[silence]
Inga Fraser: In the 1920s, following on from
the developments of cubism and futurism,
ideas circulated in Europe regarding
the significance of a sense of
movement in modern art.
In 1920, Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner proclaimed,
and I quote: "We affirm in these
plastic and pictorial arts,
a new element,
the kinetic rhythms as the basic forms
of our perception of real time."
In 1922, Lazlo Moholy-Nagy stated that
artists must, and I quote:
"Put in place of the static principle of classical
art,
the dynamic principle of universal life."
In Britain, following the experiments of
the Vorticists and the interim of the First World
War,
artists and sculptors in particular,
sought a way of working that expressed
something of the dynamism of their age.
In this short paper,
I want to compare the different trajectories
of two sculptors in the 1920s,
Frank Dobson and Henry Moore,
as a means to explore the subtle change
in how movement was conceptualised in
both theory and practice over
the course of the decade.
I hope it will follow along quite well
from some of the questions that were
coming up after your paper, Cathy.
I will argue that the artists' respective
experiences in the city during this period
informed their approaches to art, and that
two commissions completed towards the
end of the decade served to demonstrate
their divergent paths.
It's worth saying a few words about
the different experiences the
two sculptors had growing up.
Frank Dobson was born in 1886,
so 12 years older than Moore,
and
his childhood was fairly peripatetic,
spent in London,
in Hampstead, Goodge Street,
Forest Gate and Brighton.
Aged 11, Dobson won a scholarship
to Leyton Technical School.
Following the death of his father,
he moved to Hastings to live with an aunt
and
attended the Hastings School of Art.
He worked as a studio assistant to the
sculptor William Reynolds-Stephens,
but at that time,
he wasn't actually creating any sculpture himself.
He spent time in Cornwall and Devon
before being awarded a scholarship to
the Hospitalfield Art Institute in Arbroath
in Scotland in 1906.
Four years later in 1910,
he returned to London and attended
the City and Guilds Art School
in Kennington before returning to Cornwall.
In 1915, Dobson enlisted in the Artists Rifles
and was posted to France,
but was sent back to England in 1917
with an ulcer and invalided out
in November 1918.
Shortly afterwards,
Dobson moved into Trafalgar Studios,
Manresa Road in Chelsea,
which was his address until 1939.
I won't go into detail about Moore's
upbringing because I'm sure
you're all very familiar,
but suffice to say that Dobson's upbringing
was fairly unstable in comparison
to Moore's, with the solid backing of his teachers,
his secondary school, and his family.
Moore of course,
moved to London in 1921 to attend the Royal
College of Arts.
Dobson's first experience of modern art
was at the Glasgow Institute where they
were taken from Hospitalfield,
sort of in a period of 1906 to 1910,
and there he recalls seeing
a Monet and a Pissarro.
Later in London,
Dobson saw, and I quote:
"A large collection of impressionist pictures"
at the Franco-British exhibition
at Shepherd's Bush.
He also saw Roger Fry's post-impressionism show
at the Grafton Galleries.
Of that show, he stated in retrospect,
I quote: "Post-impressionism awakened me from
my enchanted dream.
The show at the Grafton Galleries was just an explosion.
The demolition of all the art forms I had come to know."
Despite his enthusiasm,
he described Cézanne and Van Gogh
as too complex at that time,
but the style and sculptural qualities
of the paintings by Gauguin
prompted Dobson to visit the British museum
to study non-western sculpture,
including Peruvian, Egyptian, Assyrian, Polynesian,
and African sculpture.
Moore's first experience of modern art
as we heard,
came by his art teacher Alice Gostick,
and also in the home of Michael Sadler,
the vice chancellor of the university.
When in London,
Moore began his frequent visits to
the British Museum on
Wednesday and Sunday afternoons.
Both Dobson and Moore recall specific books
which inspired them in their early life.
In the 1910s,
Dobson met Guy Baker in Cornwall
and borrowed books on Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Gauguin.
In a lecture given in 1951 at the Royal Academy,
Dobson, also talking about his earlier life
mentions,
Anthony Ludovici's 'Nietzsche and Art',
which ultimately prompted him to
study Egyptian and archaic Greek sculpture.
He also cites two magazines
which introduced him
to Expressionism in the 1910s.
The German titles 'Jugend' and 'Simplicissimus'
which is a satirical magazine.
By the 1920s in London,
Dobson had clearly gathered a library of his
own,
as is evidenced in the diary of Betty Muntz
which I was fortunate to look at in
the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.
She was Dobson's studio assistant
in the early 1920s and on the 30th of October
1920,
she writes,
"Dobie showed me books on sculpture
and lent me a beautiful Egyptian one.
He showed me a book of the work
of some German woman,
it was awfully good most of it."
Obviously for Moore, its Fry's Vision and Design
which is often cited as pivotal in
influencing his understanding of modern art,
a book he read in Leeds in 1921.
As Rob mentioned, the morning after
he came back from his very traditional learning
at the Royal College of Art,
he was able to pore over the books in
his own bedroom and he recalls,
and I quote:
"It was heaven in the evenings in
my horrid little room in Sydney Street,
when I could spread out the books
I've got out of the library
and know that
I had the chance of learning about all
the sculptures that had ever
been made in the world."
In addition to the college library
in his first Autumn term,
Moore discovered Zwemmer's bookshop
on Charing Cross Road and
to fully give details of the quote
that Rob referred to this morning,
he said,
"No doubt the British museum contributed
most
of all to my great excitement and education,
but the art books I found in Zwemmers
had a great share too.
It was easy to combine weekly visits
with call-ins at Zwemmers.
These calls would sometimes
quite shamelessly last an hour."
So, both artists in their formative years
record
the impact of particular publications,
access via informal connections or
in libraries and new specialist
bookshops in the city.
Images of historic
and contemporary art circulated freely
when the real thing was not
always available to see.
R. H. Wilenski
writes that in the modern era and I quote,
"The continuous publication in books,
periodicals and separate sheets of countless
photographs of sculpture of all times
and places had made it easy
for every student to obtain some contact
with a hundred kinds of sculpture in an afternoon."
For Dobson and Moore, the society that
they kept in London in the 1920s
proved
to be influential in relation
to their ongoing education,
their commissions and sales,
but also, in relation to their opportunity
for travel.
Dobson had been lucky to count Augustus John
as an early champion and
by the beginning of the 1920s,
he was fêted by a fashionable London society
including the critics Clive Bell and Roger
Fry,
the economist John Maynard Keynes,
the writers David Garnett
and Raymond Mortimer and Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell.
He'd been introduced to this company,
the sort of Bloomsbury Group via Stephen Tomlin
who was a younger artist affiliated
with that circle,
who was a private student of Dobson's.
Mortimer ended up writing a book
on Dobson which was published
by the Fleuron Press in 1926,
and Fry wrote about Dobson
in The Burlington Magazine and
Bell in Vogue.
When people are discussing these
early write-ups of Dobson,
they appear over-enthusiastic in retrospect
considering the long-term
trajectory of his career.
Dobson was to do many portraits of
that circle such as the Osbert Sitwell
and also, the Lydia Lopokova.
Further afield, through his role as a founder member
on the Council of the Film Society in London,
Dobson traveled to France and
met Man Ray and Alice Prin,
better known as Kiki de Montparnasse.
He recalls, and I quote:
"I was very much excited about
the cinema and in Paris,
had gone to see some rather intellectual films
and because of this interest,
I was asked to go on the council of
the newly formed Film Society.
One of the first things I did for the Society
was to go
to Paris and get an abstract film by Man Ray"
–so that's a still from Emak Bakia,
which is likely the film.
The film society crowd was viewed as
rather unorthodox, with a writer in the Daily
Express
describing the scene outside the cinema
at one of their screenings,
I quote:
"I found the pavement of the Strand
crowded
with the most diverse
and peculiar collection of people
I have seen in London.
A good many had no hats,
but they were to make up for that because
between them they had a quite astonishing
number of hairy chins.
Plus-fours, queer-colored flannel trousers,
and immaculate morning coats
were inextricably jumbled,
but evidently
Dobson appeared quite at home,
as the reporter continues,
"The first person I saw inside had a Slavonic face
admirably suited to the occasion.
It was Mr. Frank Dobson, the sculptor."
In Paris in 1922, Dobson saw an exhibition of Picasso's work and also met Zadkine.
Travelling again to the city in 1926,
he recalls seeing the work of Derain, Matisse, Utrillo, Marie Laurencin and Suzanne Valadon
He recalls, and I quote:
"I spent quite a lot of time visiting
the galleries
and various exhibitions
on the left bank and also the [?].
I used to sit outside the Dôme or the Rotonde
discussing the latest developments
to the masters.
There are all sorts of young students about."
Other famous figures he encountered
during subsequent visits to France
include Jean Cocteau,
Peggy Guggenheim,
and her husband Laurence Vail.
In 1924, the year Dobson's work was
included in the biennial,
he traveled to Venice with Leo and Elsie Myers.
Leo Myers was one of the founders of
the London Artists Association,
of which Dobson was a member,
and so, this was a time of economic uncertainty
in Britain and this organization had
been formed and paid selected artists
a wage in exchange for
a commission on a sale of work,
so you're sort of in this select circle where
some sort of income was assured.
Myers also invited Dobson to accompany
him on a trip to Sri Lanka where
they went by boat in 1925,
so, the picture we get of Dobson
during this time is an artist sort of
thoroughly embedded within
avant-gardes of London,
but also Europe, and absorbing
a wide range of material,
so, painting, sculpture,
but also, film and non-Western art.
As a student in London in the same period,
Moore's experiences,
perhaps understandably
less cosmopolitan by comparison--
we've heard about his peers Raymond Coxon,
Edna Ginesi, and Barbara Hepworth,
and he sort of mentions anecdotally
meeting sort of some people
via William Rothenstein and
also, Charles Rutherstone,
which Rob mentioned this morning.
In Paris, in 1922, when he was there
with Raymond Coxon,
he notes seeing the Cézanne in the Pellerin
Collection
and describes the Great Bathers
approvingly as the triangular bathing composition
with the nudes in perspective,
lying on the ground,
as if they had been sliced out of mountain rock.
It was interesting to see how Moore uses
a similar composition of trees
in his own Two Nudes Among Trees,
although this was made a year earlier,
but circa date makes me wonder whether
it does have some relation with the Cézanne.
But, he doesn't appear to have been
as impressed when visiting Paris
again in 1925 as part of his traveling scholarship,
during which time he also visited Rome,
Florence, Venice, and other cities in Italy.
He wrote to Raymond Coxon,
and I quote,
"You were right about Paris,
it's a dull hole,
nothing of any great interest seems
to be going on and the place hasn't
the variety of London,
a week is enough."
In comparison with Dobson,
Moore appears to have eschewed much
of the artistic
activity in London and Paris,
perhaps in favor of a more
subjective pursuit of art.
A crucial feature in the modern city is,
of course, technology,
and the way in which Dobson and Moore
refer to technology helps us understand
their developing artistic positions.
Speaking with Stanley Casson about his motivation
for wanting to pursue sculpture,
Dobson revealed,
and I quote:
"I've always loved to mess about with
engines and such things and I've got
this longing
to always work in three dimensions
and use my fingers and hands,
so automatically
I found myself taking to modeling
and carving,
that's how I became a sculptor."
Moore, on the other hand, recollects,
"Whilst a student at the World College of
Art,
I became involved in Machine Art,
which in those days had its place in Modern
Art.
Although, I was interested in the work
of Leger and the Futurists who
exploited mechanical forms,
I was never directly influenced by machinery
as such"
–and we were talking about this quote,
he's referring to the stringed forms,
but it sort of seems to have a wider impact.
While Dobson explicitly links mechanics
with handy work and sculpture,
Moore distances the relation,
preferring to associate machines with
an aesthetic and a historic one at that.
Observers of Dobson's work often refer to
a certain rhythmic quality.
Fellow artist Cedric Morris,
for instance,
writes of Dobson's sculpture 'Man Child',
which is in the exhibition and
I hope you all saw it at lunch,
"Here one is at once struck by the rhythm,
a quality very rare,
but belonging to all good sculpture
and fullness and roundness of the form or forms used.
The constancy and fitting together
of the forms, the curious flowing,
almost writhing quality of the lines,
giving this piece of work a liveliness added
to
its great solidity and weightfulness."
This is another work by Dobson,
'Woman Descending from a Bus'.
This piece of work has a sensation
of turning or swinging around slowly,
and shows again,
this rhythm and flowing quality.
The obvious reference for this sculpture,
reproduced very poorly here–
this is an online scan of issue number two of
Wyndham Lewis' 'The Tyro'– is Duchamp's
'Nude Descending a Staircase',
and I love the incredibly prosaic homage
of Dobson's title,
'Woman Descending from a Bus'.
So, the movement in these and
other works by Dobson is akin to
a freeze frame or a multiple exposure
showing the path of bodies in motion.
As Dobson explained to Stanley Casson
when interviewed in 1933,
"All the finest works in sculpture,
which I have seen have a peculiar still quality,
which I call static, underlying this
the forms, or the multiple of them, are assembled
in such a fashion that one is aware
of a continuous and beautiful
movement within the whole,
which
I like to call rhythm.
One limb is given a fullness
which leads up to another shape,
which is its complement and
so, as you pass around,
you observe the unity of the artist's intention."
From this description,
one gets a sense of progression of
form over time and
and a succession of states,
and it's the time-based media of music
with which Dobson drew an analogy
when discussing his work in 1936.
He states,
"Rhythm and flow in sculpture are
to me much the same as they are in music.
There are staccato passages,
where movement is quick and jerky and
there are big crescendos where the volume
swells
with big and simple resonance,
and it's by the subtle relation of these
that much of the finest results are achieved."
If Dobson's sense of movement is to be
understood in terms of kinetics,
informed by an interest in music,
cinema, and mechanics,
and resulting in a sculpture of stilled rhythms,
Moore's from an ostensibly comparable
beginning is understood in quite
different
terms by the end of the decade.
Early sketches show Moore like Dobson,
exploring the body in motion
and you can also see this in the linocut,
which is upstairs,
and in various designs for friezes.
The designs sort of also relate to some
of Moore's very early work with
the sort of parts which.
are often talked about in terms of
a proto-cinema because you can sort of
turn them and create this sort of
animation of forms.
Early carvings such as 'Standing Woman'
appear to have a lot in common
with Dobson's rhythmic portrayal of
the human body
and Moore even
depicted a dance scene.
Nevertheless,
looking back on the period in 1982,
Moore stated, and I quote:
"I did not and I still do not like sculpture
that
represents actual physical movement."
By the 1930s,
Moore's sculpture had become characteristic
in its solidity, combined with a sense
of growing or surging forms, as
in the 1930 'Reclining Woman',
in blue Hornton stone,
or the 'Half Figure'
in Ancaster stone from the same year.
Moore preferred to describe his works
in terms of a living energy in the 1930s,
so in his statement for the 'Unit
One' catalogue,
Moore explains,
"For me, a work must have a vitality of its own.
I do not mean a reflection of the vitality of life,
of movement, physical action, frisking,
dancing figures and so on,
but that a work can have in it
a pent-up energy and an intense life
of
its own independent of the object
it might represent."
He states that his aim was to,
and I quote:
"Turn an inert block into a composition
which has a full-form existence,
with masses of varied size and
section conceived in the air surrounded entirety,
stressing and straining, thrusting
and opposing each other in spatial relationship,
being static and yet having an alert,
dynamic tension between its parts."
Edward Juler has described in detail
how the myriad discoveries in the
Life Sciences in the 1920s and '30s,
in particular biology,
and their dissemination by a popular literature,
photography and cinema may be observed
to have informed the approach
of artists interested in doctrines of truth
to materials or Neo-Romanticism.
He cites Moore as an exemplary figure
in such a discussion and
early writers on Moore,
such as Geoffrey Grigson describe,
and I quote:
"That life,
that held-in immense life is Moore's interest.
He's interested in the rounded solid shapes
into which life builds itself."
In the British Museum,
he had seen the carved symbols of life.
He now saw life in its natural forms and framework,
from the cells to the skeleton."
So, despite having begun the decade
in a mode that was comparable
to that of Dobson,
by the end of the 1920s,
for Moore the objective was to imbue
the material used with a vitality
that expressed the dynamism
of the modern era, not directly
representationally,
but in oblique terms,
via the recognition of the teeming structures
of life that lie beyond the human eye.
We can see the variance in the two sculptors'
approaches neatly in two commissions
they produced towards the end of
the decade for architectural settings.
On the one hand,
Dobson's, which served to illustrate the ideas for
which he was to achieve most public
recognition in his career,
on the other, Moore's,
which I think was formative,
the means by which he shed elements of
his earlier work and consolidated
the approach to sculpture that would
yet bring him the greatest success.
Dobson's was a relief for the head office
of the Hay's Wharf Companies on
the
south bank of the River Thames and
that's a sort-of-recent photo
as you can see there,
on a building designed by Harry Stuart GoodHart-Rendel.
Dobson responded to the commission
with a work on the theme of commerce,
capital, and labor,
represented by
three figures at the top of the relief
from which descend four lines
of sequentially composed panels,
showing geometrically simplified boxes,
barrels, canisters,
stacked and linked with ropes or chains.
The panels are gilded and framed with
black granite on the facade of the building.
The commission was reviewed favorably
in the press with one reviewer reluctantly admitting,
"The effect is as pleasing as it is startling
and even the distortions
of the crowning figures,
bewildering in themselves,
are justified when considered in relation
to the geometrical forms of the other panels,"
and the architectural correspondent
of The Times enthused,
"No praise can be too high
for Mr. Dobson's treatment of the reliefs.
The planes of the details have been
so skillfully adjusted to the play of light
and shade that the design is clear
and coherent as a whole.
From London Bridge,
the details tell rather like hieroglyphics and on a nearer approach
they're full of interest."
The work precisely combines
Dobson's interest in rhythm with
the linked reliefs
even forming something akin to a filmstrip
as they run the length of the facade.
It combines both geometric forms that
recall cubism and a figurative approach.
Though, it was received successfully,
if perhaps not the moment at
which Dobson began to be accepted
by the traditionalists,
by the end of the 1920s
he was no longer the unstable character
reviewed in the press outside the film society
screenings and also
that caused him
to be rejected by Rothenstein as a
candidate for the position of head of sculpture
at the Royal College of Arts in 1925
which was Moore's suggestion.
Moore's commission, on the other hand,
was a relief depicting
the West Wind for the new London transport
headquarters
in St. James and came by
the architect Charles Holden.
The tower of the building was to be inspired
by the Tower of the Winds in Athens,
and Moore was one of several sculptors
asked to contribute a relief of the wind
which would be positioned above
Epstein's Day and Night figures on
the lower part of the building.
What's often remarked upon
is Moore's dissatisfaction of having
to work in relief.
Moore recalls being extremely reluctant
to accept the commission
and claimed he was resolved to cut
as deeply
as the conditions would allow
to suggest sculpture in the round.
Writing just two years after the commission
in the Architectural Association Journal in
1930,
Moore confirms,
"The sculpture which moves me most
is full-blooded and self-supporting.
Fully in the round, that is.
Its component forms are completely realised
and work as masses in opposition,
not being merely indicated
by surface cutting in relief.
It is not perfectly symmetrical,
it is static,
and it is strong and vital,
giving off something of the energy
and power of great mountains."
But these comments are in retrospect
and one could argue that it was precisely
the process of working on this commission
that led Moore to his firmly held views,
and crucially also provided him with
a method of producing dynamic sculpture
that did not actually represent movement.
The 1928 sketchbook, which you
can also see
in the exhibition, shows
his trouble in attempting to respond
to the ostensibly kinetic theme.
He wrestles the figure through myriad formulations.
These are just photocopies from
the catalogue raisonné,
so sorry for the quality.
His resolution came in the characterization
of the wind,
the West Wind, as a rainier and softer wind
and the drawings appear to develop
towards a more solid static figure
rather than one in motion.
For Moore,
the commission at the end of the 1920s
was a shape of things to come,
not the shape of things as they
had been as it was for Dobson.
In the 1920s in London then,
Dobson and Moore both experienced
a similar proliferation of images
of modern art and modern culture via literature,
museums, galleries, film,
and travel abroad.
While Dobson's approach
was to attempt to represent this flow
in rhythmic sculptural composition,
Moore's approach was to assimilate
the flow
and seek to render the knowledge
of the universal forms it produced.
As the critic R. H. Wilenski wrote,
"The modern sculptors have arrived at the
concept
of the universal analogy of form,
the concept of all human, animal
and vegetable forms as different manifestations
of the common principles of architecture."
Again, Moore summarized in the primitive art
essay
that underlining these individual characteristics,
the featural peculiarities,
and the primitive schools,
a common world language of forms is apparent.
The same shapes and form relationships
are used to express similar ideas at wildly
different places and periods in history."
In the 1930s, as Edward Juler has argued,
there was, and I quote:
"A growing disenchantment with the fruits
of industrialisation and mechanisation
which had served to heighten hostility
towards those forms of artistic modernism,
specifically, geometric abstraction
that appeared to cravenly mimic
mechanical imagery and therefore
ignore the biological needs of humankind."
He identifies the decline of faith
in materialism and mechanism as
a meaningful epistemological system,
the causes of which include the reality
of warfare
during the First World War and post-war industrialization.
This was replaced by a more romantic
understanding of nature, informed
by instinctive, idealistic,
holistical metaphysical attitudes,
and bolstered by such notions
as Henri Bergson's 'Élan Vital',
the idea of a dynamic force
which motivates the growth
and form of living organisms.
In their engagement with
the modern city in the 1920s,
one can see Dobson's mechanistic modernity
contrasted with Moore's,
increasingly more vitalist or humanist modernity.
It was with these respective ways
of thinking that the sculptors were able
to themselves augment the mise-en-scene of the city
by commissions in the public realm
that contributed to the reformation
of the city in modern art terms,
influencing the next generation of artists.
That's the end.
That's Moore's design for a lamp,
which I couldn't find a way to fit in,
but it's very amusing.
[laughter]
[applause]
Host: Thank you, Inga.
You've left us tantalizingly with this,
before we get some questions,
can you say a little bit more,
now you've got a space to say why-
Inga: Well, I went through all of the sketchbooks
and I guess I was used to looking for
the things that didn't seem to fall
into Moore's work at all.
He did two designs for lamps in the mid-'20s.
There are two sort of candelabra figures.
The actual things that were made,
he made clay models for them which
look completely different and then
were subsequently destroyed.
Again, one of those,
trying something out,
not making it.
Host: Just to follow up on this,
I think that's incredibly good.
In terms of what you've just said,
your reading of Dobson and Moore
on their versions of how the render movement
and think about energy and form.
I think this is incredibly telling because
at a time in the mid-1920s
when artists were in the thralls of
the products of technological modernity,
the light bulb, electrics, telephones, motor cars,
here we have an artist whose lamp
has candles that burn down.
It talks of still life, memento mori,
an old-fashioned outlook.
I think it's a very telling image.
It also kind of,  just to carry on,
it leads me to my first question to you.
I found your paper incredibly helpful actually
and pennies were dropping as
I was listening to you.
It's not often that you hear Dobson's work
talked about in relation to Moore. It's quite rare.
Although, we know they shared
the same cultural space and they've
had
no doubt similar thoughts on
their correspondences in shared ideas.
In your schematic account from
the late teens to the '30s,
the cult of art deco,
how they think about movement,
vitalism in different ways which is very clearly
laid out.
One of those that came to my mind
is, looking at that Osbert Sitwell in 1923,
thinking about the way that Henry Moore
harnessed the optical energies in the effects
of polished metal in the 1930s.
I want you to say a little bit about, if I can draw you, if you will,
on both these artists use of the treatment of surface.
You talked about structure and about figuration and form,
but how they both, in often quite contradictory ways,
used polished wood, polished stone even, polished metal,
in ways that bespeak of an art deco fad,
but also talk at other moments to non-western,
to exotic hardwoods,
could you just talk shine and
polish in relation to mechanistic modernities?
Inga: This sort of catholic approach to finishes
and different types of material is something
that you definitely observe
in Dobson's work from the period,
and also from Moore's actually in
a slightly longer period as well.
They both enjoy looking at
their works in different stages.
Dobson photographed work in a model form
as well, before having the finished things.
The Dancers, which was one of the earliest
slides, you see that
in bronze and also in clay.
Those images have circulated as well.
I think it's Roger Fry's transformations
actually,
reproduces as a plate–
and this is a hugely important book and there's only, what, like 28 plates.
One of them is Dobson's Cornucopia,
so it covers a broad history of sculpture
and it's the clay model rather
than the finished piece.
In terms of polish,
I think,
for Dobson, using it in the kind of
'20s,
it very much did link in with those ideas
of technological modernity.
I don't know,
this is complete speculation and I'm sure there
are many more Moore experts in the room
who could say more decisively on this,
but it seems that having that level of polish
for Moore has a slightly more–
It needs a kind of meaning,
a kind of inner meaning and
so it's only when he gets to the '30s work
where it's not just technology
for the sake of it.
It's a sort of modernity in a more digested
form that those sorts of polishes are being
used for.
Host: It might be evocative of certain
spiritualties
which might be informed by other
modern sculptors using this,
and the way that photography can–
and they shine–
that can be captured through
the black and white photographic image.
Inga: Which is why I was so interested
in the readings of the Zadkine sculpture
as an idol as well even though it was wooden,
the kind of ritualistic role that modern sculpture
often seemed to take in this period
in which traditional religious attitudes
were changing.
A lot of work has been done on Hepworth
in relation to her religious views changing
as she met Nicholson,
and that's something that I'm sure you could
look into in relation to Moore as well.
Host: Yes, thank you.
I thought that across the first few papers.
We were dealing with very different
surfaces with very
different metaphorical resonances,
and also, in terms of relation to the human
body.
So far,
when we're looking at photographs of Henry Moore
in the 1920s and '30s,
we haven't been looking at a Brancusian, Rodain-esque bearded man,
we've been looking at a very close-shaven–
There's something about the very famous Gaudier-Brzeska line, about him telling whoever it was that
he shaved his beard off
for the sake of pure form.
There's something about the correspondence of skin and surface–
Anyway,
Any other comments or questions?
Audience: I was just wondering,
it's actually just a thought going back
to what Jon and Cathy
were just saying about Moore and movement,
and also thinking about those sculptures,
particularly the sculpture that Cathy showed.
The ones that showed the
influence of Cubism and Vorticism.
I wondered if you'd thought about that work
and how that might relate
to the movement as well?
Inga: Yes,
in relation to Dobson,
he has a very specifically cubist period
which is 1918 to 1920,
where he's affiliated with Wyndham Lewis
and his drawings, his sculpture is
all very much like post-First World War cubism.
I was really surprised to find
those drawings in Moore.
Because I was looking at Frank Dobson,
and so I looked at Moore, for the purpose
of
this paper, as a comparison.
So yes, to actually see the drawings
that developed from a more
cubist investigation of movements in space
to something that's more surging, I suppose–
So the Moore sculpture that you showed,
the sort of upward turned face as well,
and the other ones in the space,
they do have that kind of growth
rather than a kind of movement.
It's a different interpretation
of kineticism, I guess.
Host: Any more?
Thank you, Inga.
Inga: Thank you.
[applause]
[silence]
