Parke-Bernet in New York, and several of the pieces found their way into important collections 120 such as the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Henry Moore is widely considered to be the doyen of British Modernism. With encouragement from an appreciative school teacher, he decided from an early age to become a sculptor— not an embellisher of buildings and churches, working under the direction of architects—but as an artist with the goal of creating free-standing works. Moore came to London from Yorkshire in 1921, having received a scholarship to the Royal College of Art. At the time, he was one of only six or seven sculpture students at the college, and he was assigned his own studio and life model from which to study. Moore first visited the British Museum the same year and thereafter went twice a week for two to three hours a session, working his way from room to room. Breaking with the classical Greek and Roman ideals that were the basis of art studies then, Moore searched for a different direction in himself and found what he was looking for in primitive, archaic, and tribal art. He claimed that nine-tenths of his learning and understanding of sculpture came from his observations at the British Museum. In the 1920s, the only other working sculptor Moore had respect for was Jacob Epstein, and he never forgot the moment when Epstein showed him his collection of primitive carvings (fig. 23). The bedroom was so crowded with pieces that he wondered how Epstein ever got into bed without knocking things over. He himself would’ve liked to collect tribal art then too. He knew it to be the rage in Paris but found that on his stipend of £90 pounds a year, the £10 pounds that a good African figure fetched on the Caledonian road market was just too much.18 He was particularly interested in African and Oceanic sculptures, and he found the British Museum’s displays and cases, which were packed full of pieces, to be exceptionally wonderful. There was always something new to discover. Moore found the moniker “primitive” to be misleading, suggesting crudeness and incompetence. “It was obvious to me that these artists were not trying—and failing—to represent the human form naturalistically, but that they had definite traditions of their own. The existence of such varied traditions outside European art was a great revelation and stimulus. I used to draw many of these carvings, sometimes on any scraps of paper that I had with me, sometimes in sketchbooks. And, of course, some of these carvings influenced my own work later.”19 Moore had many favorite sculptures at the museum and spent a lot of time looking at and studying them, turning them over in his mind. He drew inspiration from specific facets of the works, with certain elements revealing important truths to him. Regarding the malangan carvings he saw in the Oceanic section, he thought them especially important to the development of his own work. “New Ireland carvings made a tremendous impression on me through their use of forms within a form. I realized what a sense of mystery could be achieved by having the inside partly hidden so that you have to move around the sculpture to understand it. I was also staggered by the craftsmanship needed to make these interior carvings (fig. 24). The so-called primitive peoples were often as advanced in technique as the more developed societies. The painting of these pieces is very attractive but, for me, decoration on sculpture can be a distraction from the impact of the three-dimensional form.”20 Moore’s sketches of a malangan figure at the museum show him trying to work out the complexity of the internal structures of the piece and how those structures work compositionally in relation to the outer framework and core body (fig. 26). The drawings also express his feelings of movement within the sculpture and how that could translate to a work of his own making. He incorporated all these thoughts in his work Upright Internal/External Forms from 1951 (fig. 25). In the early 1950s, as Moore’s public commissions took on a scale of monumentality that required more assistance in his studio, he hired the young artist Anthony Caro. Caro found his own success later that decade, creating metal sculptures of bolted steel beams and plates, often painted in bold, monochromatic colors. Like Moore, Caro was interested in non-Western sculpture, including African and Oceanic art, but he has drawn specific inspiration from New Ireland art, both as an artist and as a collector. And, like Moore, Caro first became interested in the then socalled primitive art in his student days. New Ireland sculpture was a revelation to him “because it is open and closed at the same time. The best pieces are full of feeling— the form is inventive as well as complicated and yet it never loses its unity. The first piece I acquired was a malangan head. There are times and places when the making of sculpture seems to run in the blood—Archaic Greek sculpture, West African wood carvings, Chola bronzes in South India. This is true for New Ireland sculptures— it seems to be natural language, how people express themselves. I am not exclusively collecting New Ireland sculptures, but the New Ireland pieces are sculptural, loose, and inventive. Heads and figures often include fishes and birds in the same piece. My most recent FEATURE FIG. 23 (above): Adrian Allinson, Epstein Doubting the Authenticity of a South Seas Idol, 1914. Pen and ink on paper. Private collection. FIG. 24 (right): Mask, matua. New Ireland. Wood, pigment, shell. H: 111 cm. Collected between 1896 and 1899 by Father Rascher and Richard Parkinson. Ex Herz-Jesu-Mission, MCS Schwesterngemeinschaft, Munster- Hiltrup, Germany, 1905; Manfred Steffmann, Möhensee- Günne, Germany. Private collection. Photo: © Hughes Dubois. FIG. 25 (far right top): Henry Moore, Upright Internal/External Forms, 1952–53. Bronze. H: 673 cm. © The Henry Moore Foundation. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation. FIG. 26 (far right bottom): Henry Moore, Upright Internal/External Forms, c. 1935. Drawing on paper. © The Henry Moore Foundation. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation.
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