Lions and unicorns: the Britishness of postwar British sculpture.

0012836 ;Art and National Identity; Sheep Piece, 1971-1972 bronze Lions and unicorns: the Britishness of postwar British sculpture. Paul Overy Art in America New York

In issue of Art in America on Art and National Identity. Opens with a full-page colour photograph of Sheep Piece, 1971-1972 bronze in the sheep meadow at Much Hadham. Mentions Moore's honours, the giant scale of the castings of his late work, and his promotion by the British Council. Moore's critical position may be in flux today but in terms of museum holdings and public sitings throughout the world he is still the best-known sculptor of the 20th century. Moore's Shelter drawings and his post-war family groups were both in keeping with the British image. His later public works "shipped to almost every part of the world (as formerly British armaments locomotives and machine tools had been) seemed like belated products of the no longer vital workshop of the world." Mentions the reaction of critics and of younger artists against Moore. Contemporary British sculptors, in particular Anish KAPOOR, but also Richard LONG, Barry FLANAGAN, and Nicholas POPE, react to Moore's (and Hepworth's) "modernist primitivizing".

Discussion of Moore's style from the 1930s (some works abstract and organic, similar to Jean ARP and Naum GABO; others fusing figurative and landscape imagery in his reclining figures) and the postwar period (a fusion of the two earlier styles). Mention of Moore's place in the Hampstead set of artists in the 1930s. Moore's reclining figures from the 1950s onwards, with allusions to Reclining Figure: Festival and the UNESCO Reclining Figure. Contrast between Moore and the Geometry of Fear school. Moore's public popularity contrasts with criticism from avant-garde art circles from the 1960s on.