There is ample room to debate the influence that Henry Moore had on modern sculpture. But the sheer pervasiveness of his work is not in doubt. When he died last week at the age of 88 in the farmhouse where he had lived and worked for more than 40 years, near the English village of Much Hadham, Henry Moore, C.H., O.M., was the best-known sculptor in the world.
His public works in marble and bronze, mainly based on the human figure, stood, sat and (especially) reclined on their plinths in cities from London to Chicago, from Melbourne to New York. No other major artist in the past century, not even Auguste Rodin, completed as many public commissions as Moore. At the height of his fame, from 1960 onward, it seemed that every mayor, museum director and chairman of the board in the Western world had simultaneously agreed that a Moore work was the only possible solution to the problem of how to relieve the hardness and social tension of new post-Bauhaus buildings with an organic metaphor, how to dress up a civic space without commemorating anything in particular. At the same time, people in the street found that his work spoke to them in a way that some dull tangle of official I beams could not.
It is also worth remembering, now that everyone takes for granted the rightness of open landscape as a site for sculpture, that he did more than any other artist of his time to rekindle that idea and recover some of its archaic roots. Moore's King and Queen, 1952-53, gazing out over the stony ocean of Scottish moors, are the descendants not of 18th century garden sculpture but of something older, more vital and mysterious: the chthonic spirit of place embodied in the dolmens of Carnac or Stonehenge.
No other sculptor's imagination was more manifestly connected to his past, even to his infancy, than Moore's. Like D.H. Lawrence, he came from a mining village; his father had labored in the pit and risen to become an engineer. His mother bore eight children, and one does not need to be an exegete to realize that it is to her that his work insistently refers -- those broad- backed, maternal figures, like sentinels, their bodies expanded into bosses and swells that suggest an infant's apprehension of the breast, or hollowed into womblike cavities. The fundamental experience of work that every miner's boy knew about -- that of going down into a cramped, cold and dangerous darkness to hew at rock -- was transcended in Moore's work as a man: still cutting stone, but in the light, and in the soothing precinct of his mother's remembered body. What anxiety was to Giacometti or sexual rage to Picasso, nurture and shelter were to Moore. His commitment to sculpture as an act of hollowing, modeling and smoothing the "body" of a single mass ran counter to the pattern of 20th century sculpture, which was to construct from disparate parts a shape that did not need to be felt with the hands, one in which sight preceded touch. (Who ever wanted to stroke a Gonzalez or a David Smith?) His impulse to preserve the traditional values of carving and casting went back to his Yorkshire childhood.