ART BULLETIN

No. 64 Vol. l2 Aug/Sept 1995 journal of the Representative body for Professional Artists in Ireland ISSN 0790- 5858

Association of Artists in Ireland 803 Liberty Hall, Dublin 1 Telephone 01-8740529

Art Bulletin August/September 1995

Platform 25

[Second extract]

An extract from Fuller Versus Moore: Reflections on an Interpretation by Bernd. G. Rosenheim. The first part of this article was published in the June / July issue of Art Bulletin

One of the demands of the Avant-Garde around 1900 was - and for many artists still is - the idea of "truth to material". It was prominent in the teaching methods of The Bauhaus and every non-conventional artist followed it. And so indeed did Moore. It is the idea of not overstraining the technical possibilities of the material but leaving it as natural as possible. To reach this end a sense of form is required, an inner feeling on the part of the artist as to how far he can go in transforming the material. This demands, of course, .a good deal of craftsmanship - but not in the first place. On the contrary: too much skill could be a temptation to destroy the natural characteristics of the material. If Michelangelo differentiates between subtracting and adding material, he is merely defining two ways of making sculpture. His preference for the subtracting method - which he considered sculpture - corresponded to his temperament. He "saw" the shape of the sculpture he was going to make enclosed in the stone. Even when Michelangelo compares the adding method to painting, it is not inferior to direct carving as Fuller asserts. Enlarging a small model naturally implies certain changes in the large form which enable the sculptor to redefine and modulate it with the same or even greater subtlety than in direct carving. And the same is true for modelling directly a large sculpture in clay or plaster. All depends on the artists approach to his vision, which means or which tools he prefers. It is the result which counts, not the method.

If - for the decline of sculpture after Michelangelo - Fuller lays blame on the methods of pointing up and bronze casting, he deliberately ignores the masterpieces for example of antique Greek bronze casting which in every case were achieved by the adding method. Neither the treatment of the material nor new mechanical techniques, much less direct working at the stone, were the reasons for the decline, but the weakness in imagination and lack of an original artistic conception. In fact these epochs were overshadowed by the genius of Michelangelo. The sculptors overburdened their work with iaeas and contents and - not finding an adequate form - took refuge in technical refinement and virtuosity. Craftsmanship was not missing but just the reverse, there was too much of it. The sculptors of the 17th and 18th century were mostly skilful craftsmen of decorative taste. Bernini's work was theatrical gesture; Canova's seemingly pure and immaculate perfection remained cold and sterile; whereas Rodin, a giant and a "broken tower" among the sculptors of the 19th century, could not achieve the greatness and monumentality he strived for. And this again was not because of his technical procedures but because of a failed spiritual concept.

He could not but fail when using unsuitable means for a monumental form such as an impressionistic surface or ;he restless movements of his figures. However above all: he lived in an unmonumental period. Monumentality of form has its roots in the spirit of an epoch. Rodin's epoch was thoroughly bourgeois. Generally accepted art was allegorical decoration. Art was no existential need. Sculpture had to be rhetorical. It was blown up to a wilful -as-if-monumentality". On the other hand the outsiders, the impressionists, were anything but monumental. True monumentality endures every enlargement. Egyptian amulets are as monumental as their huge counterparts. Monumental spirit creates monumental form; neither is it achieved by perfect craftsmanship nor by "truth to material". If this spirit is absent the blown-up model might even reach the limits of the ridiculous. It was this cul-de-sac of a technically sophisticated academic art, which represented dead forms of once living cultures, against which a modern movement revolted and brought forth the idea of "truth to material".

It is an essentially modern idea. Neither Michelangelo nor the sculptors of the Middle Ages nor the ancient Greeks thought in these terms. It is a modern view on the use of material in those past epochs. In some cases this modern understanding may be applicable to the handling of material. in others not, Michelangelo and his contemporaries were not concerned with the "stoneness" of a stone-sculpture but, among other qualities, with the natural beauty of the human body, with observation of nature to which they wanted to come as close as possible, showing flesh and muscles. And above all they tried to give to sculpture the breath of life making the observer forget the material of which it was made. The masters of Gothic art could not care less for "truth to material". Their ideal was a transcendental one. Their aim was to overcome the earthly material in their slender, bodyless figures. Their cathedrals were a total denial of matter. And they did not hesitate to cover their saints and madonnas with colour to give them a heavenly, immaterial aura. The same did the Greeks. They painted their stat ues to make their deities real and lifelike, thus hiding the beautiful marble.

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"Truth to material" is not only a reaction, it is a deeply modern concern. No time before ours went so far in its researches and in is thinking about the structure of matter. "Truth to material" is an outcome of the "spirit" of materialism. In its extreme rt. leads to the untransformed thing, the "objet trouve", the "readymade" of Marcel Duchamp. If ully agree with Fuller when he remarks about a work of Tony Cragg that it "is just stuff. Matter. signifying nothing." It is what I call "tautological". Even though Moore discovered in his later years that he had exaggerated the doctrine of "truth to material" in his youth, he could not but follow it. Being born in this century, his mind being shaped by the ways of his time, he quite naturally was engaged in the problems of material as it is innate in modern thinking and feeling. And still: as an artist he proved what I feel is true for every art of all times: it is always the spiritual conception which forms the material.

Fuller's criticism is right in respect of certain developments in the art of recent years, though I cannot follow his general rejection of modern art. Yet since he claims Moore to be a supporter of "anti-modern tradition in English art...perhaps more so than he himself was ready to admit", we have to look closer at this thesis. To consolidate his anti-modernism Fuller takes but one of many different attitudes in modern art, equating it to the whole: that which he calls "Pevsnerian". Pevsner was enthusiastic about science, rationalism, and technology. Among some art-directions with similar ideas it was especially futurism which celebrated machine-power, speed and dynamism. These artists admired locomotives, automobiles and aeroplanes as an expression of the industrialized epoch. This range of themes, of course, is just one of many others in the arts and it is certainly legitimate, even if Fuller does not like it and we are nowadays aware of the dangers connected with technical progress. Judging art by its ideas and contents, and not by its results, presupposes and ideological standpoint: because the critic refuses the ideas, he does not accept the artworks. Such censorship we know only too well in this century. Those artists who were modern in their convictions, but did not deal with a rationalistic or technological art - like Epstein, Hepworth, Moore and others Fuller simply declares anti-modern. he generalizes their stand against certain art conceptions to a complete "refusal of modernity". And there were others. Fuller ignores completely that there were movements and artists - in fact the majority - who were undoubtedly modern, but had quite different interests from for example Pevsner or the constructivists. Who could deny Brancusi's, Giacometti's or Picasso's modernity ? Where is their faith in technology and progress expressed in their work ? Where is the machine-world in the sculptures and paintings of Max Ernst or Miro and many others ? You cannot but call their new approach to nature, to an inner world of dreams and fantasy, their poetic language or even their mysticism modern. They have their roots, but their visions differ completely from those of most 19th century artists.

Fuller even goes so far as to denounce modernism as a source of fascism: "... The neo-Romantic revival ...which, unlike futurism and modernism, could never have led to fascism". Besides the fact that no art movement was ever able to evoke a political movement, the partial affinities to fascism occurred only in Italian futurism. (By the way: there were and are closer links between conservative thinking and fascism, than have ever existed between a few modern artists and this ideology.)

One of the essential impulses of modern arts - not only in sculpture and painting, but also in literature and music was the search for the origins, the primordial, the source of human existence and culture. Most artists at the beginning of this century were fascinated by ancient and exotic cultures or the folklore of their own heritage. Moore did not stand alone in this respect. The modernity of all these artists lay in their new approach to these contents, which were no themes of learning and education, but were felt as an existential demand. And it was a new artistic language, in which these subjects had to be given a corresponding expression, a language which left behind all traditional models, though based on them to a large extent. Among the qualities of this language -indeed the most crucial one - was a new understanding of space in the formative arts. One cannot stress enough its importance: the conception of space in the arts - and not only there - is a spiritual one, which shows us how an epoch sees and understands the world.

It is well known what an impact negrosculptures had on so many modern artists. There was not only an unsurpassed power of expressivity in these works, but also - for the European eye an unusual concept of space. Roger Fry, whose essay on negro-sculpture was to influence Moore, claimed there was a "complete plastic freedom" and that African artists "really conceive form in three dimensions". This view was shared by most of the contemporary artists and certainly also by Moore. It was a modern entirely European view. As we know, Picasso also was strongly influenced by the direct expression and breaking up of forms in African sculpture. Yet he, as well, misunderstood their proper intentions and their true aims - like most of his contemporaries and created from their unrealistic, mostly cubial forms a new style. It was the most fruitful misunderstanding in modern art.

Negro-sculpture, like plastic artworks in all "primitive" cultures, knows only one main view of the idol, from where it discloses its strongest aspect: the frontal one. All the other appearances are side-views of minor importance for its

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function and form. It is the front of the deity which faces the worshipper, for whom the spirit, the demon, the god represented in the idol, is undoubted reality. He would never look at it as an aesthetic object. Such an attitude would allow him to leave his ritually fixed place and admire the statue even from behind. The worshipper's relation to the deity however is "onedimensional" or rather "onedirectional". All forces - magical and formal - of the statue are directed towards the worshipper, and in no other direction. Which means: they are not directed into the surrounding space. These sculptures rest in themselves; their structure neither conquers nor defines space outside themselves. It was this striking absence of space, as we understand it, the rigorous frontality in combination with a strong ornamentation - and all the other qualities mentioned - which made such a surprising new, fresh and immediate impression on the artists. It opened new dimensions to them.

Not being worshipper we are entirely free to walk around such a statue looking at it as an artwork. In doing so we do not obey the spiritual nor the artistic intentions, which are expressed in its structure. Yet we discover that peculiar difference in the plastic conception, which we have known since the Renaissance: The space - conquering perspective. With its discovery Western sculpture could develop real threedimensionality, i.e. spaciousness around the plastic artwork radiating into every direction. And accordingly it can be perceived from all sides.

Henry Moore was the artist, who took a further step: he created a new dimension of space. If since the Stone Age sculpture was solid volume as opposed to empty space, Moore broke with this seemingly unchangeable tradition, and this was for him, as he put it, a "revelation". He brought space into sculpture.

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[Photograph by Gudok and David Farrell. Black & White photograph. 6x4ft From upcoming exhibition at City Arts Centre]

Others might have employed the hole in sculpture before - but no-one worked with such consistency at this device and brought it to such a sublimation. It became an organic part of his sculptures, as natural as the massive parts of the work. On the other hand: as soon as space penetrated sculpture, for those who wanted to follow it the way was open to diminish the plastic volume. The consequence of transparent sculptures was inevitable.

Moore's step - although slowly, reflectively, circumspectly and organically prepared - nevertheless was a revolutionary deed, as revolutionary as cubism was. And it had a similar result, achieved however by different means: a mufti-dimensionaiity. If in cubist painting the form of an object were split into pieces, it was an act of destruction of the traditional image; wilful and violent as one can expect it from a revolutionary action. But this was not the final

Art Bulletin August/September 1995

aim. The fragmentized motif was out together in a new context and in such a way, that different aspects of it could be seen at the same time. Whether we like it aesthetically or not the result was a new dimension of space and this was the true revolutionary stride. It meant, that the individualistic standpoint - from which the onlooker perceived only one single aspect of an abject - was abandoned in favour of a manifold and simultaneous view. Moreover Picasso and his companions achieved in the arts, what Einstein did in his relativity theory: observing the relation of time and space simultaneously. In fact with their method the cubists succeeded also in this sense: they could show the alternating aspects of a figure, a house, a still life, which the viewer would have in walking around - an action, which takes a certain period of time. This is true for cubist painting as well as for cubist sculpture: the broken forms display a large number of spacial aspects

Moore, in parallel but quite independently, found his persona! way to the very same end: to a new spaciousness

which nobody before him had achieved. It is certainly different from the simultaneous view of cubism. Nevertheless his sculptures also offer a whole range of aspects. The continuous movement of their forms leads you around and even into these plastic organisms.

Sculpture before Moore remained always one single work, even if it displayed different aspects from different angles. Moore's work - above all the cleft and the perforated pieces - show so many distinct visual angles, that one might think that one is seeing a number of different works. And -it has been emphasized often enough - in splitting or piercing the solid volume he included environment, nature, landscape or urban surroundings in his sculptures. In this way Moore disclosed completely new perspectives granting an unprecedented freedom to the spectator. It is a freedom of choice. The spectator is invited to search for those manifold aspects, which are presented to him. Doing so he will, as it were, merge his personal view with a higher level of observation, thus recreating an ever new artwork in his mind.

In my opinion Moore's contribution to the arts of his century can only be compared with that of Picasso. Important as Moore's innovations were - they may or may not have lasting influence - they are only one side of his oeuvre. His timeless greatness is based on his artistic language, which leaves behind all criticism of the day. His importance consists neither in his alleged conservativism nor in his modernity. What makes him a great artist is the form, into which he was able to pour his vision. It was his spiritual and creative power, which grew constantly in that quiet way wholly and uniquely characteristic of him. It grew naturally and irresistibly just as the growth of a small plant to a huge tree.

Article by Bernd G. Rosenheim

Henry Moore, An Interpretation. Peter Fuller, Methuen, 1994.