Moore's ode

An exhibition at Te Papa offers a rare opportunity to muse on the magic of Henry Moore's sculptures, reports arts editor LINDA HERRICK.

A rater special cargo has quietly arrived at Wellington's Te Papa museum: a collection of 15 sculptures by the great British Modernist Henry Moore.

Although the more massive pieces arrived in Wellington on a container ship, others were flown in via Auckland. It's a delicious fantasy to imagine a stately procession of trucks gliding down State Highway One, proudly bearing large-scale Moore bronzes for passing motorists to gape at.

But with a collection worth "millions and millions", according to Te Papa's Ian Wedde, such a security risk could never happen - although their combined weight of 14,500kg hardly makes them portable.

All of the works, as well as a satellite exhibition of drawings, models and "found objects" such as stones and bones which inspired many of Moore's sculptures, will be displayed in Te Papa's Tower Gallery and Ilott Centre. But one monumental piece - Two Piece Reclining Figure: Points 1969-70, measuring 4m long by 2m wide by 2.5m high - will be placed where Moore's largest creations always look their best: outside.

Henry Moore: Journey through Form opens on February 22 and runs through to June.

It is not the first time some of Moore's works have come to New Zealand but his 1956 exhibition at the Auckland Art Gallery (and later at the National Art Gallery in Wellington) was a controversial affair.

This comes as a puzzle to this writer, who had a Moore epiphany at Japan's Hakone Open-Air Museum, home to 26 huge Moore works hunkered among the mountains south-west of Tokyo.

To experience Moore in that environment was simply stunning. But in 1956, Auckland mayor J.H. Luxford said: "I had never seen the art gallery so desecrated by such a nauseating sight. These figures, offending against all known anatomy, were repulsive."

Another gallery patron ran out in a rage, shouting that Moore should be shot, while one woman told a Herald reporter that "some evil influence in the world is trying to demoralise us".

Nevertheless, more than 37,000 Aucklanders went to see the Moore show, and attitudes have matured since those days when sculptors were expected to represent literal figures which looked "realistic" and which didn't require much thought or imagination.

In negotiating with the Henry Moore Foundation to bring this latest exhibition to Te Papa, Wedde (whose title is "concept leader, humanities") was lucky enough to visit the mother lode - Moore's 28ha Perry Green estate and foundation base in Hertfordshire, where the artist died in 1986 at the age of 88 after living there since 1940.

"Perry Green is quite a wonderful place," says Wedde. "It preserves Moore's way of working and its social structure. Perry Green has a team of around 30 people and there are people there who've been involved with his work for 20, 30 years, or longer.

"They arrive at work at the same time he would have when he was active, they break for morning coffee at the same time and they all go down to the same pub for lunch and choose the same item on the menu every day. It's amazing.

"It was great to go there and see how organised things are, like the archive, the publishing programme, their conservation units and, of course, an absolutely enormous exhibition programme.

"It is like a living museum. They have preserved as much as was sensible to be able to explain how Henry Moore made the work and to give you a flavour of the man. His presence is still very strongly there."

Wedde agrees that photos simply can't offer the visceral thrill of seeing a Moore work, of being able to walk around a piece and experience its vitality and power, which shift with every angle.

"This sounds like a cliche and this applies to all 3-D forms," he says, "but in Moore's case in particular it's something he thought about very hard and talked about a great deal.

"As you move around them, you have the experience of sensing how those forms shift and how different locking mechanisms appear. The negative spaces - the 'holes' - take on a significant value and the works become animated as you move around. Moore said a very interesting thing, that sculpture's persistent attempt to show figures in motion was ridiculous and pointless. But he worked to try and capture a sense of contained force."

Moore's working-class background - he was the seventh child of a miner in Castleford, near Leeds - meant he retained a fundamental pragmatism, which applied as much to his life as his art.

"To me, he is so fascinating," says Wedde. "Even though he achieved this extraordinary grandeur as a 20th-century artist and is found in every major collection in most major metropolitan centres around the world, with a huge cultural industry growing around him, his origins in a Yorkshire coal-mining family were very important.

"He learned about art by looking at the blackened church architecture, the figures in the northern churches, the industrial landscape, the glass works, the mine shafts."

Wedde says the found objects included in the exhibition, such as the bones, offer an extraordinary insight into Moore's method of building up models.

"That's something he started doing more and more, from the 50s onwards, drawing less and working more from bones, stones, shells, animal skulls.

"When you look at the forms which evolved through the last 20 years of his life, those shapes are strangely familiar, like the things you pick up on the beach. You don't know why you pick them up but they have a magic.

"Moore's large forms grew from those little objects, from little models, to a maquette, then a big polystyrene form which became a mould, then a plaster cast, which became a working model for a large bronze.

"And then some of those were upscaled to the gigantic works. By the time you get to that scale, it's extraordinary how he still retained the feeling of that little thing in the world, that intimate, magic thing."

Moore may be dead but the strength of his personality remains as a legacy, says Wedde. "He hadn't come up through a privileged stream of education.

"He always looks to me like someone who retained a practical toughness. He never lost the love of the craft and he retained a strong feeling for a team environment.

"He wasn't airy-fairy, he didn't run an authoritarian atelier - it was a very close, intimate team."