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Moore’s war
Henry Moore’s paintings of Londoners taking shelter in the Underground remain powerful images, writes Gerald Isaaman
HENRY Moore became a sculptor because he wanted to create real things, those monumental stone and bronze works that are a remarkable legacy to the life of a moral Yorkshireman who, along with Barbara Hepworth, literally broke the mould to create modern art.
Yet his most popular work – at least with the public – were his moving Underground bomb shelter drawings made during the Blitz of World War II, many of them at Belsize Park, Hampstead and Cricklewood Tube stations. So it is good and enlightening to see Moore, nowadays too often forgotten, back in the public eye with this exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, to mark the 20th anniversary of his death.
And in particular because, like all great artists, he could draw, fill sketchbooks galore with his ideas, often in incredible detail, unlike those abstract artists today who have lost touch with recognisable reality. Moore’s comprehensive ability with chalk, crayon, charcoal, whatever, was one reason why he was appointed an official war artist, his age preventing him from fighting the fascism he hated in the front line.
Remarkably too, the shelter drawings, which form such a vital part of this exhibition, came about by chance.
Moore and his Polish wife, Irina, who had just moved into No 7 the Mall Studios, Tasker Road, Hampstead, vacated by his friends Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, who had exiled themselves to Cornwall, were returning from dinner in the West End. They were without their little Standard 8 car because of lack of petrol as they headed home to Hampstead.
“I hadn’t been by Tube for ages,” Moore later recalled.
“For the first time that evening I saw people lying on the platforms at all the stations we stopped at. When we got to Belsize Park we weren’t allowed out of the station for an hour because of the bombing. I spent the time looking at the rows of people sleeping on the platforms. I had never seen so many reclining figures, and even the train tunnels seemed to be like the holes in my sculpture.”
He turned to his sketchbooks in which to record the almost surreal vision of a new nightmare life trapped in the worm-like tunnels beneath London, focusing solely on women and children, mostly sleeping huddled in fear, mouths open as if awaiting the dentist of death. On another night his studio had its windows shattered by bomb blast that damaged just one sculpture, and he and Irina moved out to Perry Green, Much Hadham, Moore returning to London twice a week to continue his grim record of suffering London.
There is just but one fully worked up picture from Moore’s shelter period, the exhibition concentrating on his original sketchbook work, and that will be a huge disappointment to those who have seen them displayed in the past.
There are at least two houses in Hampstead where they still hang on the wall – and where I first saw them long ago – but while the sketches do have their own cumulative effect the exhibition would have benefited from the bigger picture, the greater impact of Moore’s artistry.
They remain, fortunately, a melancholic elegy to a war most of the nation didn’t see, in the same way too that it was a war where your fate was delivered from afar, from the droning planes and buzz-bombs that I remember appearing out of nowhere.
There are letters too to be seen, from Moore to the poet and Cambridge academic Arthur Sale, telling him, in his meticulous handwriting, of the realism of war, which, ironically, have made – and changed – artists over the centuries.
Indeed, Moore admits that his shelter experiences made him a much more compassionate and humane artist. Yet he claimed that Hampstead in the 1930s, when it was the beehive of radical art, gave him little.
“My real education was the British Museum,” he said. “I did not get anything out of Hampstead – only friends.”
He is wrong, of course, in one sense. Hampstead gave him a unique opportunity to leave for us, the survivors of wars that still hopelessly abound, an essence of what living in terror was like nearly 70 years ago when Adolf Hitler held our fate in the balance. And that is unforgettable.
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