HMF Review 2011-13
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review 2011–13 henry moore foundation A Chairman’s Foreword Shorter in length but longer in the time span of membership include unlimited free access it covers, this review differs from its annual to Perry Green during the season, invitations predecessors. The decision to move to a to private views and special Friends’ events biennial publication allows the Foundation to both there and at the Henry Moore Institute report more effectively on activities, including in Leeds, newsletters and email updates, and grants, which span more than one year. And discounts on merchandise. by focussing on the more salient features of Among the personnel changes which took 2011–13, with fewer statistics and more illus- place in 2011–13, the retirement of Charles trations, it is intended to convey a more vivid Joint after 17 years of service as Head of impression of the Foundation’s achievements Finance and Administration was undoubt- on site, at Perry Green and at the Institute edly the most significant. He was succeeded in Leeds, and further afield, in this country by Lesley Wake who joined the Foundation and abroad. The review is also fully online at from Arts and Business to become its first www.henry-moore.org, together with more Chief Operating Officer. We also said goodbye detailed information, including a full list of to Annabel Friedlein, our first Head of the grants made during the period. In addition, Communications, who did so much in the four the Charity Commission’s website carries years she was with us to rethink our place in the Foundation’s latest Annual Report and the new digital world in which we operate. its audited financial statements (registered There were two retirements from the Board, number 271370). Access to all of this online both of long-serving members. As Trustees, information is a further reason for the James Joll and Simon Keswick were main- changes we have introduced in the format and stays of the Finance Committee who also content of this review. brought to the table a wealth of knowledge As the Director reports, the Foundation and experience of the art world. In their place continued to operate successfully on all we welcomed Celia Clear, the former Head of fronts. It did so in spite of the financial pres- Tate Enterprises, and Peter Wienand, a senior sures from rising costs and greater demand partner of Farrer & Co. for the support it provides through the grants While the review which follows speaks programme; costs which income from the for itself, I would like to stress on behalf of endowment is insufficient to meet in their the Trustees the enormous debt of gratitude entirety. It was in part to meet this challenge we owe to our staff and volunteers at Perry that the Foundation chose to put in place a Green and in Leeds. The accomplishments of small media and marketing team, led by the which we boast are in a very real sense theirs; Head of Marketing and Enterprise, to promote it is through their unstinting efforts that its activities via print and digital media as well the Foundation is able to fulfil its charitable as to generate new streams of revenue. purposes and to do so with resounding Another welcome initiative was the success. We thank them all. launching of ‘Henry Moore Friends’. Benefits Duncan Robinson B henry moore foundation 1 Director’s Report The financial years 2011 to 2013 saw a notice- 2011 marked the beginning of a reap- able growth in the Foundation’s international praisal of Moore’s work, with an exhibition profile, as we became aware of our role as of his plasters at Perry Green that year and the largest grant-making artist-endowed in 2102. For the first time these hitherto foundation outside the USA, with a significant overlooked objects, many of them never educational remit exemplified by the work of before exhibited, were presented as works our Institute in Leeds. This was also a period of art in their own right – their textured and which, no less decisively, marked the start of coloured surfaces evocative of the artist’s an extensive re-evaluation of Henry Moore’s touch – rather than as a preliminary stage reputation, with innovative exhibitions of his in their translation into the more industrial work in London, New York and Perry Green. bronze, by which material most of them are In late 2012 I took part in a two-day known. The 2011 and 2012 seasons were conference in New York of artists’ founda- enhanced by the first ever audioguide, as well tions, the only non-American founda- as by Henry Moore at Perry Green, the first tion to be invited. The conference was guidebook to his outdoor sculptures, studios organised by Christine Vincent, author of and house. At 17,000 in each of the two years, the recently published National Study of visitor figures for 2011 and 2012 were well up Artist-Endowed Foundations funded by the on 2010 (13,660). Aspen Institute Program in Philanthropy In summer 2012, in collaboration with the and Social Innovation. Leaders of most of Gagosian Gallery in London, we showed a the major US artist foundations participated, group of large late bronzes by Moore indoors, including Pollock-Krasner, Lichtenstein, also for the first time. Although Moore pre- Gottlieb, Dedalus (Robert Motherwell), ferred his sculptures to be seen outdoors in Rauschenberg, and Mapplethorpe. At a natural surroundings, the Gagosian Gallery time when such organisations are playing near King’s Cross is one of the largest exhib- an increasingly important role in funding iting spaces in London with overhead natural the visual arts in the USA, it was gratifying light, thus going some way towards satisfying to find that the hybrid nature of The Henry Moore’s demand for ‘daylight’. When encoun- Moore Foundation, with its mixed portfolio tered in a confined space, his later bronzes, of curatorial, educational and philanthropic with their touching, interlocking and soaring activities, was seen as offering a model for forms, seem at once more abstract and more US foundations, in a tax regime where simply closely related to the human body. These stewarding an artist’s legacy is no longer qualities tend to get lost in the open air, sufficient to warrant charitable status. where the more romantic aspect of Moore’s work – its analogy with trees, hills, rock opposite Sculpture conservator formations and so on – predominates. James Copper at work restoring Moore’s Large 2013 saw the first of our exhibitions Figure in a Shelter 1985–86 at Perry Green. examining Moore in the context of other 2 ChAirmAn’s Foreword henry moore foundation 3 The Director giving a presentation on The Top Studio at Perry Green, a former Moore’s Knife Edge Two Piece 1962–65, the work of the Foundation to a conference of stable, restored to how it was in the 1950s. opposite the Houses of Parliament, before (left) Artist-Endowed Foundation Leaders at The Many of Moore’s most important sculptures and after (right) conservation work. New School, New York, November 2012. in the decade following the end of the Second World War were carved or modelled here. artists. Moore Rodin, a collaboration with the Musée Rodin in Paris, opened at Perry Green a few days before the end of the period under consideration; its huge success, and the implications this had for the Foundation’s infrastructure, will be reported in the next Review. At the same time as mounting exhibitions designed to reveal Moore in a new light, we continued our commitment to the scholarly cataloguing of his work at Tate Britain, by renewing our funding of the HMF Research Curator post for a further two years. Scholarship also informed the twice yearly meetings of the Henry Moore entrance to the concert hall, in time for the Authentication Committee, on which David Benjamin Britten centenary in 2013. Mitchinson, the Foundation’s former Head The Henry Moore Institute in Leeds of Collections and Exhibitions, and Antony continued to strengthen its collaborative Griffiths, recently retired as Keeper of Prints relationship with Leeds Art Gallery, curating and Drawings at the British Museum, served the sculpture displays, advising on acquisi- as our outside experts. Two high-profile tions and loans, and expanding the important Archive of Sculptors’ Papers. The years 2011 to 2013 saw some remarkably innovative and visually exciting exhibitions at the Institute, including Mario Merz: What Is to Be Done?; United Enemies: The Problem of Sculpture in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s; Sarah Lucas: Ordinary Things; and 1913: the Shape of Time. conservation projects in London benefited at Santa Croce. Back home at Perry Green, All four were accompanied by publications from our advice and financial support: the we conserved the massive Large Figure in of a standard for which the Institute is justly reinstatement of The Arch in Kensington a Shelter, Moore’s last sculpture, which had renowned. United Enemies got off to a memo- Gardens (front cover), on the north bank of been left unpatinated at the foundry on the rable start with a performance on the steps the Serpentine, after a long absence; and the artist’s death in 1986; and returned his Top of the Institute of ‘High Up on a Baroque restoration of Knife Edge Two Piece opposite Studio – a former stable – to how it looked Palazzo’, by Nice Style: the World’s First Pose the Palace of Westminster on Abingdon in its heyday, the 1950s. As far as long-term Band, founded by Bruce McLean with two of Green. In Florence, we restored Warrior loans are concerned, we were pleased his students at Maidstone College of Art in with Shield, a gift from Irina Moore to the that we could lend Large Internal Form to the early 1970s.