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Henry Moore Artwork Catalogue

England and Moore: Bernard Meadows, Stephen Spender, Ghisha Koenig.

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England and Moore: Bernard Meadows, Stephen Spender, Ghisha Koenig.
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Bib. Number0014186

England and Moore: Bernard Meadows, Stephen Spender, Ghisha Koenig.

PublisherICA TV
Place PublishedLondon
Year
Date & Collation85mins.Sound recording and film reels 9,10,11,12. HMF audio number A134
LanguageEnglish
More InformationUnedited interviews made for 0011194. Bernard MEADOWS 17 February 1988 ten minutes on scale and on Moore as a person. I don't think that he had friends he confided to...he was well able to look after his own ideas...His one great help with his work was his wife Irina".
17 February 1988 Stephen SPENDER 45 minutes on London Mercury portrait (See 0009197). "We spent about a week doing it...there are something between six and a dozen different versions". Hampstead in the 1930s. "Henry Moore was trying I think very hard at that time to be an abstract artist...but however hard he tried at that time everything he did always turned into something else usually a reclining figure...He wished that he could do work in which his feelings about humanity were more obvious...He signed manifestos...He did feel very committed...In the whole of his life he never had any feeling that anyone was inferior to him or that anyone was superior to him...There was total refusal of Henry ever to force his politics his political sympathies into his work". Spender acknowledged Moore's consciousness of his childhood working-class background but rejected the notion that his work represented a failure of the Labour Movement. "When he got ideas about himself which were often really imposed on him by other people...he could often be misled he could think for instance that anything he did could be cast in bronze and it would be interesting because it was by Henry Moore...After the Moores left Hampstead I doubt whether Henry really had real friends". Use of natural objects and birth of Mary Moore.
17 February 1988 Ghisha KOENIG a student of Moore at Chelsea School of Art in the 1940s attacks Moore as a teacher a person and an artist: "No sense of adventure to the classes...He didn't relate to us as human beings...He is not the great sculptor because he hasn't a real vision...He went on to explain why Rodin was not a great artist... he used assistants he used pointing machines he enlarged maquettes of which he did not work on himself - all the very traps he himself fell into".
For England and Moore: Bernard Meadows 1 2 and 4 see 0014184 and 0014185 and 0014200."