A letter to an unknown friend....

The colour of art....

Dear Friend,

I am at the Albert Hall, as you suggested, listening to the 85 year old/young Martha Argerich play Beethoven's Piano Concerto No 2 with the Munich Philharmonic and conductor Lahav Shani. It is fresh, it is light, it is beautiful, and, as Joanna MacGregor says, she brings colour to the performance.....

Turning Form (Atlantic) - Barbara Hepworth, 1961

30 years ago Martha Argerich decided she would not play solo again, preferring to play with orchestras, chamber groups, or in duets. But she is remarkable – agile, intelligent, strong – and, despite always being afflicted with nerves before any performance, she is still a revered star of the classical concert circuit (and it is hard to believe but she first played at the Last Night of the Proms in 1966 - 60 years ago!)

Eidos - Barbara Hepworth, 1947

I realise that it is something of a leap to connect Martha Argerich with Barbara Hepworth, but I was at the Courtauld Gallery the other day to see Hepworth in Colour, The first exhibition to consider colour in the sculptures and drawings of Barbara Hepworth.....

Intersection - Barbara Hepworth, 1946

But how can you liken a pianist to a sculptor? Or, rather, how can you compare modern visual art to the musical compositions of someone born in 1770?

You and I perhaps might have different answers to this, but as I listen to the strong but delicate finger-dancing of the Argentine pianist I can imagine the powerful but controlled sculpting of Barbara Hepworth’s hands, and something about the nature of art belongs to both.

Sculpture with Colour (Eos) - Barbara Hepworth, 1946

 

Dismiss my rambling as you like.  But who has ever conclusively defined ‘art?’  Is art the difference between Ariel and Caliban?  Is it what makes life tasteful, or beautiful? Is it what distracts us from the mundane, the awful, the wastewater that flows through Trump and Farage? (Apologies – but what is the worst of humanity?)

 

Sea Form (Porthmeor) - Barbara Hepworth, 1958

So, perhaps Beethoven’s trills and flowing notescapes are really not so very different from the harmonious shapes that Barbara Hepworth hewed or made from the seascapes around St Ives, like this bronze (above) with a mottled green patina and flecks of white, as if salted from long immersion in seawater.....

Wave - Barbara Hepworth, 1943-44

And then there are those that she coloured (though the cobalt blue has since faded) and embellished with taught lines like hawsers on fishing boats.

Pelagos - Barbara Hepworth, 1946
 

Hepworth was admired for her employment of natural materials, and for the way she smoothed and crafted forms, and most of her works that are in the public domain are monochrome, or use the polychromatic nature of their material, be it wood or bronze or stone.  But when she left London for Cornwall in 1939, taking her family to a safer haven, she became inspired by the colours and shapes of the Cornish landscape and coast.  And, I would say, with tenuous connection to Beethoven and Argerich, she would have been moved by the sounds of the sea, the sometimes rhythmic, sometimes dangerous, rush and surge, beat and ebb of the sea on her doorstep.  Chipping and sanding, smoothing and carving, the work of a sculptor needs to echo natural rhythms and what is more defining to us that the swell and fall of the waters on the face of the earth?

Pelagos - Barbara Hepworth, 1946
Elm, paint and strings

I am in the Albert Hall.  Martha Argerich, her grey hair drifting over her collar, is absorbed by her music, bent over the piano that almost hides her, matching the compound harmonies of the orchestra, as if it is her own composition, but knowing that she is reconstructing Beethoven’s imagination, spelling out to us, the dull streetwalking mass of society, just how sounds can overcome the flat swamp of life.  

Curved Form with Green - Barbara Hepworth, 1943
Pencil and gouache on paper

 

And, perhaps, to a degree, that is also what Barbara Hepworth achieved, shaping forms from shapeless masses, threading strings across gaps, so that things connect and have symmetry and strength?

Circle (Forms in Movement) - Barbara Hepworth, 1942

 

I write this as people in black tee shirts, trousers and masks disrupt the traffic outside Dover, threaten innocent by-passers in my home town of Portsmouth, and scare shoppers outside the Daily Mail office in London, and do so with impunity, while at the same time gentle people who sat holding placards carrying the words, I oppose genocide, I support Palestine Action, are dragged off to trial and potential prison sentences in overcrowded prisons.

 

Two Opposing Forms (Grey and Green) - Barbara Hepworth, 1969
Irish marble and paint

How does that fit with Beethoven and Martha Argerich and Barbara Hepworth?  Could it be that art is the defining difference between brute ignorance and imaginative intelligence?   The gulf between hate and love?  

 

Spring (Project for Sculpture) - Barbara Hepworth, 1957
Oil paint on board

My life is nothing in the grand scheme of things, in the rich wealth of the world, but, though my abilities are nothing compared to the great artists of humanity, I think I can tell the difference between a hawk and a handsaw.....

 

I thank you again for directing me to this promenade concert, to a wonderful evening. I only wish you could have been with me to share it, but, perhaps, by writing this, I may draw closer to linking thoughts and experience with you, and with others.....  

The diversity of music, and of all forms of art, means that while we may share experiences, our responses may be different. Just as colour is something we perceive individually (the blues and greens of the sea and the weeds on the rocks in my photographs of St Ives are not exactly as they were in daylight, nor will they ever be exactly the same to you and me) we can still share the appreciation. Just as the soughing of air amongst the leaves of trees is a kind of music, so is the erosion of material a kind of sculpture.....  Let us be grateful that there is a world around us and that there are artists to guide us to its wonders.

 

We live in hope.....  We have to.....

 

With love,
 
Richard  

Winged Figure - Barbara Hepworth, 1961-62
Aluminium with steel rods

*****

And, if you would like to see more about Barbara Hepworth and St Ives, please visit:

https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2023/03/a-brief-trip-to-st-ives-cornwall.html

and

https://www.richardpgibbs.org/2026/07/south-by-south-west-part-2.html

Spring - Barbara Hepworth, 1966

*****

Feeling Henry Moore-ish

In deepest Hertfordshire

Nice day, love?

The other day I had reason to meet an Italian family from near La Spezia, and the father owned a quarry at Carrara, in the Apuan Alps. This was where Michelangelo Buonarroti chose his massive blocks for David, Moses, La Pieta, as the white marble was the best quality for working.

At nearby Forte dei Marmi, once the preferred resort of the Agnelli family, Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley et al, Henry Moore had a house at 198 Via Civitali. Moore obtained his marble from and worked at the Henraux quarry in Querceta. The Henraux firm also own Altissimo, the quarry from which Michelangelo had obtained his stone.

Don't be negative

Anyway, this rather tenuous link brought me back to a tiny hamlet in Hertfordshire, between Bishop's Stortford and Ware, a part of Much Hadham called Perry Green.

Henry Moore, the seventh of eight children,  was born in the coal-mining town of Castleford, Yorkshire, on 30 July 1898. At the age of eighteen he joined the 15th Battalion of The London Regiment. Not long afterwards he took part in the battle of Cambrai, but was gassed and hospitalised for several months. In 1924 Moore was appointed as sculpture instructor at the Royal College and here he met Irina Radetsky, a painting student at the college.

They married and lived in Hampstead, where they met other artists and writers such as Barbara Hepworth and Stephen Spender. His first one-man exhibition, consisting of sculptures and drawing, opened at the Warren Gallery in 1928 and from then on his fame increased as he became involved in the art life of London and exhibited in Switzerland.

In 1940, after his Hampstead studio had been badly damaged in a bombing raid,  Henry Moore moved to this 17th century farmhouse in Perry Green that became his home until his death in 1986.

The house is just as he left it, as if he has gone out for a walk in the fields.  Bottles of scotch and brandy remain unfinished.  A valve radio is tuned to the Home Service.  The kitchen has an old fashioned simplicity that conjures up the warmth of soup and the smell of toast.  The office is cluttered with boxes of kodak film, sketches and models.  The arm chairs in the sitting room are worn and comfortable. There is the everyday sense of a busy genius at work, and at peace.

In the extensive grounds the Henry Moore Foundation (which is a registered charity, founded in 1977 by the artist himself, whose purpose is to preserve the legacy of Henry Moore and his work and to promote interest in the visual arts) has arranged many large pieces of work, mainly bronze sculptures. In the studios and galleries there are exhibitions of drawings and of the craft of producing bronze forms, as well as of sculpting marble.

Some of the pieces are recognisably life forms, and the themes of family and mother and child recur.

Others are more abstract and experiment with texture as well as form.

But the thrill is in the harmony and in the natural setting of these pieces.  As you move around, or through them, different aspects reveal themselves and the strange forms become familiar and welcoming. 

As you get closer the surfaces reflect the surrounding trees, or the sky, and the angles support each other, like intricate canyons sculpted by wind and water.

The Foundation's land extends from the garden and outhouses to fields rising away, populated by grazing sheep, who seem to take the enormous works for granted, using them as trees to shelter under, or trunks to rub against to soothe their itches.

And the imagination works with the shapes to see in them a variety of lights and shades, of possibilities and reflections.

It is pleasant, especially when you think of the glass screen in front of La Pieta in Rome and the attacks she has faced, to be able to stroke these surfaces, to be one with the shapes, as the sensation of safety, of massive care, engulfs you.

The embracing family protects the little one.  The circles seem like elephants' tusks that go on for eternity, or ears that will listen for ever.

Some pieces are incredibly solid, daunting in their weight and size. Others are isolated and vulnerable, touched with femininity despite the weathered texture.

Moore's daughter Mary was born in 1946, the year of his first foreign retrospective exhibition, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Henry Moore became the most influential sculptor of the twentieth century. Influenced by his studies of Classical, Pre-Columbian (Chac-Mool is a recurrent idea) as well as African art he produced original sculptural forms which are largely abstractions of organic shapes.

In my opinion, everything, every shape, every bit of natural form, animals, people, pebbles, shells, anything you like are all things that can help you to make a sculpture," Moore said of his work.  "The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form [and] knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration.

A visit to Perry Green is an inspiration and a pleasure.  Henry Moore may not actually be producing much new work these days, but his pieces are as fresh as if he had only just finished them, and you cannot help but feel his presence in the gentle surroundings of his home and studio.  I am sure that if you sit in the Hoops Inn just across the lane for long enough, the artist will walk in to join you for a drink.  

Currently, and until October this year, Henry Moore's friend Rodin is holding an exhibition at Perry Green, so perhaps, if you are fortunate, they will both be there, in stone and bronze!

http://www.henry-moore.org/pg

http://www.henry-moore.org/pg/exhibitions/moore-rodin

http://www.hoops-inn.co.uk/map/