It was Berger too who coined a brilliantly destructive insult that formulates all that’s

It was Berger too who coined a brilliantly destructive insult that formulates all that’s wrong with Moore’s long late period: “Piltdown sculpture.”The famous archaeological forgery, purporting to be the skull of a missing link, really a collage of ape and human bones, was exposed in 1953. The phrase calls Moore’s work pseudo-primal, and (more acutely) a collage of bits which pretends to a natural unity I think the trouble starts with Recumbent Figure (1938). Put the phrase “organic form” out of your mind just for a moment and see the piece for what it is: a dismembered corpse in a body-stocking. And what’s grotesque is not the dismemberment, the disparate human parts it’s made of, but the way they’re stitched up and smoothed over in the fluid sheath of general, non-specific tissue.Moore’s knack was for metamorphosis, seamlessly grafting together diverse elements – limbs, stones, buttocks, bones, branches, crags, occasional hints of manufacture.

The metamorphosis always urges continuity and integration, not contrast. When, in the late Fifties, John Berger made a negative judgement on his recent work, the story goes that someone from the British Council rang up Moore to personally apologise for this outrage. Moore’s art was given a para-religious, almost a magical status, It was a dream of modern art come true – work that offered more than images, more even than the archetypal shapes of the human mind, but forms that actually radiated power, energy points in the world, like the old stone rings; and was quite popular too.He became an international figure and a national treasure – and an artist almost beyond criticism. Moore was blessed and cursed with a talent for the central cliches of the age. But how thrilling, then, for a viewer to able to feel: here are the myths of our time, here are the living icons of our culture (our culture therefore is alive, and unified). The Helmet pieces: Mycenae meets Sputnik, The Internal and External Forms: creation pot cum splitting atom The King and Queens: neolithic ETs.

(Another of Moore’s cultural credits: disseminating an image of the “alien” in the public mind)..This mythic stuff is fatally dated now. You see it in Wieland Wagner’s denazified Bayreuth productions, set in an abstract realm fusing primal past and sci-fi future Moore gets the same feeling. But there was a true match between Moore’s work and the needs of a war- wrecked world. His Anglican compromise of abstract, figurative and organic provided the right ideals and consolations: images of non-specific, non- divisive humanism; an art that looked modern but avoided modernist aggro and fragmentation; that offered the “mythic” as basic common ground.”Timeless” was the mode of the time. In the years following his triumph at the 1948 Venice Biennale, international exhibitions and commissions abounded. One can put this down to vigorous cultural diplomacy by the British Council, doing promotion of Britain and free-world propaganda. And then – which again few artists, however famous, manage – he hit the stride of history.Moore was the man for the post-war moment.