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0015334

Publisher: Art Gallery of New South Wales

Place Published: Sydney

Year: 1992

Date & Collation: 27 mins.Sound Recording.

Description: Wednesday 5th August the last week of the Henry Moore exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (See 0014949) between Nick Waterlow and Renee Free and Gwen Eastwood who is a very old friend of Henry Moore". Mrs Eastwood recalls memories of Leeds School of Art and of two ceramics by Moore. "It may have been 1919 when I first knew him...He also had a very good friend called Raymond Coxon who was one of the small group which we formed...We used to go sketching and we used to go sometimes to the moving pictures which were very new...I was born in 1903...my name was Gwendoline Warburton...my father was with the Yorkshire Post...We had to wear hats gloves on all occasions...We were smacked quite a lot but we were happy...I suppose until the outbreak of the First World War which completely changed the world...I can remember the very very first traces of what we would call new modern art and that was a Russian...I can't remember his name but he left...he sent a postcard back to the Leeds School of Art at Christmas a hand painted card...just a mass of green with one brown line going across it...It was a really strange and extraordinary sort of thing to send we couldn't understand it...that would be my first introduction to modern art...Henry Moore...was still quite academic at that time...I don't remember Henry Moore doing any landscape. He seemed to spend most of his time in the life class with the anatomy class and with the modelling class...at the same time...he was at the Castleton Pottery Class..CPP (Castleford Pottery Painting) or something like that...it would be a ready-made piece...but his decorations of course are absolutely beautiful...I did have another one much smaller but over those seventy years I'm afraid it just got dropped...a small nut bowl and it was fairly freely done with green and with yellow...we had a lot of fun...a group of us went to the Roundtape Park in Leeds...they all went in swimming...that was a happy day...after 1920-21...I suppose it would be I had no further connection with Henry because he went to London...I left England in 1924 for Australia...I followed Henry's career of course...He was part of us and he was Hal to us all...I thought well it might amuse people who are running the exhibitions to know that there was a little piece of genuine Henry Moore artifact so far away from England in time and space that had existed for almost seventy years and been a family friend really". There is a typed transcript of this sound recording in the Henry Moore Foundation library at Much Hadham."