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In September 1940, Henry Moore and his wife, Irina, left London to escape wartime bombing, ending up in the bucolic hamlet of Perry Green, where Hertfordshire meets Essex. What was envisaged as a temporary refuge eventually became permanent, and the array of buildings in which Moore lived and worked is now a kind of cultural ecosystem dedicated to his genius. Part minor stately home, part sculpture park and part archive – one of the largest devoted to a single artist – it’s now overseen by his eponymous foundation, established in 1977.
Today, it comprises a constellation of studios and workspaces dispersed across an Arcadian landscape. Sheep graze in far fields and colossal sculptures loom on the horizon. Moore’s house, Hoglands, is preserved just as he left it, replete with his collections of books and artefacts – Dogon and Ashanti carvings, a narwhal tusk casually slung in a corner, a Picasso print in the kitchen – along with amply provisioned drinks trays for entertaining visitors and prospective buyers. Over the years, Moore clinked glasses with a stream of admirers, from Lauren Bacall to German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who had a large Moore situated outside his Bonn chancellery in the 1970s, remarking that it synthesised “nature with intelligence”.
Before ascending to this rural apotheosis, Moore’s life was shaped by childhood poverty – the son of a Yorkshire coalminer, he was the seventh of eight children – and formative experiences in both world wars. Injured in a gas attack during the 1917 Battle of Cambrai, he was the youngest man in his regiment, volunteering at 18. The horror ultimately inculcated a deep and lasting sense of despair at the human capacity for conflict. “The sight of a khaki uniform,” he wrote, “began to mean everything in life that was wrong and wasteful and anti-life.”
The second world war displaced him to Perry Green, but it also saw him working as a war artist, descending nightly like a modern Dante into the London underground to make powerful, poignant drawings of people sheltering from the blitz, encapsulating moments of collective vulnerability and stoicism. “He was so sensitive, he didn’t want to take photographs or sketch people,” says Lesley Wake of the Henry Moore Foundation. “He literally took notes and drew from them.”
The Shelter Drawings, which established his reputation, are central to understanding Moore’s response to conflict – and pivotal to his development as an artist. “He created people,” says Wake, “but he was drawing sculptures. And all this came out of seeing people sheltering in the shadows.”
With a sense of things coming full circle, the Shelter Drawings, among the first works Moore made after arriving in Perry Green, are the subject of a new exhibition in the estate’s Sheep Field Barn, marking its reopening after a major remodelling by London-based architects DSDHA. “An important aspect of the brief,” says DSDHA director David Hills, “was this dichotomy of wanting it to feel like it did when Moore was here, but also recognising that today’s visitors have different expectations.”
For such an ordinary, everyday building, the Sheep Field Barn has a surprisingly complex provenance. Originally a steel-frame structure covered in asbestos panels, it was erected in the 1970s and used by Moore to store work materials and sheep fodder. In 1999, it was converted into a gallery space by Hawkins/Brown Architects, its stark geometric volume wrapped in a skin of timber, typical of local farm buildings. As the largest structure on the estate, its scale – combined with the matt black painted cladding – gave it a somewhat brooding, monolithic presence.
Its latest reimagining sees new parts added to its north and east sides enclosed by a sloping roof that becomes, in effect, the building’s fifth elevation. Paradoxically, the effect of extending the roof contrives to diminish the building’s scale, despite its enlarged footprint, easing it into the landscape and making it look less monolithic. A new external carapace of silver spruce timber, reclaimed from the original building, is also softer on the eye. Overall, the remodelling exudes a sense of rigour and precision: with limited scope for architectural moves, each one had to be scrupulously considered.
Part of the renovated gallery will be given over to a permanent display exploring the arc of Moore’s life and work. A changing exhibition programme, inaugurated by the Shelter Drawings, will run alongside, focusing more intently on specific aspects of his oeuvre. The expanded building also incorporates new spaces for art education, a passion of Moore’. His assorted studios, like his house, are as he left them, tools and work still in place, as if the great man had just stepped out for a cup of tea.
Different studios were used for different activities, from creating maquettes, to carving, drawing and printmaking. Improvisation was a common theme. A greenhouse-like structure was employed for preparing huge plastercasts and the drawing studio was a compact summer house originally set on a turntable so it could be rotated to follow the sun. Moore’s maquette studio, unassuming from the outside, is a riotous cornucopia inside, an eye-popping cabinet of curiosities crammed with models and scavenged bits and pieces: stones, wood, feathers, bones and a cyclopean elephant skull.
In this spirit, DSDHA’s design strategy is disarmingly and admirably simple. The initial generative model, which would sit happily in Moore’s maquette studio, shows the dark bulk of the original building with the new parts neatly sheathed over it, a deft yet elegant transformation. The idea of containing one volume within the other parallels Moore’s propensity to put one form inside another, as illustrated by Large Upright Internal/External Form, a monumental bronze from the early 1980s that now sits near the building’s entrance. Its pod-like, uterine contours counterpoint the straight lines of the architecture.
The enlarged volume contains two new workshops for making, experimenting, talks and other activities, along with ancillary spaces. The foundation hosts visits by more than 2,000 schoolchildren each year, delivered free, and these improved facilities will uplift its educational offer, perhaps even incubating the next Moore or Sarah Lucas. Moore claimed that he decided to become a sculptor when he was 11 after learning about Michelangelo’s achievements at Sunday school.
In an era in which art and design are increasingly relegated to the margins, it’s a fine attempt at practical redress. Over time, the workshops will be animated by a cacophony of made work. “Children go out, they find stuff, bring it back in, and we go, ‘What does that look like to you?’” says Wake. “What can you make it into? They use that to inspire work. So they’re doing exactly what Moore did, on the same site.”
In good weather, people and activities can spill out into the adjoining field, protected by the overhanging roof. Standard zinc sheep troughs provide water for cleaning mucky hands, but there was some bemusement from the plumber who installed them at the choice of something so patently agricultural.
Yet this was entirely the point. Although Moore became immensely wealthy, with his sculptures commanding huge sums, he lived modestly, embracing a mindset of “frugal innovation”. Wake says: “He was a recycler before the phrase was even coined. But he did it from the point of view of waste not, want not. He used everything he had.” The no-frills refashioning of a shed into a slightly larger shed chimes exactly with his artistic and philosophic ethos.
Doubtless he would approve of the project’s aim of being a paradigm of re-use and sustainability. Sheep’s wool insulation, triple-glazed windows and an airtight envelope enhance energy efficiency, while integrated solar panels on the big roof generate power, supported by ground source heat pumps. The retrofit may be twice the size of the original building but will consume half as much energy.
There is a delicious irony in the insulation being made of sheep’s wool, as Moore would regularly draw sheep in the surrounding fields, tapping on the window of his studio to attract them. These ovine congregations formed the basis of Sheep Piece, one of his most famous bronze sculptures. When Moore placed a cast in the fields of Perry Green, sheep would shelter under it and use it as a scratching post. But whether by animals or humans, Moore always thought that sculptures should be touched and their forms and textures savoured.
With the renovation of the Sheep Field Barn and a major new show opening in May at Kew Gardens in London, Moore is having a moment. It’s hard to believe that he was born in 1898 – but his practice represented a radical rupture with the romanticism of the Victorian era, a rupture that was not always well received. His sculptures were decapitated in Dumfries and daubed with blue paint in Leeds, while his Recumbent Figure was vandalised during a wartime loan to New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Nonetheless, as the decades passed, he became a national treasure, and was always clear about where he stood. “Art is the expression of the imagination,” he once declared, “not the reproduction of reality.”
