Review: Henry Moore, Tate Britain

EXHIBITION
Henry Moore
Tate Britain
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
In the most important exhibition of the sculptor's work since his death, visitors are invited to re-appraise the genius.

Picture: Reclining Figure, 1929 / The Henry Moore Foundation

REVIEW
Henry Moore opened the door through which hundreds of sculptors poured, imagination rich with his inspiration. Trouble is, time passes, fashions change and Henry Moore stood motionless by the door while the party rattled on elsewhere.

So Moore retreated to parks and public places and his vision became an adornment for municipal offices and a roost for fat pigeons.

But Henry Moore is new again. Despite the ubiquity, despite his national treasure status, despite his dulling familiarity, Moore has a whole new batch of things to say to a whole new millennium of people who didn't witness the slaughter of his century.

Time to revisit Henry Moore. See him anew in the biggest exhibition of his works since his death in 1986.

Normally with these grand exhibitions, the placards provide the narrative but this one... this one is different. This one urges a visceral response - Moore provides the work, you find the narrative. You chisel away at a Moore till the story comes.

Sculpture doesn't move me. I didn't get Henry Moore till now. The reclining figures just looked wrong. Distended and upended and round-about. Holes and string and thunder thighs.

But my narrative emerged once I had immersed myself in Moore.

My narrative was this: Michelangelo saw a slab of marble. He chipped and hammered and from this crude stone came David. Came perfection.

Moore, who had seen the horrors of the trenches and the misery of the Blitz, could not find perfection in his world. We were not there yet. So he found a lump of Horton stone or an elm and he tried to capture re-birth, a new start, faltering forms having another bash at civilising themselves.

The figures emerge like aliens; like freak flask babies; like a Terminator turning from floor tile to T-1000 via a silvery gloop.

Plain, innocent faces peer inquiringly from crayon-drawn torsos. Organic bodies - broad-backed, full of life and precocious sex - combine primeval atoms to find a distorted form that is too early, too uncomplicated, too uncertain to be the kind of beast that could organise a holocaust.

They have a will to live. So they seduce and conjoin and gestate and suckle. They are perplexed but imbued with vitality. They wait for evolution to make them David.

Moore was inspired by the so-called "primitive art" of non-Western cultures, dedicated to sex and religion. Mother and child, the totemic and universal, are recurring motifs throughout the seven rooms - and such is his feel for the primal that his drawings of the Blitz feel like a stark warning of the fate that will befall these figures when they venture too far from their Eden.

No, sculpture doesn't move me. Life does though, and Moore manages to capture this - and more. He captures the ache for resolution that is life's default setting.

- Until August 8. Go to tate.org.uk.