Moore Better

Went to the Henry Moore exhibition at Tate Britain today. He's one of my absolute favourite artists, the first modern artist who clicked for me, when I was doing my A-levels and not getting it at all. We went to the National Gallery, I think it was, who were doing an exhibition of his stuff. The sculptures I was familiar with, but the drawings blew me away. The ink pen and wax drawings of sheep and the blitz, their amazing, almost neon quality. And seeing those blitz drawings again today was so incredibly moving and beautiful.

Of course the sculptures are very sensual and sexy. There was a class of teenage girls doing drawings of them, several clustered around sculptures of large objects poised at large holes. Lots of sculptures of aloof mothers clutching needy babies. Most of the crowd were women, most (all!) of the sculptures were women. The women in the sculptures, with their big hips and tits and hands and feet, suggest a man who liked a hefty fuck, quite at odds with our perception of the whey-faced frigid English of the mid-20th Century.

I'd really recommend the exhibition, it has some truly wonderful stuff in it.