Henry Moore | Printmaker | Exhibition Walkthrough

If you were to stroll along to the Kew Gardens in Richmond in London between now and I think next January, you would come across the largest exhibition of Henry Moore's outdoor sculpture. Some monumental pieces of work there, lying in the grounds of the Botanical Gardens. If, however, you were to come and visit us here in Uppingham, you would have a much more intimate insight into Henry Moore's life as a printmaker. And as an added bonus, you can take these works away with you. Henry Moore took to printmaking really in the latter half of his career. He was, I think, pretty well in his 60s when he really came to tackle it, to take on its challenges in the 1950s, working with the lithographer Stanley Jones. He'd made prints very early in his career as a young student, but it wasn't really until the years after the war that he really came to accept and embrace the kind of great multiplicity, the great variety and the experimentalism that is inherent in printmaking. Having said that, in this little retrospective show, we do have some of Moore's earliest printmaking, in the example of this school print that is over my shoulder, made in the late 1940s for Brenda Ronsley's School Prints Limited venture, a sort of campaign to bring real art into the classroom for young children to enjoy. And between this print over my shoulder, which is widely regarded as one of the strongest in the series, and the works around me in this show, you can really see the variety and the range that Henry Moore was able to bring out of printmaking as a medium. I think printmaking for Henry Moore was a kind of extension of his drawing, and for the greater part of his career, drawing for Moore was a kind of an exploration of forms, of ideas, of themes that may then take a future life in three dimensions. He remembered though, in the 1970s, looking back at his career, how at some point after the war, when his sculptural reputation was completely international, he was perhaps Britain's most famous, most celebrated artist. He remembered how his drawings kind of broke free from that relationship and how they kind of began to live a life of their own, and you really see that in the prints around me here. Alongside the things that we know more for, the kind of large reclining figures, the mother and child motif, some of these kind of beautifully curved and twisting sculptural forms that we see in some of these prints, there are some more kind of intimate and prosaic moments too. There are little sketches of young girls drawing at a desk, perhaps modelled after his daughter Mary, who was born immediately after the war. There are little moments between mother and child which are not just a kind of sculptural exploration of two forms together. There are more tender, and I think probably more realistically observed, observations perhaps of family life at home or of the mothers and children that he'd seen sheltering in the tube during the war, of the people that he saw around him in Much Haddon. In this exhibition we actually have a really beautiful original drawing that Moore made of a series of reclining figures, and it's a very kind of ephemeral, light, kind of sketchily drawn series. You can see how in just a few kind of strokes with the pen, in this kind of calligraphic way, Moore has conjured these quite sort of large and imposing forms of the reclining figure. When you compare that drawing, this really beautiful work, to this print next to me which was made I think just a year after, so possibly within months of each other, you can see how the drawing medium, the kind of fluidity, the immediacy of drawing lent itself to lithography, the ability to draw straight onto the stone plate. This print that sort of mirrors some of the ideas going on in here, the idea that you can kind of quite quickly sketch off these forms and get a feeling for the thing in front of you. Stanley Jones, the lithographer who worked with Moore at Cohen Press, at Cohen Studio, felt that there was a kind of special relationship between sculptors and printmaking. Something about the kind of routine, ritual nature of printmaking, the kind of tactile qualities of it, the fact that you're working with stone, with metal, that you're often engraving a surface or you're feeling the textures of things, that these were two mediums that kind of spoke to each other and he worked closely with a lot of sculptors in his career. When we look across the prints in this exhibition, you can see Moore playing with some of those ideas and really getting the most out of the kind of textures inherent not just in the kind of greasy inks that he was using, the greasy medium he was drawing with, but in the stone itself. A number of these prints you see reclining figures, sculptural forms sitting over a background and the background is a kind of work of art in itself. There are kind of waves and undulations and curves just like the landscape, just like the figure that is sort of set in this kind of imaginary landscape. And that of course was a major theme for Henry Moore, the figure within the landscape but also as a kind of landscape itself, the contours, the shadows, the curves, the kind of mounds that make up the human body. Perhaps one of the most profound themes that he dealt with though, and certainly the one that speaks to me most, are his mother and child series and they take on a variety of forms. They are sometimes completely formal explorations of a sort of smaller unit next to a larger one and they're sometimes very much more tenderly, intimately, closely observed drawings, imaginations of the kind of relationship between a child and their parent. And this kind of gets back to the kind of dual string in Henry Moore's art. He said of the mother and art theme that it was of course one that is persistent in sculpture. It is among some of the earliest sculptures, the earliest carvings that we made were of maternity figures, fertility figures. So of course there is a long formal creative tradition there. He also liked to tell the story of how his first, his earliest feelings for sculptural form came as a young boy in a large family when he was asked by his mother to rub ointment into her shoulders. This very intimate moment, this very personal moment obviously had a profound effect on him and in many interviews, in discussions, many years after the fact he would always come back to this memory of feeling for the first time the kind of heft and physicality of the human form beneath his fingers. So in his work you have these two elements, the kind of psychodrama of this moment and this kind of psychology to his work and then you have this more formal idea of the sort of sculptural forms, the roundness, the square block and really this is the two levels to Henry Moore's art. When we look at a lot of British art in the years following the war we see two major areas of inspiration, one from surrealism on the one hand, from the kind of unconscious, the idea of these sort of images that are deep within us and then of abstract art on the other hand that is dealing with the immediate kind of plastic, malleable, visible, physical forms in front of us and in printmaking where you have a three-dimensional surface that is being worked on to produce this two-dimensional image, there is a kind of sense of all of these things coming together and producing something that is kind of vibrant and living on the page. Moore took to printmaking really like a duck to water and he became incredibly prolific, I think he made more than 700 prints across a variety of mediums and to see them in the flesh, to see the kind of subtleties in the colour and the texture, you can tell that this was someone who really felt not just that this was a great medium for expression and for creativity and exploration but that this was someone who really understood what could be done in printmaking. I hope you've enjoyed this little foray into this aspect of Moore's life, all of the works that you see around us on the walls on display are of course on our website, do please get in touch if something takes your fancy. For now I leave you with Henry Moore in Uppingham in the Goldmark Gallery.