ITP 16: Nuclear Energy by Henry Moore
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 view where a moment before all had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy…To my surprise I discovered that I was completely naked. How odd! All over the right side of my body I was cut and bleeding.”
“August 7, At the hospital: My old friend Mr Katsutani had come to look for me, and now that he had found me emotion overcame him… ‘You should see how the city has changed,’ he said brokenly. ‘When I reached the Misasa Bridge this morning, everything before me was gone. These buildings here are the only ones left anywhere around… You could tell that many people had gone down to the river to get a drink of water and had died where they lay… The sight of the soldiers, though, was more dreadful than the dead people floating down the river. I came on to I don’t know how many , burned from the hips up; and where the skin had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy. They must have been wearing their military caps because the black hair on top of their heads was not burned. It made them look like they were wearing black lacquer bowls. And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back. One soldier, whose features had been destroyed and was left with his white teeth sticking out, asked me for some water, but I didn’t have any. I clasped my hands and prayed for him. He didn’t say anything more. His plea for water must have been his last words.’”
As Moore himself implicitly admitted, Atom Piece is a slightly confused work of art. But they like it well enough in Chicago and, for that matter, Hiroshima. About a decade ago the Hiroshima Museum of Modern Art purchased an edition of the work and gave it pride of place outside the main entrance. I once saw it there and was struck by how very new it looked: a burnished bronze, miniaturised version of a mushroom cloud, the Bomb remade as a shiny precious object. I wonder what Dr Hichiya and his fellow survivors would have made of it.
Date: 06-08-2000
Owning Institution: University of Chicago, Illinois
Publication:
Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”
Subject:
20th Century
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 view where a moment before all had been so bright and sunny was now dark and hazy…To my surprise I discovered that I was completely naked. How odd! All over the right side of my body I was cut and bleeding.”
“August 7, At the hospital: My old friend Mr Katsutani had come to look for me, and now that he had found me emotion overcame him… ‘You should see how the city has changed,’ he said brokenly. ‘When I reached the Misasa Bridge this morning, everything before me was gone. These buildings here are the only ones left anywhere around… You could tell that many people had gone down to the river to get a drink of water and had died where they lay… The sight of the soldiers, though, was more dreadful than the dead people floating down the river. I came on to I don’t know how many , burned from the hips up; and where the skin had peeled, their flesh was wet and mushy. They must have been wearing their military caps because the black hair on top of their heads was not burned. It made them look like they were wearing black lacquer bowls. And they had no faces! Their eyes, noses and mouths had been burned away, and it looked like their ears had melted off. It was hard to tell front from back. One soldier, whose features had been destroyed and was left with his white teeth sticking out, asked me for some water, but I didn’t have any. I clasped my hands and prayed for him. He didn’t say anything more. His plea for water must have been his last words.’”
Henry Moore’s sculpture was not, strictly speaking, intended to be a memorial to the dead of Hiroshima. It was commissioned by the University of Chicago wanted to commemorate the construction of the very first nuclear “pile”, in 1942, by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi, in a squash court on the university campus. In this building, Fermi produced the first artificial self-sustaining chain reaction. His work confirmed that it would be possible to bring two pieces of uranium or plutonium smaller than the critical size suddenly together, creating a colossal explosion, and thus paved the way for the development of the atomic bomb. When Moore was approached to create Atom Piece he was shown round Fermi’s squash court, a ramshackle wooden building which struck him, he later recalled, as “entirely unlike where a thing of such an important nature might take place.” It was to be demolished and his sculpture was to mark the place where it had stood.
Moore tried hard to see the positive side of nuclear energy. He talked of the lower part of his bronze, formed from heavy and almost architectural columns, “as a protective form”, and as a kind of “cathedral” (an idea which may have been suggested to him by the proximity of an actual church to the site where Atom Piece was to be placed). The upper part, with its resemblance to a human cranium, was “meant to suggest that it was through man’s cerebral activity that brought about the nuclear discovery”. But other thoughts too seem to have entered into Moore’s own cerebral activity. His sculpture could just as easily be seen to evoke the characteristic shape of an atom bomb explosion. From certain angles it also resembles a grisly eyeless skull (and may even recall, at a distant remove, Mr Katsutani’s appalled memory of faceless soldiers with melted hair like “black lacquer bowls” on their heads). The artist acknowledged allusions to “the destructive side of the atom”, while voicing the hope that his work “might express to people in a symbolic way the whole event.”
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