The Daily Telegraph - Features
Surprising proof that less really is Moore
Henry Moore in Miniature
Holburne Museum, Bath
★★★★★
A sculpture by Henry Moore is normally hard to miss. Works by the 20th-century British artist are dotted throughout the world, and they’re usually known for their grand scale.
Henry Moore in Miniature
– a delightful new single-room exhibition in Bath – takes a rather different approach: it provides a look at the sculptor’s smaller works: his maquettes for larger projects, his experimentations, his three-dimensional sketches in Plasticine and wood. The result is a broad retrospective, from the artist’s earliest trials with aping Mayan and Aztec forms in the 1920s through to bronzes cast in the 1980s. To see this range in one room is almost unbelievable: if the sculptures were full-sized, the space required would have dwarfed the Holburne Museum and much of the surrounding city.
The exhibition charts Moore’s development, from his early experiments with different materials (on holiday in Norfolk with Barbara Hepworth and John Skeaping, all three sculptors picked up ironstone pebbles and set about working on them) all the way to his later fame and public commissions. But what emerges isn’t a disparate show: there’s a continual sense that Moore returned to the ideas that interested him most.
One of the earliest sculptures in the show is Maternity (1924), a near-cubist form of a breastfeeding mother and child. Later, in 1938, Moore cast an abstract lead form (he initially worked with melting lead down using his kitchen saucepans) called Mother and Child: two figures flow into each other, held together – and apart – by taut lines of string between them. In the 1940s, Moore took to drawing families sheltering from the bombs in London; his terracotta maquettes from this period, also showing mothers and children or family groups, have a new-found realism and immediacy.
But is this just an exhibition of Moore’s preparatory work – studies for larger exhibitions, and proofs of concept? In part, yes: many of the works here have full-sized counterparts. But in a more important sense, this show is something else entirely. Not only does it include works never exhibited before, but it is also a testament to the intimacy that’s possible with sculpture. By the end of his career, Moore had a team of assistants to help him produce his works. But that’s not the case with these miniature pieces, some of which still bear his fingerprints.
Henry Moore in Miniature provides a new understanding of the famous sculptor, and a real – almost tangible – knowledge of his methods.
Until Sept 8. Tickets: 01225 388569; holburne.org