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Moore in Guangzhou
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Cathy
HENRY MOORE (1898-1986) is familiar to Chinese artists, but absolutely not to the common.
No doubt, the series exhibitions of Henry Moore, representative of world's sculpture art in the twentieth century, have sparked a stir among China's art circle.
"The arrival of Moore's works gives us a better chance to understand him and also inspiration to Chinese artists," Yuan Yunfu, professor with the Fine Art Academy of Qinghua University, was quoted by a special Chinese magazine "Understanding Moore" devoted to the series exhibitions in China. The magazine has summed up different voice and visions of top 25 Chinese sculptors and artists.
But it seems that more work should be done to promote the influential sculptor who is already popular in Western countries long before.
"It's a pity that most Chinese still don't know his name, including college students and graduates," said Cai Zhiyong, a volunteer exhibition guide who is still a junior in an art school in Guangzhou last week. "I should do my bit to the promotion of the great man. I think most of the people in advanced countries have higher art preciation level. Once they enter a place like this, they tend to keep quiet and focus on the exhibits. But my audience's behaviour sometimes embarrassed me. I have to remind them now and then. Some of them even tough the exhibits. I feel a moral mission to advance the education of the public so as to raise their appreciation level."
To provide Chinese spectators a good chance to better understand Moore, the exhibition organizers invited Tim Marlow, an editor with British tate The Magazine, to interpret Moore's works in Guangdong Museum of Art.
"Moore took very big ideas and treated it in very simple forms but he always underlined the complexity, and that is the way great art is. His works can be understood from different ways and by different levels. Because I am an artist by training, from my point of view, they remind me of what it is a human being and how I am as a human being in the world. And that is the real message. It is something about humanity," said Tim Marlow.
Before Moore, sculpture in public places tended to be just monuments to great figures such as kings and great generals. What Moore did is that he transformed the monuments and made a breakthrough in the sculpture art history by creating something for the common people and also, something abstract as against those made in the Renaissance. And they always perfectly combine with the natural green space and the outer space in cities because his original ideas came from the natural things.
In front of a collection of stones, shells and bones of animals, Marlow tried his best to use simple words and sentences to introduce what triggered Moore's emotions. "Moore collected odd bits. Anything he found had a shape that interested him. He kept it around in his studio. Everything, every shape, every bit of natural form, animals, people, pebbles, shells, anything he liked, were all things that would give a start for a new idea.
"What worth mentioning is that this is the first time we exhibit these odd things, although his works have reached to more than 60 countries," Marlow added.
"Marlow's interpretation is so good and simple that I hope my viewer group can grasp the message," Cai Zhiyong told the reporters.
Life and works of Henry Moore:
Moore was born into a miner's family in Castleford, Yorkshire, on 30 July, 1898. He passed the Cambridge Senior Certificate at the age of 16. Later he enlisted and joined army during World War One. He was trained as a professional artist after winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. Now followed a period of intense activity for Moore, a thirsting for knowledge, an outpouring of ideas, many of them into the pages of the notebooks which have survived to this day. His first one-man exhibition opened in 1928. In 1946 came his first foreign retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Now the abuse which Moore had received in the thirties, such as "The cult of ugliness triumphs at the hands of Mr Moore" turned into the praise. By the end of the '70s the number of exhibitions had grown to an average of 40 a year. His Florence exhibition in 1972, the largest and most impressive to that date, set the standard for all subsequent "blockbusters". Honours, honorary degrees, prizes, commissions and awards were showered upon him.
Two of the main themes that occupied so much of Moore's working life are the mother and child and the reclining figure. Moore has emphasized the landscape components of the female form to suggest the hills and valleys of a rolling countryside. The figures always become grounded, the earth mother anchored to the soilm while at the same time remaining alert and focused on her offspring. In contrast to her rounded comforting forms the abstracted baby is held in a hard almost vicious protective shield rising from the womb (as illustrated by the right picture).
Reclining Mother and Child 1975-76, bronze
A striking example of the tough and the tender in Moore's works.
Moore explained his sculpture of separated parts with hollows and holes: The space created between the forms not only permits vistas of the surrounding environment through the sculpture, but invites one physically to enter the sculptural space. The viewer becomes not just a spectator but a participants.
Two Piece Reclining Figure (front)
The hollows and holes of Moore's previous work give way to the complete division of this sculpture into separate but integral parts.
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