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Flesh and Bone study visit report - The Open College of the Arts

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Flesh and Bone study visit report

The title, Flesh and Bone, seems macabre enough to have put anyone off a Saturday morning visit. The local flooding that cut off Oxford from the south and the circuitous route to the exhibition past the Ashmolean’s collection of musical instruments and ceramics proved further obstacles.
Nevertheless, ten OCA students assembled to see the work of Henry Moore and Francis Bacon and a show of Malcom Morley’s hyper-realist works. As always, different students brought particular experiences to the mix. For one it was the memory of seeing one of the sculptures on a childhood visit to the Festival of Britain. For another it was a particular interest in Henry Moore’s drawings and for a third an understanding of the works by Michelangelo and Rodin that were included as comparisons.
The title of the show is in fact taken from a review by John Piper’s wife, the critic Myfanwy Piper. In it she observed that Moore’s work is about ‘the bones beneath the skin’ while Bacon’s is a reminder of the nature of ‘flesh as meat’. The observation indicates the difference between the melting softness of Bacon’s figures and the rigidity of Moore’s sculptures, which even beneath the biomorphic shapes of his reclining figures are usually based around orthogonals. It also conjures up the impression in Moore’s work of something that has been weathered and reduced to its essentials. Not surprisingly, this stripped down quality is most apparent in his skeletal outdoor pieces, which were influenced by the archaeological preoccupations of British art in the thirties. Indeed when Moore was able to site these out of doors, he was delighted to find that they reminded him of Stonehenge. Moore’s interest in primitivism helped to give his works a sense of timelessness that is in contrast to the apparitional quality of Bacon’s paintings. For the fact that Bacon worked from photographs rather than life drawings reinforces their sense of instantaneity. Often they appear as if they had been suddenly illuminated by a flashbulb as well as glimpsed voyeuristically through a keyhole.
Quite rightly, however, the exhibition concentrates on the similarities rather than the differences. For Bacon, like Moore, seems to describe experiences that he regarded as universal to the human condition rather than portraying particular people or events. Both were preoccupied with morbidity and with what Eliot called ‘the skull beneath the skin’. Both have an atavistic quality, although in Bacon’s case it is of the crumbling golems of the bog-burials rather than the flinty resilience of Tenochtitlan or Stonehenge. The catalogue quotes a comment by the critic, John Russell, about their shared preoccupation with ‘the blind and irrational forces (of) the world.’ In Moore’s case critics have associated this with his experiences in the first world war. They have also linked it to a sense of unease that he borrowed from Pre-Columbian art and that he transposed to his early masks, reclining figures and his relief for the building at St James’s.
After the second world war critics explained this dystopian element in his work with reference to the revelations of Auschwitz, existentialism and the cold war. At the Venice Biennale in 1952 Herbert Read identified Moore’s work as the inspiration for the younger sculptors that became associated with his phrase the ‘geometry of fear.’ Bacon’s tormented figures were seen as emblematic of such tensions. Like Moore, he made grand statements about humanity using dramatic and expressive imagery that suggests a contemporary preoccupation with the Jungian concept of the unifying power of myth. This had its counterpart in the work of the American Abstract Expressionists.
What is interesting in this context is the exhibition’s comparison of their work to Rodin about whom both Moore and Bacon expressed interest. In Moore’s case the catalogue describes this in terms of surface qualities and quotes David Sylvester’s remark about the way in which his figures seem to reflect the tension of the muscles beneath them. In the same way it compares the splayed figure of Rodin’s Iris to the candour and asymmetry of Bacon’s work. In fact one could take the analogies much further. Many critics have attributed the impression of arrested movement in Moore’s sculpture to the figure of Chac Mool that he copied in the British Museum. Yet this characteristic might have an additional provenance in Rodin’s Age of Bronze, a copy of which is in the Ashmolean Museum. From the time of his Reclining Figure of 1929 onwards there is a sense of dislocation in Moore’s work, of abrupt junctures between the torso, legs and trunk. The frequent impression of individual limbs twisting and moving against each other evokes Rodin even more strongly when the later figures eventually break apart. In the same way the intense eroticism of Rodin’s sculptures provides an obvious comparison to Bacon’s paintings.
Rodin’s own work was hugely influenced by his collection of fragments of Greek and Roman sculpture. His transposition of the humanistic language of order, harmony and proportion into the restless stretching and straining of the Gates of Hell thus provides a text-book example of the way in which later European artists reworked classical imagery into their own guilt-ridden Christian vocabulary. The fragmentation of the figures additionally recalls the distinction that Nietzsche made between the visual and performing arts. According to the philosopher, the former are distinguished by their Apollonian wholeness and their focus on the parameters between phenomena, which distinguish them and make them legible. In contrast, music and theatre, which Nietzsche and Schopenhauer believed capable of representing reality more fully, are concerned with the Dionysian qualities of movement, emotion and present the world in media res through our own piece-meal experiences of it rather than through the long lens of objectivity.
Much of the above applies to the work of Moore and Bacon and explains its often over-wrought and theatrical quality. At the Ashmolean, however, these melodramatic elements were offset by the intelligence in which the works were juxtaposed. Hence, for example, an anguished triptych by Bacon based in part on Grunewald’s Figures at the Base of the Cross was shown near three of Moore’s standing sculptures, of which the central one is known as The Golgotha Cross. Moore inscribed its base with the symbols of Christ’s crucifixion including the seeming afterthought of an apparently swiftly executed and fragile ladder reminiscent of Gaudier-Brzeska’s carving of images into his portrait busts. This established an interesting contrast in terms of the sense of time that the viewer assumed it had taken to make the heavily-worked bronze and the more swiftly-executed image upon it.
Another great thing about the show was the opportunity to see a substantial body of Moore’s graphic works including extremely freely-executed works from the 1950’s, which were reminiscent of that decade’s preoccupation with naïve and children’s art. At times the emotions that are played out on the small cabaret-like stages of Bacon’s paintings or in the grandiloquent gestures of Moore’s sculpture can seem alienating and bombastic. Hence the inclusion of these smaller and more spontaneous works provided a welcome balance to the rest.


Posted by author: Gerald

3 thoughts on “Flesh and Bone study visit report

  • This is a very good blog. It is interesting to note that both were influenced by Rodin and that Rodin was influenced by classical sculpture. I always find it fascinating when painters are influenced by sculpture (and vice versa). I was just reading yesterday that Bonnard frequented the Louvre, in particular the antiquities section. Many of his poses of Marthe are based on classical statues. He disliked painting directly from the model, preferring to use quick sketches and memory. However, he did do some clay figure modelling for a while and this tactile memory must have served him well.

  • This was my first study visit with the OCA and it was excellent, thank you. The communications before and during were very good, and I didn’t realise until signing up that entry was paid for. I encourage other students that haven’t experienced a study visit to attend as it’s such a useful and interesting extension to the course.
    Gerald was a fantastic, highly knowledgeable guide, and it really enhanced my visit to have someone there to explain and ask questions about the work.
    It was rewarding meeting other students too, sharing ideas, backgrounds and being able to engage in discussions about the work.
    Thank you very much OCA!

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