How two like-minded titans of art emerged from the underground
In September 1940, shortly after bombs began to rain down upon London, Henry Moore took a Tube journey into the West End. As the train snaked in and out of each station, the artist caught glimpses of people bedding down for the night. “I saw hundreds of Henry Moore Reclining Figures stretched along the platforms,” he said. “Even the train tunnels seemed to be like the holes in my sculpture.”
This tense, nocturnal world brought Moore and photographer Bill Brandt together. The haunting images they independently created struck a chord for wartime Britain through their publication in magazines. In the following decades, the two men’s careers intersected as they mined similar subject matter – work, families, the landscape and geological formations. Both men possessed wide-ranging skills and, at times, even forayed into each other’s media.
Five portraits of Moore by Brandt, traversing 30 years, open this outstanding show of more than 200 works, which traces their parallel careers and interests. What the exhibition – along with its beautiful accompanying publication – demonstrates is how their images reinforce and resonate with each other. A close-up of Moore’s eye could be a detail from one of his own works, replete with ridges, crags and crosshatched wrinkles. Moore’s drawings and Brandt’s photographs of London’s subterranean shelters were first published together in Lilliput magazine. While people ignored official warnings against seeking shelter underground, the Ministry of Information soon recognised the need for images that conveyed safety and community resilience, distributed through popular publications, such as Picture Post.
Their distinctive visions were honed by their wartime work. Brandt’s is one of striking realism and pathos. Intertwined slumbering bodies could equally be corpses, piled in a mass burial pit. In a crypt, a man sleeps in an open sarcophagus, Jews study the bible and a Sikh family cling together. The Blitz was a great leveller, in more ways than one.
On the other hand, Moore’s stylised subjects possess the impenetrable solidity of tomb effigies. Using a wax resist technique, creating a pitted, plaster-like surface, his blanketed subway sleepers resemble the robed victims of Vesuvius, their faces frozen in an eerie echo of the gaping mouths of the tunnels. In other drawings, abstracted figures are gathered like archaeological hoards, or recline in front of bombed-out buildings, the ruined vestiges of lost civilisations.
After the war, their vision went overground, with ancient sites becoming key subjects. Brandt’s sublime Stonehenge (1947), with its overexposed snowy foreground and looming sarsens, suggests a mythological city hovering on an astral plane. Shown alongside Moore’s textured drawings of the monument, an accessible, timeless British abstract art emerges, deeply rooted in the soil and natural forces. Works are placed alongside the publications through which they became widely known. Together, they demonstrate how at a particular moment in history, the coming together of artistry, mass media and political forces enabled a photographer and a sculptor to emerge from the underground into the light of international success.