A show that manages to make Moore seem fresh all over again
Exhibition Henry Moore: The Helmet Heads Wallace Collection, London W1
★★★★☆
‘Less is Moore” goes the old quip. It refers to the way, in his later years, Henry Moore produced a surfeit of castings of his large bronzes. There was a period in the Sixties when it seemed no corporate plaza or public square was complete without one.
Moore died in 1977, and myriad exhibitions have been devoted to him since, including a big Tate retrospective earlier this decade. For many of us, there’s a distinct sense of overfamiliarity with his recurring subjects: the reclining figure, for instance, and the mother with child.
Credit to the curators of a new show at the Wallace Collection, then, for managing to come up with a novel take on the artist – or, more precisely, for focusing on an aspect of his career barely addressed before: his fascination with armour, helmets in particular. Moore said the first sculptures he ever remembered seeing were on a visit, aged nine, to a church in Methley in his native West Yorkshire. Its stone-carved effigies of medieval knights in armour left him “deeply impressed”. Moore’s first experience of sculpture was, in a way, his first experience of armour.
He’d go on to serve as a machinegunner in the First World War, and the exhibition features a bronze he made more than three decades later – Helmet Head No 1, from 1950 – clearly inspired by the M1916 “coal scuttle” helmet worn by the Germans. It even boasts the distinctive pair of round air vents on the brow.
Moore moved to London in 1921, where the Wallace Collection became a favourite haunt. He visited countless times over his lifetime, captivated above all by its Italian and German helmets from the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. A selection of these appear in the current show, alongside 60 helmet-related works (drawings, maquettes and full-sized sculptures) produced by Moore over several decades. He humbly spoke of the helmets he sculpted as “variations” on those in the Wallace.
Moore made his first in the late Thirties, and it’s clear these were never intended as items for anyone to actually wear. They were works of art. Some veer so far towards the abstract or surreal, they’re barely even recognisable as helmets at all.
Despite the title, Small Helmet Head (1950) most resembles a scuba diving mask. Head Cyclops, from a decade later, has an opening the shape of a big inverted comma at the front. Emerging at us from that opening is an outsize eye socket (in reference to the oneeyed giant of Greek mythology, the Cyclops). As for Helmet Head No 6, from 1975, it’s completely open at the front, revealing what looks like a hatching bird within.
Most of these sculptures feature some kind of figure or form inside the “helmet” – reflecting the obvious fact that real helmets are only used with a human head inside them. Moore said he was attracted by the idea of “an outer protection to an inner form”. Which invites the comparison with his famous sculptures of a mother nurturing her child.
The curators suggest the helmet works might have been responses to the geopolitical context in which Moore made them (that of the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War). Helmets are intrinsically related to combat, it’s true, and the various conflicts of the mid-20th century do coincide exactly with Moore’s repeated making of these sculptures over 40 years.
But the overriding sense when looking at the works, is of an artist not so much viscerally responding to the world’s evils, as creating beguilingly rounded forms as an antidote to them.
Put on in collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation, this is the first paid-entry show in the Wallace Collection’s new exhibition space below stairs.
It won’t transform anyone’s view of Moore, but it certainly allows his work to excite and seem fresh again. Which in itself is a minor miracle.
Until June 23; wallacecollection.org, 020 7563 9500