Tunnel Vision

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The New York Sun

As the judiciously selected and stunningly installed exhibition at Tate Britain demonstrates, the 1930s were Henry Moore’s most fecund and innovative period of sculptural experimentation, confirming him as a leader of the modern movement in Britain. The outbreak of the Second World War, however, saw abrupt changes in output and outlook alike. He turned to drawing as his principal mode of expression, and responded to the suffering of the Blitz with a dark humanism in broodingly archetypal depictions of shelterers lining the platforms and tunnels of London’s Underground Railway, the Tube.

Just as his abstracting, geologizing explorations of the female form, with their legendary, punctured holes, anticipate the social theme of figures huddled, en masse, in underground tunnels, so too the heaped, skeletal figures would prove prophetic of wartime horrors to come, in the form of footage of liberated concentration camps. The shelter drawings, exhibited in the US during the war, brought Moore international success.

The exhibition highlights the darker side of post-war Moore, with his fallen warriors series of the 1950s and the A-Bomb mushroom of his “Atom Piece” of 1964-65. The post-war work marks a synthesis of his 1930s fascination with metamorphosis and the uncanny, and the social consciousness aroused by war.

The exhibition curator, Chris Stevens, places heavy emphasis on Moore’s achievements as a carver, depriving the survey of his extraordinary mature works in cast bronze. Mr. Stevens does end the show with a wow, however, in a room of four monumental wood carvings from different periods of the career. These represent the apotheosis of Moore’s equation of figure and landscape, and of the aligned, symbiotic powers of direct carving and “truth to materials.”

The London exhibition runs through August 8 and travels, in modified form, to the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, in the fall.


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