženýra se narodil v Yorkshiru ve městě Castleford. Moor se proslavil svými rozměrnými abstraktními sochami zhotovenými z bronzu nebo mramoru. Díky značné podpoře Britského uměleckého ústavu Moore pomohl uvést partikulární modernismus do Spojoného království.

Jeho schopnost naplnit poslání rozměrné sochy ho na konci života činí neobyčejně bohatým. Moor ovšem žil skromě a většinu svého majetku odkázal nadaci Hanryho Moora (Henry Moore Foundation), která pokračuje v pomoci výuce a propagaci umění.

Jeho rukopisnou formou jsou děrované ležící postavy, které jsou ovlivněny Toltek Mayskými sochami známými jako Chac Mool, tyto sochy byly k vidění jako sádrové odlitky v Paříži v roce 1925. První Moorovy sochy jsou konvenčně děrované například ohnuté ruce, které jsou znovu spojeny s trupem. Jeho pozdější díla jsou více abstraktní, děrování prochází přímo skrz trup sochy, v němž odhaluje konkávní a konvexní tvary. Toto stále odvážnější děrování se u Moorových děl vyvíjí paraelně s díly Barbary Hepworthové. První Hepworthové děrované torzo bylo přitom jen výsledek neporozumění recenzi z Moorovy rané výstavy.

Sochy

Moore je známý díky svým monumentálním abstraktním bronzovým sochám, které je možno spatřit na mnoha místech celého světa. Námětem jeho soch jsou většinou abstrakce lidské postavy. Pro Moora jsou typické dvě témata a to matka s dítětem a ležící postavy. Bez zajímavosti jistě není není, že krom koketováním se sochami rodin v padesátých letech dvacáteho století, takřka všechny jeho sochy zobrazují ženy. Charakteristickým rysem Moorových soch je děrování nebo obsažení prázdných dutin. Mnohdy jsou Moorovy zvlněné ležící postavy vykládány jako odkaz k rázu krajiny a kopců v jeho rodném Yorkshiru.

Když se Moorova neteř zeptala proč mají jeho sochy jednoduché názvy odpověděl:

Veškeré umění ma mít určité tajemství a klást nároky na pozorovatele. Jednoznačným pojmenováním sochy nebo kresby ztrácí toto dílo část tohoto tajemství a pozorovatel odejde k dalšímu dílku aniž by se snažil přijít na smysl toho co právě viděl. Každý si myslí že to ví, ale nikdy si není jistý, rozumíš.

Moore's early work focused on direct carving in which the form of the sculpture evolves as the artist repeatedly whittles away at the block (see Half-figure 1932). In the 1930s Moore's transition into Modernism paralleled that of Barbara Hepworth with both sculptors bouncing new ideas off each other and several other artists living in Hampstead at the time. Moore made many preparatory sketches and drawings for each sculpture. Most of these sketchbooks have survived, providing an insight into his development. By the end of the 1940s Moore increasingly produced sculptures by modelling, working out the shape in clay or plaster before casting the final work in bronze using the lost wax technique.

After the Second World War Moore's Bronzes took on their monumental scale, particularly suited for the public art commissions he was receiving. As a matter of practicality he largely abandoned direct carving, and took on several assistants to help produce the maquettes.

At his home in Much Hadham, Moore built up a collection of natural objects; skulls, driftwood, pebbles and shells, which he would use to provide inspiration for organic forms. For his largest works, he often produced a half-scale, working model before scaling up for the final moulding and casting at a bronze foundry. Sometimes a full-scale plaster model was constructed, allowing Moore to refine the final shape and add surface marks before casting.

Biography

*Three Way Piece No. 2 (The Archer)* (1964-65) bronze, Nathan Phillips Square, Toronto.

Early life

Moore was born in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England, the seventh of eight children to Raymond Spencer Moore and Mary Baker. His father was a mining engineer who rose to be under-manager of the Wheldale colliery in Castleford. He was an autodidact with an interest in music and literature, and he saw formal education as the route to advancement for his children.

Moore decided to become a sculptor when he was only eleven and was encouraged by his Sunday school teacher who told him about Michaelangelo to begin modelling in clay and carving in wood whilst at secondary school. Despite early promise, his parents were against a career as a sculptor, seeing it as manual labour.

In 1917, on turning 18, Moore was drafted to fight in World War I. The youngest man in his regiment, the Prince of Wales's Own Civil Service Rifles, he saw action in the Battle of Cambrai but was injured in a gas attack. He made a speedy recovery, however, and saw out the remainder of the war as a physical training instructor. In stark contrast to many of his contemporaries, Moore's wartime experience was largely untroubled; he recalled the time saying, for me the war passed in a romantic haze of trying to be a hero.

After the war, Moore received an ex-serviceman's grant to continue his education and became the first student of sculpture at Leeds School of Art in 1919 — the school had to set up a sculpture studio especially for him.

College education

"Large Four Piece Reclining Figure" (1973) bronze, San Francisco's Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall

Whilst at Leeds, Moore met fellow art student Barbara Hepworth, beginning a friendship which would last for many years. Moore was also fortunate to be introduced to African tribal sculpture, by Sir Michael Sadler, the Vice-Chancellor at the Leeds School.

In 1921 Moore won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, where Hepworth had gone the year before. Whilst in London, Moore extended his knowledge of primitive art and sculpture, studying the ethnographic collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum.

Both Moore and Hepworth's earliest sculptures followed standard teaching in romantic Victorian style; subjects were natural forms, landscapes and figurative modelling of animals. Moore increasingly felt uncomfortable with these classically derived ideas. With his knowledge of primitivism and the influence of sculptors such as Brancusi, Epstein and Dobson he started to develop a style of direct carving in which imperfections in the material and tool marks are incorporated into the finished sculpture. In doing so he had to fight against his academic tutors who did not appreciate the modern approach. In one exercise set by Derwent Wood, the professor of Sculpture at the RCA, Moore was supposed to reproduce a marble relief of Rosselli's The Virgin and Child, by first modelling the relief in plaster then reproducing it in marble using the mechanical technique of 'pointing'. Instead, Moore carved the relief directly, even marking the surface to simulate the surface prick marks that would have been left by the pointing machine. [1]

Nevertheless, in 1924, Moore won a six month travelling scholarship which he spent in Northern Italy studying the great works of Michelangelo, Giotto and several other Old Masters. Since Moore had already started to break away from the classical tradition, it is not clear that he drew much influence from this trip, though in later life he would often claim Michelangelo as an influence.

Life in Hampstead

On returning to London, Moore began a seven-year teaching post at the RCA. He was only required to teach two days a week, which gave him plenty of time to spend on his own work. In July 1929, he married Irina Radetsky, a painting student at the RCA — Irina was born in Kiev on 26 March 1907 to Russian-Polish parents. Her father disappeared in the Russian Revolution and her mother was evacuated to Paris where she married a British army officer. Irina was smuggled to Paris a year later and went to school there until she was 16, after which she was sent to live with her stepfather’s relatives in Buckinghamshire. With such a troubled childhood, it is not surprising that Irina had a reputation of being quiet and a little withdrawn. However, she found security in her marriage to Moore and was soon posing for him.

Shortly after getting married the pair moved to a studio in Hampstead on Parkhill Road, joining a small colony of avant-garde artists who were starting to take root there. Shortly afterwards, Hepworth and her partner Ben Nicholson moved into a studio around the corner from Moore, whilst Naum Gabo, Roland Penrose and the art critic Herbert Read also lived in the area. This led to a rapid cross-fertilisation of ideas that Read would publicise, helping to raise Moore's public profile. The area was also a stopping off point for a large number of refugee architects and designers from continental Europe enroute to America many of whom would later commission works from Moore.

In the early 1930s, Moore took up a post as the Head of the Department of Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art. Artistically, Moore, Hepworth and other members of the 7 and 5 Society would develop steadily more abstract work, partly influenced by their frequent trips to Paris and contact with leading French artists, notably Picasso, Braque, Arp and Giacometti. Moore flirted with Surrealism, joining Paul Nash's Unit One Group in 1933. Both Moore and Paul Nash were on the organizing committee of the London International Surrealist Exhibition, which took place in 1936. In 1937 Roland Penrose purchased an abstract 'Mother and Child' in stone from Moore that he displayed in the front garden of his house in Hampstead. The piece proved controversial with other residents and a campaign was run against the piece by the local press over the next two years. At this time Moore gradually transitioned from direct carving to casting in bronze, modelling preliminary maquettes in clay or plaster.

War artist

This inventive and productive period was brought to an end by the outbreak of the Second World War. The Chelsea School of Art evacuated to Northampton and Moore resigned his teaching post. During the war, Moore was commissioned as a war artist, notably producing powerful drawings of Londoners sleeping in the London Underground whilst sheltering from the blitz [2]. These drawings helped to boost Moore's international reputation, particularly in America.

After their Hampstead home was hit by bomb shrapnel in 1940, he and Irina moved out of London to live in a farmhouse called Hoglands in the hamlet of Perry Green near Much Hadham, Hertfordshire. This was to become Moore's final home and workshop. Despite acquiring significant wealth later in life, Moore never felt the need to move to a larger home and apart from adding a number of outbuildings and workshops the house changed little.

International recognition

After the war and following several earlier miscarriages, Irina gave birth to their daughter, Mary on 7 March 1946. The child was named after Moore's mother, who had died a couple of years earlier. Both the loss of his mother and the arrival of a baby focused Moore's mind on the family, which he expressed in his work by producing many mother-and-child compositions, although reclining figures also remained popular. In the same year, Moore made his first visit to America when a retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Kenneth Clark became an unlikely but influential champion of Moore's work and through his position as member of the Arts Council of Great Britain secured exhibitions and commissions for the artist. In 1948 he won the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale and was one of the featured artists of the Festival of Britain in 1951 and Documenta 1 in 1955.

Towards the end of the war, Moore had been approached by Henry Morris who was in the process of trying to reform education with the concept of the village college. Morris had engaged Walter Gropius as the architect for his second village college at Impington near Cambridge and he wanted Moore to design a major public sculpture for the site. Unfortunately, the County Council could not afford Gropius's full design, and scaled back the project when Gropius emigrated to America. Lacking funds, Morris had to cancel Moore's sculpture, which had not progressed beyond the maquette stage. Fortunately, Moore was able to reuse the design in 1950 for a similar commission outside a secondary school for the new town of Stevenage. This time, the project was completed and Family Group became Moore's first large scale public bronze.

In the 1950s, Moore began to receive increasingly significant commissions, including one for the UNESCO building in Paris 1957. With many more public works of art, the scale of Moore's sculptures grew significantly and he started to employ a number of assistants to work with him at Much Hadham, including Anthony Caro and Richard Wentworth.

On the campus of the University of Chicago, twenty-five years to the minute (3:36 p.m., December 2, 1967) after the team of physicists led by Enrico Fermi achieved the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction, Moore's Nuclear Energy was unveiled on the site of what used to be the University's football field bleachers, beneath which the experiments had taken place. This twelve-foot-tall piece in the middle of a large, open plaza is often thought to represent a mushroom cloud topped by a massive human skull, but Moore's interpretation is far different. He once told a friend that he hoped viewers would "go around it, looking out through the open spaces, and that they may have a feeling of being in a cathedral." [3]

Legacy

The last three decades of Moore's life continued in a similar vein, with several major retrospectives around the world, notably a very prominent exhibition in the summer of 1972 in the grounds of the Forte di Belvedere overlooking Florence. By the end of the 1970s, there were some 40 exhibitions a year featuring his work.

The number of commissions continued to increase; he completed Knife Edge Two Piece in 1962 for College Green next to the Houses of Parliament in London. Moore commented;

When I was offered the site near the House of Lords... I liked the place so much that I didn't bother to go and see an alternative site in Hyde Park — one lonely sculpture can be lost in a large park. The House of Lords site is quite different. It is next to a path where people walk and it has a few seats where they can sit and contemplate it.

As his personal wealth grew dramatically, Moore began to worry about his legacy. With the help of his daughter Mary, he set up the Henry Moore Trust in 1972, with a view to protecting his estate from death duties. By 1977 he was paying about a million pounds a year in income tax, and so to mitigate this tax burden he established the Henry Moore Foundation as a registered charity with Irina and Mary as trustees. The Foundation was established to promote the public appreciation of art and to preserve Moore's sculptures. It now runs Hoglands as a gallery and museum of Moore's workshops. The Foundation also manages the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds that supports exhibition and research activities into international sculpture. While by the Foundation's own admission general interest in Moore's work has declined since his death the institutions he endowed continue to play an essential role in promoting contemporary art in the United Kingdom.

Although Moore had turned down a knighthood in 1951 he was later awarded the Companion of Honour in 1955 and the Order of Merit in 1963.

Henry Moore died on 31 August, 1986, at the age of 88, in his home in Hertfordshire. His body is interred in the Artist's Corner at St Paul's Cathedral.

On Thursday December 15, 2005, thieves gained access to the courtyard of the Henry Moore Foundation and stole a bronze statue worth £3m ($5.3m). The 1969/1970 work, known as Reclining Figure LH608 is 3.6m long, 2m high by 2m wide and weighs 2.1 tonnes. A substantial reward has been offered by the Foundation for information leading to its recovery. It is feared it may have been stolen for melting down as scrap metal. [4]

Permanent exhibitions

Panorama of the Art Gallery of Ontario's Henry Moore collection, the largest public collection of the sculptor's works in the world.

Moore's sculptures and drawings can be seen at numerous national art galleries around the world. Notable collections are held at

*Locking Piece* (1963) bronze, presented to the Tate Gallery and now sited in Millbank near the Tate Britain.

Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, largest collection of monumental bronzes in the United States
Henry Moore Foundation, [5], Perry Green, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, UK
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, UK
Tate Gallery, London, UK
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Leeds, UK
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, and dotted around the campus of UEA, Norwich, UK.
Wakefield City Art Gallery, UK
Paço imperial, Rio de Janeiro, RJ

References

Biography from the Henry Moore foundation
Review in Sculpture Magazine
List of dates from Moore's biography at Britain Unlimited
Unknown Author. Henry Moore: At Dulwich Picture Gallery. [s.l.]: Scala Publishers, 2004. ISBN 1-85759-352-9.
John Hedgecoe. A Monumental Vision: The Sculpture of Henry Moore. [s.l.]: Collins & Brown Ltd, 1998. ISBN 1-55670-683-9.

External links

Galerie Aida/Moore na Wikimedia Commons
Henry Moore Foundation
selection of late sculptures at the Henry Moore Foundation.
3D model of 'Recumbent Figure' from the Tate

{{featured article}}

{{Persondata}}