Published: 25 February 2010
by JOHN EVANS

HENRY Moore summed up the subject matter of his career-defining works  with the words: “The only thing at all like those shelters that I could think of was the hold of a slave-ship.”

The shelter series of works were to achieve near mythical status as indicative of Londoners’ defiance during the Blitz and helped cement Moore’s reputation as a popular artist. But show co-curator Chris Stephens, head of displays at Tate Britain, says there was far more to it than that.

Moore served in the First World War. He was a survivor of the battle of Cambrai in 1917, one of just 52 from his battalion, and was gassed. “Crucial as a backdrop to his art is the fact that at the forefront of Moore’s adulthood was a landscape in which ‘The stench of rotting flesh was over everything, hardly repressed by the chloride of lime sprinkled on particularly offensive sights…’” says Stephens.

Moore had stayed in Kent during the so-called “phony war” at the start of the Second World War but had to give up sculpture and he moved to London before the Battle of Britain. 

The artist later said it was on September 11 1940 on his way home with his wife Irina to Belsize Park that he first saw people sheltering on the platforms and he dated his “first” shelter work, Women and Children in the Tube, to the following day. But art historian Professor David Alan Mellor and Stephens question this and suggest the main figures for this work must be based on images from an edition of Picture Post, published a month later.  

Mellor examines the issue in 

an essay for the catalogue accompanying the show. He notes Moore’s relationship with then National Gallery boss Sir Kenneth Clark, his becoming an official war artist and the importance of his works being shown in New York a full six months before Pearl Harbour. 

He also suggests other photo­graphic and artistic inspirations Moore might have borrowed, from Robert Capa to Gustave Doré.

Yet Stephens does not doubt Moore’s radicalism or that he was a “passionate anti-fascist”. One reaction to what the artist saw on the Underground was anger, he says, at the plight of the “urban poor” and he points also to the series of wartime commissioned drawings of miners, included in the show. Moore, whose father was a mineworker, chose to use Wheldale colliery near Castleford, where he was born in 1898.

Neither does Stephens doubt Moore’s place as a great artist, but says there is a “pyschological complexity to his work that’s been ignored”.

The current Tate exhibition aims, in part, to address that and is seen as “unquestionably the most important show in the last 30 years” according to Richard Calvocoressi, director of the Henry Moore Foundation. Moore died in 1986.

It focuses mainly on his early and middle periods in the forefront of progressive 20th-century sculpture, with more than 150 works in stone, wood, bronze, plaster and concrete,  together with the drawings.

From his being influenced by the advent of psychoanalysis and new ideas of sexuality, to the influence on him of primitive art and surrealism, it traces his development. How other political events shaped his works is examined, notably from the time of the Spanish Civil War and through the Cold War. And there is the recurring theme so important to Moore, of the mother-child relationship in many and different forms. 

• Henry Moore is at Tate Britain, Millbank, SW1 until August 8. £12.50, concessions available and
half price on the first Friday of every month at Late at Tate.
www.tate.org.uk