HMF Review 2013-15

review 2013–15 The Henry Moore Foundation Perry Green · Much Hadham Hertfordshire SG10 6EE telephone + 44 (0)1279 843 333 www.henry-moore.org Henry Moore Institute The Headrow · Leeds West Yorkshire LS1 3AH telephone + 44 (0)113 246 7467 www.henry-moore.org Trustees at 31 March 2015 Nigel Carrington Chairman Charles Asprey Henry Channon Celia Clear William Edgerley Laure Genillard Antony Griffiths Dr Anne Wagner Peter Wienand Dr David Wilson FSA Director Richard Calvocoressi CBE Chairman’s Foreword opposite Henry Moore, Relief No. 1, 1959. This large bronze was sited in Berkeley Square, central London, during the exhibition Henry Moore: Wunderkammer – Origin of Forms at the nearby Gagosian Gallery. Having taken over as Chair of the Henry Collections and Exhibitions, based at Perry Moore Foundation in November 2014, it is Green. Anita took up the post of Deputy my great pleasure to introduce our Review Director, Curatorial Affairs, at the San Diego 2013–15. Museum of Art in California and leaves the Our work over the last two years is more Foundation with our very best wishes for her fully covered by our Director and senior new role there. staff in the pages that follow so I shall leave Finally, I should like to pay tribute to it to them to summarise the range and depth the work of Richard Calvocoressi, who of our activities. I should, though, like to will leave us this summer after eight years take this opportunity to pay tribute to our as Director, a period which has marked a trustees and staff who give so generously of number of significant strides forward for the their time and skill to make the Henry Moore Foundation. In particular, the Foundation’s Foundation the very important force that it is infrastructure has been augmented by a in sculpture and the visual arts. masterplan for its Perry Green site, including The period under review saw the retire- the construction of a store for its sculpture ment of four trustees whose services collection in 2011 and a new visitor centre we greatly valued: Dawn Ades, Malcolm and archive due for completion in 2016. Baker, Marianne Brouwer, and Greville Richard’s time at the Foundation has also Worthington. We were also much saddened been characterised by a series of ground- by the death of Andrew Causey who retired breaking exhibitions designed to reassess and in 2009 after fourteen years as a trustee. But reinterpret Henry Moore for a contemporary it is to my predecessor as Chairman, Duncan public, such as the hugely successful Moore Robinson, that I owe our profoundest debt. Rodin at Perry Green and Compton Verney; Duncan chaired the Foundation for seven Bacon Moore: Flesh and Bone, a record- years, from late 2007 to November 2014. breaking show for the Ashmolean Museum in These were challenging times, when the Oxford; exhibitions at the Gagosian Gallery Foundation’s endowment had at one moment in London and New York; and an enhanced lost 25% of its value owing to the global finan- presence of Moore’s sculpture at Tate cial crisis. Thanks to Duncan’s steady nerve, Britain and in Yorkshire. During Richard’s and a judicious strategy of savings coupled directorship the Henry Moore Institute in with income generation from alternative Leeds has developed a close and fruitful sources, we were able to continue running working relationship with its neighbour, all our programmes, while our capital has Leeds Art Gallery, which houses one of gradually recovered. the finest collections of British sculpture I would also like to record our thanks outside London. Richard therefore leaves the to Anita Feldman who left in May 2014, Foundation in robust good health and with after eighteen years working for the our thanks and best wishes for the future. Foundation, the last four as Head of Nigel Carrington 2 henry moore foundation 3 Director’s Report At Perry Green, the period 2013 to 2015 season, marked the first time that living has been dominated by two developments: artists have been shown at Perry Green. In ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions juxtaposing Henry addition to the exhibitions at Perry Green, Moore’s work with that of other sculptors, Bacon Moore: Flesh and Bone at the Ashmolean past and present; and significant progress on Museum in Oxford paired Moore for the first the Masterplan. time with a painter. Francis Bacon was argu- The first phase of the Masterplan was ably the greatest British painter of the 20th commissioned in 2008–9, culminating in century, a contemporary of Moore’s, with the construction of a much needed sculpture whom he shared many formal and intellectual store, which opened in 2011. At last, the concerns – not least a radical recreation of Foundation’s large and valuable collection the human body in response to suffering and of Moore’s sculpture in all mediums could be war. The show was well received by the critics stored in secure and environmentally safe and certainly caught the public imagination, conditions. In recognition of trustees’ further attracting over 45,000 visitors. When it was responsibilities to care for the collection (e.g. later shown in expanded form at the Art the paper and photographic archive), and Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, some 84,000 of the urgency of improving the inadequate people saw it. facilities for our visitors, we embarked on the In the last Review, I drew attention to our second phase of the Masterplan. In March exhibition of Moore’s Late Large Forms at the 2014 planning permission was given for a Gagosian Gallery in London in summer 2012. new Archive and Library and a new Visitor This also showed Moore in a new light and Centre (ticket office, shop, café etc.). Both are attracted a younger audience than we are used adaptations of, and extensions to, existing to seeing at Perry Green. We followed it up in buildings, and both are on the same side of early 2015 with an exhibition at Gagosian’s the public road, close to Moore’s studios and smaller London gallery. Henry Moore: the grounds where his sculptures are sited. Wunderkammer – Origin of Forms concen- Building work started in early 2015 and is due trated on the relationship of found object to to be finished in 2016. maquette to large-scale sculpture in Moore’s Breaking the mould of Moore mono- working practice, as demonstrated so memo- graphic exhibitions has been an important rably in his maquette studio at Perry Green. part of our policy of reappraising Moore for I am pleased to report that Moore schol- a twenty-first century audience. Following arship is in a healthy state, thanks to the on from the success of Moore Rodin in 2013, Foundation’s support for the Tate’s online Body and Void, the exhibition for the 2014 project Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity. There are now two galleries opposite The Foundation’s cast of Moore’s at Tate Britain, beautifully refurbished with a Large Two Forms 1966 outside the reopened substantial grant from the Gatsby Foundation, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, summer 2013. which are permanently dedicated to the 4 Chairman’s Foreword henry moore foundation 5 left Henry Moore: Wunderkammer – Origin centre Artist’s impression of the new Archive right Moore’s Falling Warrior 1956–7 of Forms, Gagosian Gallery, London (view and Library at Perry Green, designed by Hugh (Tate, gift of the artist, 1978) in front of Francis from Davies Street)– a ‘cabinet of curiosities’ Broughton Architects and due to be completed Bacon’s Portrait of Henrietta Moraes 1963 consisting of objects from Moore’s maquette in 2016. (Private Collection), in the exhibition Bacon studio at Perry Green. Moore: Flesh and Bone, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. display of Moore’s work from Tate’s out- standing collection, much of it a gift from the artist himself. Early in my directorship, I redefined our grants categories to place greater emphasis on less ephemeral projects, e.g. helping permanent collections of historic and modern sculpture acquire, conserve, display, or catalogue work. Thus we recently decided to help the Art Gallery of Ontario to conserve some of its Moore plasters. Moore’s generous gift to the AGO in the 1970s of a large and important collection of his work in plaster did not include a sum for their maintenance. Given their age, and the fact that most of them were not made to last indefinitely, the costs of conservation are often significant. The Henry Moore Foundation is a hybrid charity the purpose of which is to safeguard and nurture Moore’s artistic legacy, as well as to disseminate the results of academic Given the challenges in obtaining public or research into sculpture through a variety of corporate funding for the visual arts in the media. We are also a grant-making charity, UK, it is even more vital that we maintain our the largest grant-making artist’s foundation grant-giving at a meaningful level. The relationship between the Henry outside the USA. At a symposium on ‘The Moore Institute and Leeds Art Gallery is an Artist as Philanthropist’ which we organised important one. As Sebastiano Barassi notes in London in October 2013, leaders of US (p.12), we curated a temporary display of artist-endowed foundations outlined the Moore’s work, drawn from the Foundation’s situation in the USA where such foundations, collection, in the Art Gallery’s sculpture with assets now running into billions of galleries. It should be our joint ambition to dollars, are playing an increasingly impor- have a permanent Henry Moore presence in tant role in arts funding. The symposium Leeds Art Gallery, showing works from our was attended by artists, their assistants, two collections, to complement the extensive executors of artists’ estates, gallery directors, display of Barbara Hepworth at Wakefield museum staff, art lawyers and journalists, and the large outdoor pieces by Moore on many of whom felt they learned a great deal loan to Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

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