Skip to main contentSkip to navigationSkip to navigation
Mary Moore at Yorkshire Sculpture Park where she has co-curated an exhibition called Henry Moore: Back to a Land.
Mary Moore at Yorkshire Sculpture Park where she has co-curated an exhibition called Henry Moore: Back to a Land. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian
Mary Moore at Yorkshire Sculpture Park where she has co-curated an exhibition called Henry Moore: Back to a Land. Photograph: Christopher Thomond for the Guardian

Damien Hirst set back art by 100 years, says Henry Moore's daughter

This article is more than 9 years old

Mary Moore says Young British Artist put art back in the frame after her sculptor father had worked so hard to challenge the formal Victorian art form

Damien Hirst has set back art by 100 years, according to the daughter of Henry Moore, the man who arguably changed British sculpture more than any other artist.

Mary Moore said her father, who died in 1986, had challenged the narrative and formally-presented artwork of the Victorian era.

“What he did was come along and take it out of the frame in a very weird way,” she told the Guardian. “I think Damien Hirst put it back in the bloody frame and art is all now in the frame and what you forget is how radical it is that it’s not in the frame.

“[Henry Moore’s art] is not narrative, it’s not contextual, it is about exploring the invented object in front of you.”

Moore was speaking before a major exhibition exploring her father’s relationship with land. More than 120 works will be on indoor and outdoor display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, including a room curated by Moore offering a personal insight into how her father worked.

The issue with the work of Hirst and others was that it relied on title and the cube it was in, she said. It was much more about having to read the label to know what was going on.

Henry Moore’s work was more gut instinct, confronting an unusual sculpture which, she said, could be so many different things from different angles.

“Art has gone back into a frame, it has gone back to being a contextual, narrative thing which is actually where we were with the pre-Raphaelites,” she said.

The show is particularly significant for two reasons. Henry Moore was born only 15 miles away in Castleford, in 1898, and played an important role in helping the park become what it is back in the late 1970s.

He was an artist in London during the second world war, then moved his home and studio to Perry Green in Hertfordshire, now home to the Henry Moore Foundation.

But he was a Yorkshireman through and through, something brought home to his daughter, she said, when she looked out her hotel window near YSP.

She was astonished by the view and realised that drawings her father did at the end of his life – housebound, in his 80s with failing eyesight – were not of his adopted home in Hertfordshire.

“They were memory landscapes and I had always thought they were of Hertfordshire, but actually they were here. They were really deeply held memories of landscapes. I was stunned as I looked out of the window. I thought: ‘Oh my God, it’s here.’”

Henry Moore is one of the most important British artists of the 20th century, his public sculptures on display around the world.

Moore, an only child, said she had fond memories of growing up in Hertfordshire, where guests included Igor Stravinsky, Lauren Bacall and Billy Wilder. “They all came and had tea and probably all had form explained to them.”

She had a particularly vivid memory of going to see their family friend Charles Laughton play King Lear at Stratford-upon-Avon when she was 10. Afterwards they went to his small greasepaint-smelling dressing room where Laughton, who was ill with cancer, was lying down in costume on a bed.

“It was the most incredible experience, an unbelievable experience. I mean for a 10-year-old … It was like seeing God in a way.”

Moore was treated like an adult from a young age and the games she played were about form and shape and judging distance. “I really enjoyed them. They were all really exercises in using your mind and sensing form and spatial distance.

“He wasn’t training me, he was playing a competitive game about things he was thinking about all of the time.”

Moore, whose career has included book illustration and running an online vintage clothes shop, was instrumental in setting up the Henry Moore Foundation after her father’s death. She decided at a young age not to be an artist – the competition was too great, she said.

Moore said she worried, in the digital age, that we were losing our skills to see things properly.

“We don’t look at things, it’s terrifying, it’s happening more and more and more. People see two-dimensionally on their phones and laptops and iPads; they don’t see shapes or understand form.

“My father always used to say: ‘How would you draw my hand, this side is dark, this side is lit.’ He was constantly making you think about form.

“Sculptors make wonderful dads because they are there all of the time, accessible all of the time, talking about what they are doing. He was a fabulous teacher.“I could go in and out of his studio, there was no restriction on my being in the studio. I could sit and work at a little table making clay animals … I understood sculptural process and how it is to do with practical things like, can I get it through that door.”

The games they played were probably more highbrow than those enjoyed by the average child, she said, recalling Moore’s tendency to ask guests to name their top 10 artists.

If they did not start with Cimabue, closely followed by Giotto, then they were judged to be rather lightweight by father and daughter.

The YSP show takes its title from a 1954 book that Moore illustrated, Jacquetta Hawkes’ A Land, a poetic history of the physical landscape of Britain.

There will be monumental works dotted around the former deer park that makes up much of YSP. Inside will be smaller sculptures and drawings investigating land and geology.

Moore’s section includes ethnographic works that inspired her father, maquettes, notes and his tools, pastels and brushes as well as photographs, including of her father drawing people sheltering in Tube stations during the Blitz.

Peter Murray, YSP’s founding director, said he thought visitors might be surprised by the freshness of the work. “To a certain extent people have forgotten how radical Moore was and how wide the range of his work was. People think they know what Moore is and what we like to do here is surprise people, it helps them rethink.”

Murray said he remembered Moore and his daughter visiting the embyronic YSP in 1979 and how the artist gave encouragement and became the museum’s first patron. It now covers 500 acres with outdoor works by artists including Barbara Hepworth, Elizabeth Frink, Joan Miro and Antony Gormley. It was named Museum of the Year in 2014.

Moore said she hoped the show would encourage people “to explore what is in front of them with an open mind and in a fresh way, so that they might re-evaluate or see things that they have never seen, understand things they have never understood. I hope it generates excitement about sculpture.”

Comments (…)

Sign in or create your Guardian account to join the discussion

Most viewed

Most viewed