"Everything I do is intended to be big."
The gas
smells like garlic or horseradish. It might look yellowish. If you were exposed
to it, you might not notice any effects for a few hours or even a day. Then angry
red blisters would erupt all over your skin and fill with yellow fluid. You
might go blind temporarily, or you might go blind permanently. Blisters would
form in your nose and throat, and your lungs might so be scalded, you would
die.
This is
what mustard gas does. It was the most widely used chemical weapon in World War
I. The Germans used it on November 30, 1917, in the Battle of Cambrai against
the British.
One of the
soldiers in the front-line trenches that day was Henry Moore. The seventh of
eight children of a coal miner from northern England, he was the youngest of
all the men in his regiment. He was one of only 52 out of 400 men who survived.
Moore then spent two months in a hospital recovering.
But he
never really recovered, physically or psychologically. His voice became permanently
husky as a result of being gassed. When he was upset, sometimes he lost the
ability to speak.
"A Disturbing Element"
He spent
the rest of his life working through what he experienced that day. Today Moore
is acclaimed by many art experts the greatest sculptor of the 20th century. He
is known by most museumgoers as the creator of massive reclining figures, many
of which have equally massive holes in them.
"When
I carve into the chest," said Moore. "I feel as if I were carving
into my own."
Over a career
spanning 50 years, most of his works fall into three categories: mother and
child, reclining figure, and heads. He worked in metals such as iron, lead, and
bronze; stones such as alabaster and marble; and elm and cherry wood.
His life's
course was revealed to him in Sunday School when a teacher read an anecdote
about Michelangelo. It described him as "the greatest sculptor who ever
lived." After that day, according to Moore's biographer, whenever anyone
asked him what he wanted to be in life, he would say 'a sculptor.'
Many of his
works at first glance seem gentle and lovely in the smoothness of their simple
swooping forms. Closer viewing, however, reveals in many of his sculptures
faces that are emotionless or vacant or expressing shock or horror.
"I
find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion,
giving evidence of a struggle," Moore said. "In great art, this
conflict is hidden. It is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is
disturbing—not perfect."
Like many
men of his generation he rarely spoke of what he experienced during war. “But
once he’d gone into his studio and shut the door, he found it very easy to get
in touch with his subconscious, with his dreams and fears," said his
daughter Mary. "He let these things flow through him, but he didn’t talk
about them. He was 50 when I was born. He and my mother behaved in a way that
was typical of their generation. They never swore. They weren’t touchy-feely.
Things people would talk freely about today he channeled into his work.”
But in a
letter Moore wrote in 1919, he told a friend, "The one great mistake in
religion as I have known it is the belief it creates in one that God is
Almighty. He is strong & powerful & good; but were the Almighty, the things
I saw and experienced, the great bloodshed & the pain, the insufferable
agony & depravity, the tears & the inhuman devilishness of the war,
would, could never have been.”
His near-death
experience gave him a sense of urgency about his life. "I think, 'What has
this day brought me, and what have I given it?'" he said.
Moore
understood that he was using his art to boldly confront and work through his
trauma. In a notebook, he wrote "wounded man | reclining man | crawling
man."
Many of his
works are of deformed torsos, limbs and breasts without bodies, faces without
features, and abdomens with holes blown through them. "There are universal
shapes to which everyone is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can
respond, if their conscious control does not shut them off," said Moore.
"You can see echoes…"
Yet his
work is about the power of life, not the negativity of death. Great sculpture,
said Moore, has “a force, a strength, a life, a vitality from inside it, so that
you have a sense that the form is pressing from inside trying to burst or
trying to give off the strength from inside itself, rather than having
something which is just shaped from outside and stopped.”
During the
1940 German Blitz, he descended into London's Underground where thousands of
people huddled during air raids. His resulting pencil sketches of indistinct
cocoon-like figures proved popular in England.
"My
father’s shelter drawings of World War II—and actually, even when I look at [his]
family groups—plug into his seeing people dead and dying in the trenches, their
faces held in a rigor mortis, their mouths open," said his daughter
Mary. "He’d been gassed. [It] makes the limbs go rigid and the mouth hang
open. You can see echoes of that in his sleeping figures.”
Fears of
war lingered in him for decades. After World War II, he made more than a dozen colossally
intimidating sculptures that mimicked the design of World War I German helmets.
More ominously, some resembled mushroom clouds or skulls.
In the
early 1950s, he created "Three Standing Figures," women who are all
staring blankly at the sky, and Moore acknowledged that their anxious
expressions were those of people expecting an air raid.
Moore was a
fighter, and his fight, in his own way, was for peace. Said Moore: "If an
artist tries consciously to do something to others, it is to stretch their
eyes, their thoughts, to something they would not see or feel if the artist had
not done it. To do this, he has to stretch his own first."
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