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But nothing comes out of childhood without the formal keys to unlock it. Where other art was concerned, Moore (like his lifelong friend and patron Kenneth Clark, who arranged for him to be an official war artist in World War II and was thus partly responsible for the sculptor's best-known early work, the underground-shelter drawings) was a great looker and rememberer. Certain works were fundamental to his art. A stone carving of the Mexican rain-god Chacmool gave him the crankshaft rhythm of shoulders, waist, pelvis and thighs that would surface in his own figures from the late '20s on. Cezanne's ponderous and sculptural Bathers spoke to his own obsessions with the reclining figure. Archaic sculpture of every kind, especially Mayan and Aegean, fortified his lifelong interest in totems and sentinel figures; and then there were Donatello and Michelangelo, the painted figures of Masaccio and, perhaps most challenging to him in his maturity, the sculptures of Giovanni Pisano in Siena and Pisa, not far from the marble quarries at Forte dei Marmi, where he took to working during the summers.
In short, like all conscientious artists, Moore composed his own tribunal, that of the great dead from whose silent judgment there is no appeal. Naturally, his lack of close affinity with the avant-garde -- or even with the idea of avant-gardism -- made him seem like a fuddy-duddy to some younger sculptors, particularly in the '60s. It might have been otherwise had he behaved like the Great English Artist people were always making him out to be, but he was utterly without pretension, and his zeal for public service, as long as it did not get in the way of his work, was genuine. He was consulted by British Prime Ministers, from Anthony Eden to Margaret Thatcher, on museum and art-education policy and never failed to stand up to them on behalf of younger or less successful artists.
Inevitably, so long a working life entailed a certain amount of repetition; to the skeptic, the later Moore seemed to be running a one-man academy of stones and bones. "Less is more, and Moore is a bore" was what one heard from English art students hip to Anthony Caro and David Smith, and the sentiment was echoed by people who had forgotten, or not known, his stubborn efforts to get modernism a hearing among the art-hating English 30 years before. All that is over, but the sculpture remains. When the best of it has been winnowed out -- which will take years, for the oeuvre is huge -- its grandeur of formal diction and intimacy of feeling will leave no doubt at all as to Moore's stature.