Henry Moore's World

The most distinguished living sculptor, Henry Moore opened up as he never has before in the talk with CARLTON LAKE which follows. Mr. Lake, art critic for the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR,has lived abroad since 1952. Last autumn, after his visit with Mr. Moore in Hertfordshire, he returned to the United States, where he is now at work on a new book.

HENRY MOORE is a kindly, soft-spoken Yorkshireman, a boyish, vigorous sixty-three, with clear blue eyes, a ready smile, and a shock of gray hair that starts well back of the forehead. He sat down in a corner of a divan diagonally opposite me in the small, friendly sitting room of his white Hertfordshire farmhouse. We had been talking, a few days earlier, in Paris, where he had gone to supervise the installation of his big retrospective show at the Musée Rodin. We had parted company in front of one of his latest, and finest, works, one of the two monumental Two-Piece Reclining Figures. The conversation today returned us to that point.

“It’s a good thing, this post-war proliferation of sculptors,” he said. “In America before the war, one could mention Calder, and that was all. Now there are Lipton, Roszak, Lassaw, David Smith, and many, many others. In England, one might name thirty; in Italy, at least twenty. A good thing for sculpture in general, but it creates problems. The number of foundries hasn’t increased comparably. It was all but impossible to get some of my big pieces cast into bronze in time for the exhibition, which started off in Hamburg.

“I was fortunate in finding a foundry in West Germany that could cast the two large Two-Piece Reclining Figures for me in time for the opening. I went to Hamburg before the show opened so I could see the casts and finish off the patinating. That was in May, 1960. From there the exhibition went to Essen, then on to Zurich, Munich, and Rome. I went to Rome for the opening there.

“When the exhibition moved to Paris, to the Musée Rodin, I had to go there too, since I had promised to help them solve the problems involved in placing the sculpture. The Musée Rodin is not an exhibition museum, like the Tate or the Museum of Modern Art in Rome, which is set up for changing exhibitions. Most of my things, as you saw, had to be displayed in the chapel, and that’s hardly an ideal setting. The light is bad, and the architecture of the interior interferes with perspective. The big pieces, at least, could be placed outside, but it was too early to start using the gardens, and the pieces that were grouped around the museum itself had to stand up against a baroque building. Not the ideal background. Not one I would have chosen, anyway.

“Of course, all exhibitions are to some extent compromises. They have to be, even in well-lit, well-built galleries. An exhibition which groups works of mine isn’t what I envisage as I do sculpture. Each sculpture is an individual creation, and one doesn’t do it with relation to one’s other works. It’s really a false affair, sticking fifty of them together like that. A collector in Scotland who has three large pieces of mine has set them outdoors on his sheep farm over an area of about three miles. Each piece has its own setting, unaffected by the others. Each of them has its own relation to nature. That’s why I make them outdoors, so I can see each sculpture in relation to the sky and the trees. I’ve arranged my studio so I can work outside. That’s the nearest to the ideal. But seeing them all within half an hour in an exhibition like mine in the Rodin Museum is a poor substitute for seeing things.”

I told Moore I couldn’t recall that the Musée Rodin had ever before given itself over to the works of a single sculptor, except Rodin, of course. It does have a group showing every spring, at the back of the garden, of the leading younger sculptors of the École de Paris — a kind of continuing moral obligation. And a year ago it showed a comparable survey of modern Italian sculpture. But the Moore show, so far as I could remember, was the first full-scale retrospective of a single living sculptor.

He looked understandably happy about that. “That makes up for all the disadvantages,” he said. “For me, Rodin is the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo.”

“And after Rodin?” I asked him.

“Then it’s on to Amsterdam, Berlin, and winding up at Vienna in the autumn,” he said, neatly side-stepping the trap. “Shall we go into the studio?”

I FOLLOWED him into the vestibule. We put on our hats and coats and crossed the couryard, through the early-spring drizzle. Moore opened the door at the end of the studio nearest the house, and we went inside. It is a fairly long building, but narrow and not high, and its dimensions limit its usefulness to smaller pieces. It was filled with many of them, new and old, dust-covered and freshly patinated, work in progress on stands, sacks of plaster.

“ This was the stable when we came here in 1940,” Moore said. “We had been living down in Kent, then moved to London. We came here for a weekend during the blitz in 1940. While we were here, my studio, which was in Hampstead, was put out of commission by a near miss. All the windows were shattered, and a number of pieces were damaged. That decided us. We stayed on here for six months as tenants and then bought the place.”

I asked him how living out here had fitted in with his work as a war artist. “I went into London two or three days a week to do my shelter drawings,” he said. “Its curious how that all started. The official shelters were insufficient. People had taken to rolling their blankets about eight or nine o’clock in the evening, going down into the tube stations, and settling on the platforms. The authorities could do nothing about it. Later on, the government began to organize things better. They put in lavatories and coffee bars down there and began building four-tiered bunks for the children. It was like a huge city in the bowels of the earth. When I first saw it, quite by accident — I had gone into one of them during an air raid — I saw hundreds of Henry Moore Reclining Figures stretched along the platforms. I was fascinated, visually. I went back again and again. I hadn’t intended to be a war artist. I had seen soldiers and planes before, and no experience of that kind meant anything to me. But scenes like those in the underground had never happened before, except in the holds of slave ships. This was unique. I had already volunteered to do munition toolmaking. The government had appealed to those with special skills with their hands, engravers and so on. I expected to be called up for that work at any moment, and I knew I’d be doing no large pieces. Therefore, I felt free to take on this.

“Anyway, as I was saying, this building was the stable. I had only to open up the doors in the back and put in top lights. I’d always worked in the open air, you know, down in Kent. Sculpture is an open-air art. Painting’s an indoor art. You wouldn’t put a Rembrandt on the lawn to look at, but sculpture in the great periods — Egyptian, Greek, Gothic — has always been an outdoor object. I’ve always thought my own work that way, felt it that way. I did the Time-Life stone screen outside and watched it grow from the green. I haven’t liked being cooped up. In England you can do it that way; we’ve got the weather for it.” I smiled, very conscious of the tattoo of the rain on the roof. Moore saw me and looked up over our heads. “Oh, we do have a bit of rain now and again,” he said, “but then I just work under tarpaulins. That’s the way I did with the Time-Life wall. I’ve worked in southern Italy and been terribly debilitated by the heat. And in Norway and Sweden the winters are so dark. It’s all nonsense, what they say about the English climate. It’s ideal. It’s been a wonderful winter. We had just a touch of frost in mid-March, not bad at all. The pipes are all uncovered. Since they freeze up only about once in four years, it’s hardly worth the trouble to cover them.”

He looked around the studio. “You can see I use this now only for finishing and patinating. I nip in at night to see to the finishing touches.” He walked over to a bench and put his hand on a bronze HelmetHead, a stylized abstraction of the human head about fourteen inches high, similar to one I had seen in the MusÉe Rodin exhibition. It was made up of two separate pieces, a hollow casque in the general shape of a head, and an inner figure which was a simplification of the human torso.

“When bronze comes from the foundry,” Moore said, “it’s like a rather dirty new penny. Clean nature — out here, for example — will turn it green. Sooty, chemical-laden air, like London’s, turns it black. As Chinese bronzes show, it can have remarkable quality and variety. When I was a young sculptor and did nothing but carving, I used to talk a lot about ‘truth to materials.’ I have found, though, that bronze can do anything.” He rubbed his hand over the smooth, darkening surface of the bronze head. “If one wants to give that sense of internal action, a feeling of force from within, one of the qualities in form that give vitality, you can’t get that by only rough surfaces. Young sculptors say, ‘I don’t like smooth surfaces.’ That’s a very superficial point of view, like saying, ‘I only like people with rough tweeds.’ The texture of a piece of sculpture should be the outcome of its character, of what you are seeking to do. It’s not just a surface embellishment.”

Moore clenched his fist and held it up to me. HiThe skin was drawn taut and smooth and white over the protruding knuckles. “You get a much stronger feeling of pressure from inside this way than when you look at the hand held normally,” he said.

The rain had penetrated a crack in the roof near where we were standing and had begun to drip down onto some sacks of plaster. Moore leaned over and pulled them out of the way. He returned to the Helmet-Head.

“I did the first of these in about 1940,” he said. “I was working on the idea of a form within a form. This idea of protection, of shelter within armor, hits been a theme with me for twenty years or more. It may have some psychological thing behind it, the mother-and-child idea, perhaps. You see, if this helmet weren’t smooth, it wouldn’t have that idea of ‘helmet.’ I meant it to have a kind of mechanical vitality.” He turned the helmet around so that the back was facing us. There was a large cutaway area. “It wouldn’t have this feeling of mystery, either, just as in a kind of armor. It’s a caricature of the human figure, in a sense.”

He pointed to another Helmet-Head over against the wall. It had a uniform green patina. “There’s one I did last year.” We walked over to it. It was less regular in its conformation than the other one. “Inside, you see, it has more of a machine feeling, but the outside is more pushed about. Oh, if I had four or five lifetimes, I couldn’t exhaust the possibilities of that idea. If a theme is fundamental, it keeps recurring. Like the Reclining Figures or the Mother and Child. This kind of relationship — one figure within another — is illimitable.”

Moore turned and walked to the end of the old stable. I followed him through a door into a smaller room. Facing us was a Mother and Child

bronze figure ol 1953 in which the child lunges avidly for the mother’s breast and the mother seems to be holding the child at a distance. It is a harsh, angular piece with an element of savagery. “The child is almost eating its mother, you see,” Moore said, nodding in its direction. Next to it, in sharp contrast, was a small version of a 1952-1953 sculpture called Upright External/ Internal Form, a bronze which has a curving inner figure that could be a child, within the cutaway sheltering form representing its mother.

He walked over to another version of the IlelmetHead. “This one is in lead,” he said. “I had to turn it into bronze, though; the lead was too vulnerable.” He reached inside the casque, moved the inner figure forward and back. One had the feeling of the nose in movement. “You see how it is with these forms within forms,” he said. “The possibilities are rich, endless.”

WE LEFT the studio and walked to a small, onestory building only a few yards away. Moore let us in. There were a number of very small terracotta pieces, obviously studies for other things. From a low table Moore picked up a small curving piece of what appeared to be baked clay and looked like a portion of the torso of one of his own small Reclining Figures. “This is nothing of mine,” he said. “All these bits here” — he pointed down to the table, covered with such fragments — “are natural objects, bits of pebbles, bones, and shells, things one has picked up because one found them intriguing for their shape. If one comes in here at night with a completely blank mind, in ten minutes something would give one a start on an idea, if one wished. At the seaside each year one picks them up, interprets them, and lets them be a start for something. Leonardo demonstrated that a battle scene can be found in the lichen marks on a wall. But it has to be interpreted. It can’t be simply copied. Leonardo would have found a much better battle scene than a lesser artist, of course. But one’s problems aren’t solved by finding an object. It’s what one does with it that counts. The principle is there, but there are many natural forms that are inert, dead. They have no life until you put it in. That’s the difference between sculpture and architecture. Each deals with form. Aesthetically the same judgments apply, but there is a difference. In sculpture you are free to create objects which have a life of their own. Good architecture is based on formal relationships, but architecture has a functional purpose. Sculpture has an expressionist end and is freer.”

I asked Moore what he considered to be the basis of the art of sculpture. “For me,” he said, “sculpture is based on and remains close to the human figure. That works both ways. We make the kind of sculpture we make because we are the shape we are, because we have the proportions we have. All those things make us respond to form and shape in certain ways. If we had the shape of cows, and went about on four legs, the whole basis of sculpture would be entirely different. If it were only a matter of making a pleasurable relationship between forms, sculpture would lose, for me, its fundamental importance. It would become too easy. Let me show you what I mean.” We went back into the near end ol the studio we had just left. “At one period, just belore the war, in 1938 I think, I began the most abstract side of my work — the stringed figures.” He pointed to one of them, a Mother and Child theme in lead and wire. The generalized forms of the heads of mother and child were pierced with small holes. Taut pieces of wire joined the heads together. Similar wires stretched from the simplified mouth of the child to the mother’s breasts. I told Moore I had often wondered how those figures got started.

“Well, I had gone one day to the Science Museum at South Kensington and had been greatly intrigued by some of the mathematical models; you know, those hyperbolic paraboloids and groins and so on, developed by La Grange in Paris, that have geometric figures at the ends with colored threads from one to the other to show what the form between would be. I saw the sculptural possibilities of them, and I did some. I could have done hundreds. I hey were fun, but too much in the nature of experiments to be really satisfying. That’s a different thing from expressing some deep human experience one might have had. When the war came, I gave up this type of thing. Others, like Gabo and Barbara Hepworth, have gone on doing it. It becomes a matter of ingenuity rather than a fundamental human experience.”

We walked back into the small building again. Moore reached over and picked up a little curving serrate shell, formed like a small denture. He moved it around in his hand, held it up on end. “You can see the horns of a bull there, or a caterpillar rearing up. I find that having many objects like that about, handling them, gives me ideas. The whole of nature — bones, pebbles, shells, clouds, tree trunks, flowers — all is grist to the mill of a sculptor. It all needs to be brought in at one time. People have thought — the later Greeks, in the Hellenistic period — that the human figure was the only subject, that it ended there; a question of copying. But I believe it s a question of metamorphosis. We must relate the human figure to animals, to clouds, to the landscape — bring them all together. There’s no difference between them all. By using them like metaphors in poetry, you give new meaning to things.”

WE WALKED outside. Ahead of us, behind the farmhouse, stretched the gently sloping green of Moore’s property. About three hundred yards to the rear stood the two large studios where he works on his monumental pieces. Between us and them, half a dozen of his larger sculptures had been placed in such a way that they seemed almost to be growing out of the earth. We started down the path toward the big studio.

“If I tried to do the South Downs or a Scottish mist,” he said, “it would be nothing but a scale model of what nature docs more impressively. But, take, for example, my Two-Piece Reclining Figures; if you relate the human figure to landscape, as I tried to do there, you give the big scale of mountains, you give the landscape a relation to your body, and give added meaning to both.”

Moore pointed to a little hillock on our right. “A cast of the King and Queen was there until just the other day, but I had to send it off to an exhibition.” Nearer to us was a cast of the Drabed Reclining Figure, about five feet long, which Moore executed in 1952-1953 for the Time-Life building in Bond Street, London. Off to the right I saw a model of the Reclining Figure he did in 19571958 for UNESCO headquarters in Paris. This one looked like a bronze. I asked him about it.

“That’s the original model for the UNESCO piece,” he said. “It’s half size and in plaster. I had the plaster bronzed to see what it would look like cast in bronze. I hadn’t intended to cast it, but then I decided I didn’t want to lose the original. My property used to end just below here. That field” — he indicated the rolling land off to the south — “belonged to a small-holding farmer. He died, and I bought it and built the big studio to do the UNESCO figure. Then, when I worked out the details, I realized the job was too big to do here, and so I went to Italy with the plaster model and worked there. The finished piece consists of four blocks of Roman travertine, excluding the pedestal base, of course. It is over sixteen feet long and weighs thirty-nine tons, but the original blocks weighed something like sixty tons before I went to work on them. That size and weight, of course, would have made it impossible to have done the carving here in my studio. Transport expenses alone would have been enormous, and I wouldn’t have been able to handle such weights. I produced the full-size stone sculpture at Messrs HEnraux’s stone and marble works at Querceta, a small village at the foot of the Carrara Mountains, about a mile from Forte dEi Marini. The stone was quarried near Rome, but Messrs henraux brought it from the quarries to their works at Querceta For me. there they have a large overhead crane, which simplified everything. But it took me nearly a year, with the help of two of Messrs Henraux’s stone-carvers.

“UNESCO originally asked me for a bronze. i did some drawings with that in mind, but as I thought about it, i realized that since bronze goes dark outdoors, and the sculpture would have as its background a building that is mostly glass, which looks black, the fenestration would have been too much the same tone, and you would have lost the sculpture. So then I worked on the idea of siting the figure against a background of its own, but then, inside the building you wouldn’t have had a view of the sculpture. Half the views would have been lost. So I finally decided the only solution was to use a light-colored stone, and I settled on the same stone they’ve used for the top of the building: travertine. It’s a beautiful stone. I’d always wanted to do a large piece in it. At the unveiling it looked too white — all newly carved stone has a white dust on it — but on my last trip to Paris, I went to UNESCO, and I saw that it’s weathering nicely. In ten or twenty years’ time, with the washing of the Paris rain, it will be fine. Half of Rome is built of travertine.

“Of course, it was a harder job than it would have been if I’d done it in bronze. When you carve, you’re dealing with the absolute final piece. The practical problems arc much greater than those you have with a large bronze. If I’d done it in bronze, the original would have been in plaster, and hollow. I’d have cut it up and shipped it off to the bronze founder, and the practical problems would have been his.

“When I’m doing pieces for bronze, I work occasionally in soft clay, which has to be cast in plaster. Generally, though, I work directly in plaster, building it up on a wooden framework. I put it on with a trowel or a spatula. It hardens in a quarter of an hour, and I can cut it down and build it up again.”

BY NOW we had reached the big white studio. Across the front ran a cement platform with a ramp leading up to it. On the platform were several large sculptures, covered with tarpaulins, on heavy wheeled bases. Moore identified one of them as the bronze cast of the original model for the UNESCO piece. The fine English mist was Coming down rather hard now, but we were sheltered, except for splashes, by a projection of the roof that extended out over the cement platform. Moore smiled seraphically. “Isn’t this wonderful!” he exclaimed. “It’s a typical English day. I spent a month in Spain once. It never rained except for one day. And when the rain came, I started singing and jumping around. I hadn’t realized how much one could love rain. It’s a great place to work, out here” — he pointed across the fields to the south — “seeing things take form against that landscape. I only wish we could have extended the platform on the north end, so that one could have seen the sculpture against another background, too.” I followed his eyes in that direction. Across the roadway leading to another studio, sheep were grazing in pastureland somewhat higher than the ground on which the big studio had been built.

“Let’s go inside.” he said. I followed him into the high, light studio. Most of the central area was taken up by bronze casts of two of Moore’s most important recent works, the Two-Piece Reclining Figures (Nos. I and II) of 1959 and 1960. In these, everything that Moore has done to date is somehow summed up and, at the same time, extended, because here, quite literally, he has added a new dimension to his work. The massive figures have been broken into two fragments, yet their unity is total. In the fragmenting of the form, Moore has, paradoxically, unleashed a force which is centripetal in its effect. I asked him how he had got started with this idea.

“Well,” he said, “the UNESCO thing, as I’ve told you, came to me in a flash alter four or five months of attempting to solve it as a bronze, The Two-Piece Reclining Figures must have been working around in the back of my mind for years, really. As long ago as 1934 I had done a number of smaller pieces composed of separate forms, twoand three-piece carvings in ironstone, ebony, alabaster, and other materials. They were all more abstract than these. I don’t think it was a conscious or intentional thing for me to break up the figures in this way, but I suppose those earlier works, from the thirties, had something to do with it. I didn’t do any preliminary drawings for these.

I wish now I had. One of them goes off to the Kroller-Mliller Museum, and they’ve asked me if I have some preliminary drawings.

“I did the high one first, then the more definitely reclining one. I here’s a third one, even larger, that’s just gone off to the foundry. I did the first one in two pieces almost without intending to. But after I’d done it, then the second one became a conscious idea. I realized what an advantage a separated two-piece composition could have in relating figures to landscape. He walked over to Reclining Figure No. II, put his hands on the knees and the breasts. “Knees and breasts are mountains,” he said. “Once these two parts become separated, you don’t expect it to be a naturalistic figure; therefore, you can more justifiably make it like a landscape or a rock. If it is a single figure, you can guess what it’s going to be like. If it is in two pieces, there’s a bigger surprise, you have more unexpected views; therefore, the special advantage of sculpture over painting — of having the possibility of many different views — is more fully exploited.”

Moore moved over to Reclining Figure No. I. He turned it slowly on its movable base. “The front view doesn’t enable one to foresee the back view. As you move around it, the two parts overlap or they open up and there’s space between. Sculpture is like a journey. You have a different view as you return. The three-dimensional world is full of surprises in a way that a two-dimensional world never could be. For example, if we were made flat, as though cut out of cardboard, there are certain ideas about the human body that would be only symbols. Now, painting has certain advantages — color and so on — but sculpture has endless possibilities.” He pulled up one knee and assumed a posture similar to Michelangelo’s Dying Captive. He drew his hands back slowly over his protruding knee. “Michelangelo s method was to release form until it was all out of the block, gradually revealing the thing from the front view backwards. He had such a sense of form he could do it like that. In a way, that is not a spatial approach. A spatial approach would deal with big masses first, from all round, and eventually come through to the detail in those masses, at the end. Even though I think Michelangelo was the greatest genius of the visual arts ever, I wouldn ‘t work the same way.

“The Upright External/Internal Form I did in 1952 and 1953 was a transitional stage from those early smaller pieces to these Two-Piece Reclining Figures, it seems to me in retrospect. I may do some that split into more than two parts. They are still one unit, not two or three separate figures. You '11 note that Number Two is bolted in place on its pedestal. Number One isn’t. But if somebody moved one of those parts one inch, straightaway Id know.Moore extended his arm into the open area between the two parts of the figure, then into its concavities. “The space would be different, the angles through here, there. All the relationships would be changed.”

He wiped the dust off his hands and came around to my side of the base. “Sculptors nowadays are trying to exploit space,” he said. In the old days they just looked at form. The new sculptors are more space conscious. Some of the welders and wire sculptors think they’re using space, but often they’re only using tricks. To understand proper space, you have to understand solid form as well.” He picked up a telephone handset from a shelf behind him. He tangled its wires into complete confusion. “A young sculptor who works all in strings and wires may not understand space any more than an old-time academic sculptor. He’s using a method which gives him his space automatically. But proper space is the negative of solid form. You need to understand form.”

I asked him about the function of the holes in many of his works. “The holes,” he said, “are an expansion of three-dimensional form. They’re one and the same. At a certain point I began to give my space a shape which could have turned into solid form if I’d thought of it the other way round.” I suggested that there were still many people who would find that as perverse as Doctor Johnson’s definition of a string bag — a series of holes held together by string.

“Not so perverse as all that,” he said. “What is a cave? A cave is a shape. It’s not the lump of mountain over it.”

I asked him if he thought it was easier for a sculptor to pass off bad work on the public than for a painter to do so. He thought for a moment. “It seems to me,” he said, “that the painter’s means are more easily available, whereas sculpture presents such technical difficulties that a sculptor must necessarily be more seasoned by the time he has mastered them. On the other hand, the layman has less familiarity with sculpture than he has with painting and is perhaps less capable of differentiating between good and bad there. Let’s say that it would be easier for a painter to get away with that sort of thing if he had mastered his means, but because of the greater technical difficulties involved in sculpture, the layman may see through the bad sculpture less easily. Of course, some people set up a distinction between abstract and figurative and try to separate good from bad on that basis. It’s a false distinction, in any case, and generally an emotional one. Take Poussin, for instance. He’s like a juggler, not with two or three balls, but with twenty, and keeping them all going. He is doing something much more difficult, and in that sense he has greater ability as an abstract artist when he keeps his figures and their relationships than Mondrian has when he reduces everything to squares and rectangles.”

We left the big studio and walked out into the roadway that led past the grazing sheep to a yellow-brick building. We went inside. Moore walked over to a cast of his Falling Warrior (19561957), a tragic representation, about five feet long, of a warrior who has fallen on his back but is still holding his shield. “I’ve been patinating this for an exhibition,” he said. He rubbed the chest in an area where the bronze glowed dully beneath the green patina. “One can get it so that the surfaces seem to have been arrived at in the natural way.” We walked over to the far wall, to one of Moore’s most powerful and dramatic recent works, Relief No. I, a seven-and-a-half-foot bronze upright figure, only half emerged from the block, in which all the salient features of the torso, front view, are strongly accentuated.

“Renaissance sculptors,” he said, “used relief pictorially. They reduced depth almost mathematically. They had the same use of perspective as painters. For some time I’ve thought one might use relief in its own way, to exploit the projection and recession of form and make it more powerful in relief than a realistic rendering of compressed representation.” He reached over and, with his hands, vigorously outlined the projection and recession of the upper-chest area. “To make the chest more strong, to make it come out * ' ^JeelluFl * ' ^JeelluFl more, you send it back underneath.” His hands cut through the shadowy recess beneath the upper chest, followed the form down to the waist, and jutted out as the waist flared into hips. “You bring the hips out more, and the umbilicus” — he put the stress on the penult and gave it a long i. “One has made the projections and recessions for their own sakes rather than for a pictorial use of relief. That requires as big a sense of space as if one had made a whole sculpture in the round. Form is indivisible. The understanding of three-dimensional form involves all points of view about form — space, interior and exterior form, pressure from within; they’re all one and the same big problem. They’re all mixed up with the human thing, with one’s own body and how one thinks about everything. This talk of representational and nonrepresentational art, spatial and nonspatial sculpture, is all nonsense. There’s no cutting it up into separate compartments. It’s all one.”

Something about the way he said “one" made me think of time. I looked at my watch and saw that “one” had come and gone, long since. (We had started our wanderings right after breakfast.) Moore looked at his watch. “Gracious,” he said.

I felt a bit guilty and must have looked it. He read my expression. “Oh, it’s not the time that bothers me,” he said. “Fin just wondering about my daughter Mary. She’s with the Aldermaston marchers, and they ought to be getting into Trafalgar Square pretty soon. Rather rough, with all this rain.”

“This is the ideal climate,” I said.

Moore grinned. “Well,” he said, “she is only fifteen, you know. Give her time.”