Here is the surprising case of Henry Moore, an artist who could uncover dungeons and desert dunes within the cavities of an elephant skull and who could map out invented land formations as if seen from space. These landscapes indicate a shift in Moore’s thinking and approach to both sculpture and drawing. They mark a change from his immediate post-war perception of himself as an artist with an integral role to play in society to that of a more personal and private venture. The exhibition takes as its starting point the late 1950s, when Moore first fragmented the human figure in order to convey a sense of metamorphosis with the land.

Woman 1957-58 (LH 439)and Reclining Figure: Hand 1979 (LH 709) relate the female form to undulating hills, while the multiple-piece compositions that he began in 1959 break the figure down more dramatically into separate monumental masses that resemble rock formations. The transformation of the body into landscape is not restricted to his three-dimensional work. Head of Conrad Verkell (after Dürer) 1979 for example, was begun as a drawing after a Dürer portrait but, in a surreal twist, Moore has Verkell looking down from the sky onto a rocky landscape derived directly from his own craggy features.

Particularly striking throughout the exhibition is the way in which Moore plays with scale. Stone Maze: Project for Hill Monument 1977, a table-top plaster labyrinth inspired by bone forms, was photographed under Moore’s supervision to appear as monumental as Stonehenge, a subject that is also represented in the exhibition. The artist’s fascination with the surface and interior spaces of an elephant skull led to a series of etchings in which its points and hollows became fantastic architecture, mysterious caverns or desert dunes. In drawings, his viewpoint ranges from ant’s eye view, looking up at towering natural features, to a bird’s eye view of imagined worlds.

A number of works on paper from the Foundation’s collection will be on public display for the first time, revealing the variety and depth of Moore’s explorations of the world around him. His interpretations of desert dunes, caverns, icebergs and giant rock formations are dramatic and often unsettling, while atmospheric wooded scenes composed of blots and splashes, or the delicate landscapes inspired by Japanese drawing, reveal a more lyrical side.

www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk

www.meijergardens.org

Collection Artist(s)

Glossary

  • Drawing

    The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.