Henry Moore: Seeking Shelter In His Drawings
The sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) began his Shelter Drawings as a private project. He worked on them in secret for months, telling no-one but his wife Irina. The Shelter Drawings are a series of sketches made of the Londoners that slept in the underground stations during the Blitz. Moore was first confronted with the subject matter on the 11th of September 1940. It was four days into the start of the Blitz and he and his wife found themselves trapped in Belsize Park Station, as German bombers raided the city above. He later described how ‘the scenes of the shelter world, static figures asleep – reclining figures – remained vivid in my mind, I felt somehow drawn to it all. Here was something I couldn’t help doing’.
It is often incorrectly assumed that the Shelter Drawings were a commission of Kenneth Clark’s War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC). In fact, before the Blitz, Clark had been persistent in trying to get Moore to join but despite the financial security it offered, he had no interest. It was only after their completion, when Clark saw a sketch, that he was persuaded to sell.
That the Shelter Drawings were a private project and a subject Moore ‘couldn’t help doing’ is important when laid within the context of his past experience fighting on the front line. In 1917 the Germans attacked his 400 strong Battalion and only 42 survived. He then spent three months in hospital recovering from the effects of mustard gas. Such a trauma could not have been forgotten, especially as his voice remained husky as a consequence. Surely, when history repeated itself and Britain was again at war, this would have been at the forefront of his mind.
Henry Moore, Grey Tube Shelter, 1940
Moore’s motivation to make the drawings is largely unexplored due to the contradictory narrative that he presented. He described how he “enjoyed the army.. it was a bit like being back in the family.” He insisted he “was not horrified by the war” but “wanted to win a medal” and claimed the First World War passed “in a romantic haze of hoping to be hero.” He was of a generation that all had their own old-kit-bag of troubles to pack up and smile through, so his lack of candour is understandable. What is not, is the vast majority of critics and scholars taking him at his word – the assumption that the First World War had no significant impact on his drawings.
Although Moore’s public statements and correspondence habitually gloss over his experience, there is one letter, written in 1919 or 1920, in which he describes his true feeling:
‘The one great mistake in religion as I have known it, is the belief it creates in one that God is Almighty. He is strong and powerful and Good; but were he Almighty, the things I saw and experienced, the great bloodshed and the pain, the insufferable agony and depravity, the tears and the inhuman devilishness of the war, would, could never have been.’
Now those are words befitting of a man who has suffered an abhorrent trauma, the words of a man whose faith and world-view have been irreparably altered. Yet Herbert Read, Moore’s biographer and friend, summarised the artist’s wartime as “a great adventure.”
Even though Moore never made work openly alluding to his time in the trenches, hidden references can be found throughout his body of work. He claimed the idea for his Warrior With Shields (1956) sculpture “evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952, and which reminded me of the stump of a leg amputated at the hip.” But he would have seen amputated limbs both on the frontline and at field hospital, and partial limbs also appear in work pre-1952. It is therefore hard to believe that it was a pebble, not ‘the great bloodshed and the pain’, that inspired such forms.
Whilst the Shelter Drawings do not directly reference Moore’s First World War experience, it was undoubtedly a source of motivation. He was attracted to the scenes in the tube stations as they reminded him of his sculptural forms and he described how he “had never seen so many rows of reclining figures and even the holes in my sculpture.” But it was not simply these forms brought to life in multitude down on the platforms that made the subject so irresistible, Moore began making the drawings because of what these forms subconsciously represented to him, particularly the figure of the Mother.
Henry Moore, Seated Mother and Child, 1941
In the Shelter Drawings there are many depictions of mothers with their children – they made up a high proportion of those in the stations as the men were away fighting. The theme of the Mother was a source of great interest to Moore and in later life he described how:
“From an early age I have had an obsession with the Mother and Child theme… I discovered, when drawing, I could turn every little scribble, blot or smudge into a Mother and Child… So that I was conditioned, as it were, to see it in everything. I suppose it could be explained as a ‘Mother’ complex.”
Moore attributes his preference for the topic of maternal women to his very close relationship with his own mother, writing:
“Without consciously setting out to do that, they’ve turned out that way [matriarchal women] merely because that’s the basis of my own upbringing and relationship to my own mother. She was to me the absolute stability, the rock, the whole thing in life that one knew was there for one’s protection.”
Moore associating his mother with stability and protection is important when considering that it was the maternal shelter scenes he felt so drawn to during the Blitz. Moore also described how, in 1917, when he headed off to join the army he “broke finally away from parental domination which had been very strong.” At first glance this may seem a negative description of his relationship with his parents. However, when coupled the admission that his mother was to him “the whole thing in life that one knew was there for one’s protection” it can be interpreted differently. If his first break with parental dominance ultimately ended with tragedy and gas attack it is likely that during the Blitz he tried to reforge this bond so as to lessen the internal damage, and be comforted by his ‘mother.’
However, the feminine dimension of the Shelter Drawings expands beyond the matriarchal and reclining female forms. The setting is not recognisable as the London Underground, so could instead be symbolic of the womb. If Moore saw the Mother and Child motif ‘in everything’ the real life situation of people retreating underground for protection would have resonated with him. Some of the Shelter Drawings portray both the tube stations and the world above – the safety and protection of the womblike London Underground in contrast with the danger at street level. Moore’s initial observation was that the people in the tube stations “were cut off from what was happening.” This is much like a foetus; alive and yet not physically present in the outside world. Therefore, it is possible that the Shelter Drawings represent a retreat into the womb for both Moore’s sculptural forms and his subconscious. In short, Moore took shelter in his Shelter Drawings.
Henry Moore, Blitzed Buildings and Sleeping Women Holding Child, 1940
It is also worth noting the strong sense of claustrophobia and the sinister within the drawings. By removing his recognisable sculptural forms, which are viewed in the light, to the shadowy terrain of the underground stations the familiar becomes defamiliarised which creates an uncanny quality. Sigmund Freud, the great psychoanalyst, defined the uncanny as ‘that class of the frightening that leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ The uncanny, in Moore’s drawings, reflects both the artist’s anxiety and the anxiety of those underground.
However, if his time in the trenches can be linked to his compulsion to draw the shelter scenes, it could also be the source of Moore’s reluctance towards his next project for the WAAC. In the summer of 1941 he undertook a commission to make a series of drawings of coal miners. He chose to make the drawings at Wheldale Colliery in his hometown of Castleford, where his father had worked half a century earlier. The Coal-mine Drawings are largely considered to be less successful than the Shelter Drawings and Moore described how ‘The Shelter Drawings came about after first being moved by the experience of them, whereas the coal-mine drawings were more in the nature of a commission coldly approached.’ He only spent a fortnight in Castleford making them and did not return like he originally suggested he would in a letter to the WAAC.
To some degree the Coal-mine Drawings are a continuation of the Shelter Drawings. Moore used the same combination of pen, ink, crayon and watercolour, and they are set in the same dark, underground space. However, the Coal-mine Drawings concentrate on the tasks carried out by the miners and the positioning of the forms is in opposition with the ‘Reclining Figures’ and ‘Mother and Child’ subjects reappropriated in the Shelter Drawings. It was the first time Moore had dealt with an exclusively masculine scene and violent action, as opposed to static female forms. This is probably a defining reason why the coal-mines were ‘coldly approached’ in comparison to the tube shelters’ irresistible draw. Moore described how ‘I had never willingly drawn male figures before – only as a student in college. Everything I had willingly drawn was female.”
Henry Moore, Miners at Work on the Coal face, 1942
The Coal-mine Drawings do not possess the same dichotomy of fear and nurture brought on by the artist’s traumatic past. Instead, they are more in the realm of social documents. Moore described his time down the mines negatively, stating:
“If one asked to describe what Hell might be like, this would do. A dense darkness you could touch, the whirring din of the coal-cutting machine, throwing into the air black dust so thick…”
That Moore likens the mines to Hell is significant when one remembers his emotive description of the First World War as ‘the great bloodshed and the pain, the insufferable agony and depravity, the tears and the inhuman devilishness of the war.’ The trenches are similar to the mines as they are dug into the earth, male-dominated and a place of action. Even the ‘black dust’ in the air draws connotations with the mustard gas attack that Moore endured. Therefore, it is possible that the making of the Coal-mining Drawings, far from being a retreat for protection, served as reminder of his time fighting. Instead of providing matriarchal comfort when faced with his resurgent trauma, the Coal-mine Drawings forced him to relive it.
To remove analysis of Moore’s work from his time on the Western Front would be to discredit his experience. As Winston Churchill once said “If you are going through hell, keep going.” That is exactly what Henry Moore did. He kept going to become one of the most famed and well-loved British sculptors of the 20th Century. Although at surface level his art is far removed from war, if one is to dig a deeper trench the buried references are there. From the fragmented limbs in his sculpture, to the anxious and uncanny transposition of his sculptural forms to the shadowy, claustrophobic space of the shelters, one can see his art was not wholly separate from his experience.
Moore wanted us to believe that he tried in vain to be a war hero. In reality, he succeeded. In addition to fighting for his country the first time round, the Shelter Drawings were shown in Clark’s Britain at War exhibition in 1941. The show was a calculated attempt to alter U.S public opinion in favour of assisting Britain’s war effort and the images of the people of London’s resilience in the tube stations no doubt contributed in some small part. The man that drew the Shelter Drawings was an individual tainted by past experience, coming to terms with two world wars at once. Henry Moore created war art that did not include great battle heroes or scenes of glorified combat, but instead the stoic stability and protection of a mother’s love in a climate of fear. And what could be possibly be more heroic than that?