Art: Yorkshire Pudding

With the possible exception of Jacob Epstein, 50-year-old Henry Moore is Britain’s best and most controversial sculptor. Moore’s half-abstract figures—pinheaded people carved into queer, attenuated shapes, rubbed smooth and then pierced with holes—have won critical acclaim in Manhattan (TIME, Dec. 30, 1946). A year ago they earned him first prize at an international exhibition in Venice. Last week, Yorkshire-born Henry Moore let the homefolks in on what he had been doing by holding a retrospective show in the red brick, grey-roofed town of Wakefield. Six thousand Yorkshiremen turned up to see what all the fuss was about. The proof of Henry Moore’s pudding, they figured, would be in the eating.

Plain Yorkshiremen found it pretty hard to digest, but few gallerygoers found the show impossible. A bespectacled schoolgirl named Moreen Beedle was one of the few. “My dad said I should come along and look at it,” she explained, “because he was at school with Henry Moore. But I don’t know, looks a proper mess to me.” Ronald Skipsey, a tweedy old insurance man, stayed on the fence: “They say genius is akin to madness, don’t they?” But it was a redfaced Wakefield cab driver, Tom Pickering, who came closest to the Yorkshire concensus. “It’s a different kind of trade,” he cheerfully concluded. “Can’t expect t’understand it if yer know nauwt about it!”

Tom Pickering’s sage comment cut two ways, of course. It might reduce an anti-modern-art splutterer here & there to temporary silence. It could also make those on the other side of the fence feel uncomfortably esoteric.