Moore Better Good

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Moore Better Good

The biomorphic curves of Henry Moore's work present such a pleasing and familiar figurative mode that we may overlook their conceptual under-pinnings in the social strains and bleak reality of post-WWII Britain. Heroic wartime leader Churchill was summarily turned out of office in the election of '45; and wartime rationing of even basic foodstuffs continued for nearly a decade longer as the country pulled haltingly from rubble and wreckage.

Into this context, we must consider: Was it a stoic and brazen Moore who thought to work his maquettes in the expectation of patinated lustre and indulgent scale while materials remained scarce? Or was it the humanist Moore, staring into the uncertainty of the times, who thought worthy to memorialize the counter-weight of tradition and shared history on the cusp of social and economic revolution?

Indeed, it is to the shadowy voids we must regard his work its proper due. For within the attenuated "negative" spaces of his work, are the elements that push us to question their intent -- on one hand a virtuous muscular tension, or to the other side a fading and fatigue. Will the connecting points fail, or will their mass slow a centrpedal trajectory? Do they move apart inexorably into dialectic conflict, or prove resilient, like the redoubtable British character, with the elastin/elasticity to recover and rise again? I think Moore saw the risks, recognized the necessity for progress, but cheered for the possibilities of a harmonious resolution with tradition. If that optimism divided him from the more nihilistic views of his contemporaries (and critics), so be damned.