Today being the fifty-fifth anniversary of the destruction of the city of Hiroshima by an American atomic bomb, this week’s object of contemplation is Atom Piece by Henry Moore. Commissioned in 1964, when Moore was widely considered to be the world’s most distinguished monumental sculptor, it is a brave if inevitably uneasy work of art. The artist has attempted to confront the death-dealing menace of nuclear weapons while simultaneously fulfilling his official brief, which was to celebrate the potential benefits to mankind of atomic energy.
The events of August 6 1945 and the fallout from them present any artist with a seemingly insuperable problem: how to convey, let alone encapsulate, the awesome global impact of the Bomb? Moore admitted to being troubled by the daunting scale of his given theme. As if to grasp it better in his imagination, one of the books that he read while he was thinking the commission over was Hiroshima Diary, the journal of a Japanese physician called Michihiko Hachiya who witnessed and survived (just) the blast. Hachiya was the director of the Hiroshima Communications Hospital which, despite being gutted by fire, became one of the main rallying points for the city’s thousands of sick and wounded (“patients never lived in a hospital ward so nearly free of bacteria as this one that was sterilised by fire,” he commented at the time). Here are some extracts from his diary, first published in English translation in 1955:
“August 6, 1945, At home: The hour was early; the morning still, warm, and beautiful. Shimmering leaves, reflecting sunlight from a cloudless sky, made a pleasant contrast with shadows in my garden as I gazed absently through wide-flung doors… Suddenly a strong flash of light startled me – and then another… Garden shadows disappeared. The...
