Henry Moore’s reputation has suffered since his death in 1986. He has fallen somewhat out of fashion, and must himself be held partly responsible. In his later years he succumbed to economic temptation, both overproducing and over-reproducing his own work, in particular sanctioning multiple castings of his large bronzes. “Baubles for corporate plazas” was how the American sculptor Richard Serra contemptuously described them, just a couple of years after Moore’s death. Serra was speaking for a generation to whom Moore’s work itself seemed somehow corporate: a stifling and paternalistic expression of the modernist impulse, dull and fundamentally conservative, nostalgic for the monumental forms of academic public sculpture, and romantically attached to the undulating forms of the English landscape. He was simply daring to say what a lot of people already thought. What could be more irrelevant to the modern world and its concerns than a Henry Moore Madonna and Child, on a plinth, in front of an oil company’s headquarters?

 

 

Yet the one image to which Moore returned obsessively during his formative years, indeed throughout his whole career, was actually drawn from the heart of Christian iconography and hallowed by the oldest traditions ofWestern European religious art: the image of the mother and child. There is a whole room full of Moore’s secular madonnas, babies at their breast in the current show. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, when he created the majority of the works in this part of the display, he had fallen under the spell of Picasso and was beginning to experiment with the language of Surrealism. His visual language was indebted in equal measure to Picasso’s so-called “bone drawings”, to the biomorphic sculpture of Arp and Brancusi, and the melted dream-world of Salvador Dali. It is to that radical and uneasy tradition of modernism, with its dislocated forms and stronge sense of psycho-sexual malaise, that Tate Britain’s exhibition wishes above all to reconnect Moore. Chris Stephens, co-curator of the show, sets out its revisionist agenda very clearly in the catalogue: “Viewed through his late work, Moore has come to be seen as the maker of assuring and comforting forms. In contrast this exhibition reasserts [that] ... Moore’s sculptures ... are part of a wider challenge to reason, of the redefinition of the human body as discontinuous, fluid, and driven by deep unconscious forces, and of a world characterised apprehension and anxiety, the uncanny and the absurd. Moore’s is a troubled and troubling art that digs into the very essence of the modern experience."

But although this is an exceptionally fine exhibition of Moore’s work, it disproves the very argument that it was intended to advance. The truth is that Moore’s was very much not, at heart, “a troubled and troubling art”: in fact, it was Moore’s unusual achievement to take precisely the disturbed vocabularies of painting and sculpture forged by Picasso, the Surrealists and other members of the European avant-garde and turn them towards the expression of a fundamentally sweet and humane conception – a conception of the mother, and of the nurturing act of mothering. Moore occasionally hints at Freudian depths or the intense animal need of the new-born – Suckling Child, of 1930, is a remarkably feral image of a baby latched on to the nurturing breast – but far more frequently he focusses on the touching solicitude of the mother and the close bond between her and her infant. Here as elsewhere his art rarely expresses the sense of profound alienation or dislocation claimed for it in the various texts accompanying this exhibition.

Moore certainly has moments of disquiet and anxiety, moods called forth by the harsh realities of the Second World War or the gloom attendant on its aftermath: witness his “shelter drawings”, showing huddled masses on the platforms of London’s tube stations; his Atom Piece, grimly merging the images of a death’s head, a soldier’s helmet and a mushroom cloud; his Fallen Warrior, a bronze that has the harsh angularity of a body in its death throes, recalling the real bodies of the dead discovered in the ashes of Pompeii, and presumably meant by Moore to evoke the millions who lost their lives in the Second World War. But while such work shows that he certainly did respond to the historical reality of his times, he cannot be described as an artist whose very being pulsed with a sense of outrage at the horror and absurdity of modern existence: he was no Francis Bacon.

At the centre of Moore’s imaginative and creative life there lay a profoundly benign and content conception of existence. He was always an artist whose first instinct was to caress and mould form, to find and make wholeness, not to wrench and break and dislocate. He said as much in recalling the abiding memory that shaped his abiding obsession with the image of mother and child. It was a fond memory: “I was a Yorkshire miner’s son, the youngest of seven, and my mother was no longer so very young. She suffered from bad rheumatism in the back and would say to me in winter, when I came home from school: ‘Henry boy, come and rub my back’. Then I would massage her back with liniment. When I came to this figure [of a mother and child], I found that I was unconsciously giving to its back the long-forgotten shape of the one I had so often rubbed as a boy.” Art, for Moore, was not a way of dissecting the world and laying bare its evils. It was a way of salving reality, with images to heal and to comfort.