Why This Is Hell

I tried a new walking route to Tate Britain – via a coffee bar to email some marks back to HQ, and the Oxfam – but whilst it cuts most of Horseferry Road off, it doesn’t feel wicker. It does feel quicker than going by tube to St James’s Park or Pimlico. I was there to see the new Henry Moore, as part one of a two pronged art day.

I suspect he had got bit mixed up in my head with Barbara Hepworth, as I guess his signature style is the melted reclining figure. It helped that I had seen the Picasso at the National Gallery and the Epstein/Gill etc at the RAA, because it gave it a certain amount of context. For a start there’s the interest in so-called primitive arts and African masks – it would have been neat to see some of the artifacts from the British Museum which had influenced Moore, but I think it was clear enough. Already you are clearly in a realm of ugly beauty, and this is confirmed by a room of mother and child sculptures and preparatory drawings. These are very different from the Gill Madonna and childs, which tended to the cuboid, whereas these are more … organic, flowing, curved. A note suggests that Moore enjoyed the challenge of big object/little object, but sometimes the mother is reduced to a breast. Other times the figures merge into each other.

This leads obviously into his modernist 1930s, where some of the shapes are mere sensuous form – and very beautiful, even when made from concrete. One reclining figure has broken – was always already broken – into four pieces. The bigger modernism room features standing figures – many of which have designs scratched into them, more abstracted reclining figures, some large and made from stone or plaster, some smaller and made from lead or bronze. One standing stone has the rippled pattern of a beach on its reverse. In one corner are a series of stringed sculptures – carving connected by a network of wires – which again are astounding, but I’m not clear whether these were preparatory maquettes or finished items.

It’s the next room which is the deal maker – Moore’s war work. In part it is drawings of people sheltering from the blitz in the underground, in part it is coal miners at his father’s pit. These are visions into hell, with a terrible beauty – people asleep, people bathing, people working. Particularly striking is the drawing – with chalk – of hundred of people on the underground lines themselves.

The war and its consequences are in the penultimate room, which features statues of wounded warriors, a couple of which are extremely moving. There are more reclining figures – here the material is usually plaster – and warrior’s helmets. There is a strange bronze mushroom, which points to the atom bomb, although I’m not yet clear which point it is trying to make.

After this the final room is a bit of an anticlimax – more reclining figures, carved out of elm. I guess here the niceties of the gallery work against the work – not only do these feel like they need an outdoor space, but one longs to touch and caress.

But all in all a fantastic collection of items, and I must read the catalogue.

I walked to St James’s to catch a tube to London Bridge and thence to Dulwich. In future I will stick to the train from Victoria.

I knew little about Paul Nash, aside from seeing a plaque at Rye, but he was a British surrealist and war artist. I’d planned to see this exhibition, but I’d misread the calendar and assumed it closed in March rather than May.



The Dulwich Picture Gallery special exhibition space is a long narrow one, with larger rooms at each end. I believe I’ve been there at least twice – a fantasy one and something I forget now (annoying! something Pre-Raph? Byrne-Jones?). The fantasy one was crowded with prams – which reminds me, a bemused toddler was being pushed around the Moore and was probably being scarred for life.

Many of Nash’s paintings are double exposures – a room and a seascape, the pyramids out at sea, a pile of crashed German planes and the sea. A landscape of Ypres becomes something sullen and brooding. Dymchurch is repeated transformed and altered, and filled with viewpoints to infinity. I guess one of his most famous paintings is of a bird looking into a mirror at the seaside. Disturbing.

He’s not a great painter, and his photos shown here don’t make him a great photographer, but it’s fascinating to see the abstract changes he wreaks upon St Pancras Station or a Gloucestershire landscape. Whereas his friend and contemporary Ben Nicholson fuses landscape and still life in minimalism, Nash fuses the two in surrealism. I need a further look.

I took the long way out of the gallery and to the other station, but I need the exercise. In retrospect I should have gone to Bromley South and caught a train home, I went back to London in hope of getting food – the train ran late and I got lost in Victoria Station, not being used to those platforms and unable to get my bearings. As it was I grabbed a sandwich and nearly missed the train as the cashier didn’t know how to work the till.

But a great day over all, and I even have an idea for a paper for the comics, surrealism and sf conference next year.