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There aren’t many people who could put a face to Gary Hume, even if they could spot one of his glossy, candy-coloured paintings a mile off. Of the gaggle of late-Eighties Goldsmiths graduates who enjoyed the patronage of Charles Saatchi and Jay Jopling, and later became known as the YBAs (Young British Artists), Hume has never been a fully-fledged celebrity in the way that Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin have.

This could be due to his choice of medium; while his peers were busy sinking
sharks in formaldehyde and immortalising their unmade beds, Hume stuck to
plain old painting. He tried his hand at sculpture in the early days but
says: “They kept falling over. That was my main trouble: gravity.”

There was another reason why Hume seemed out of step with his Brit art
contemporaries. While his friends were getting wasted at the Groucho Club,
Hume was more likely to be found sitting in a playground with his young son,
Joe, of whom he shared custody with a former girlfriend. Hume was determined
that his son should have a dad (his own father left when he was 18 months
old), though he remembers early parenthood as an “incredibly boring
activity” and is in no hurry to do it again.

Joe is now 22 and studying contemporary dance in New York, and Hume, 47, is
married to the artist Georgie Hopton. The couple divide their time between
London and a small farm in the Catskills in upstate New York where they
spend summers tending the vegetable garden and making maple syrup.

We meet in his London studio, a smart, two-storey space near Old Street. The
vivid flawlessness of his paintings stands in conspicuous contrast to Hume,
who is rather unkempt-looking, with his three-day stubble and frayed
sweater. Grooming clearly isn’t high on his to-do list, even though the
precision of his work would suggest that he is, at heart, something of a
perfectionist.

The studio is lined with his trademark gloss-on-aluminium paintings, all huge
– around ten feet high – and propped against the wall on empty paint-pots.
Downstairs there’s a kitchen and living area, at the end of which sits a
bookshelf stuffed with exhibition catalogues and titles on Michelangelo, de
Kooning and Beuys. There are books on birds and flowers picked up on Hume’s
frequent trips to Charing Cross Road in search of inspiration. “If I’m
feeling desperate I’ll go out image-hunting,” he says. “I’ll go to
newsagents and stand at the rack flicking through magazines or go to
second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like concrete poetry, I start
to realise that I am drawn to particular things and then I start wondering
why that is.”

Laden with images, Hume will then come back and start drawing. “One
drawing demands to become a painting so I start to work on that, and then
the painting might demand something else,” he explains. “Then the
painting might say, ‘I want a companion, and the companion should be like
this’, so I have to find that, either by drawing it myself or locating the
image.”

Hume has a habit of talking about his paintings as if they are living beings
with minds of their own. He has said that a dialogue that exists between him
and his work, though that’s not to suggest that he sits in his studio all
day madly jabbering at his paintings. He is, I think, making a point about
the instinctive nature of his work; his ideas come from a place in his mind
that he can’t quite locate and would rather not question.

Hume is currently preparing a selection of paintings and drawings for an
exhibition in Salisbury, and another at the Sprth Magers gallery
in Berlin. He is also set to publish his first picture book, a self-titled
coffee-table number which lays out, in no particular order, his life’s work,
from his famous door paintings through to his pictures of flowers, hats,
babies, birds and body parts.

It was the door paintings that made Hume’s name. Three of them appeared in
Freeze, the 1988 exhibition of Goldsmiths graduates that caught the eye of
Charles Saatchi and thus jolted British art out of its torpor.

The doors were inspired by an advertisement Hume had seen for Bupa, and were
life-size replicas of the swing-doors inside St Bartholomew’s Hospital in
east London. One of them hangs here in the kitchen. Blank and beautiful,
it’s painted magnolia and blends in so well with the units that I don’t
notice it until Hume points it out, which is probably the point.

Hume finished the original Door series in 1992, though he continues to make
the odd one for old times’ sake. Did they hamper what came next? “Not
really, but I’d had enough of them,” he reflects. “I loved them
but unless I stopped making the damned things I knew it was all I would make
for ever and I would be bored out of my mind.

“They are beautiful to look at and you can have fun with them
intellectually, but to actually paint them is incredibly boring. You’re
sanding and sanding and then painting and sanding again and painting. It is
a nightmare, overwhelmingly awful. I just couldn’t be that bored, not for
art.”

The most successful of his paintings, Hume maintains, are born from
embarrassment. He opens his book and shows me a picture from 1994 called
Polar Bear.

“When I was making that I was tearing my hair out and thinking: ‘Oh my
God, how could I draw that? It’s ridiculous. What am I doing?’ Looking at it
now I love it, but to enable myself to make that I have to be embarrassed by
it. Someone’s going to come in and say: ‘What is that childish nonsense,
that great big blobby thing with all these pubic tendrils sticking out?’
You’ve got to be okay with that, otherwise you are working within a
consensus.”

Hume loves gloss paint because of its ability to reflect light and change
colour under different conditions and at different times of day. He flinches
a little when I say that some might see his works as decorative. Certainly,
their aesthetic qualities make them considerably more accessible than, say,
one of the Chapman brothers’ penis-nosed dolls, and are undoubtedly the kind
of paintings that people want to own.

A few years ago Elton John asked Hume to make something for his shower at
home.

“I said to him, ‘of course, what a nice idea,’ but inside I was thinking:
‘Are you fucking mad? Of course I don’t want to make anything for your
shower. How insulting!’ After that, every time I saw him he would say,
‘how’s the shower piece going?’ and I’d say, ‘fine.’ Then, after about two
years, he said: ‘Look, Gary, what’s happening?’ So I said that I didn’t want
to do it after all. So he said: “Well, why don’t you get a can of spray
paint, write, ‘Elton’s a cunt’ in my shower, and I’ll buy it.”

In the end Hume built a marble piece inspired by William Blake’s gravestone
for John’s shower. It was a huge success, and led to him making more for
exhibition. “It was a problem-solving exercise – how do you create
something beautiful and worthwhile for a shower-room? – that resulted in me
making something that I would never have thought of in other circumstances.
So I was pleased. But I still wrote ‘Elton is a cunt’ on the back of it. Ha
ha!”

Hume grew up in Kent, the fourth of five children. His mother read a lot of
poetry and would take the children on day trips to London galleries. “I
remember my feet aching and thinking, ‘will this ever end?” he recalls.
At school he wasn’t exactly filled with encouragement by teachers who told
him he would never amount to anything. “At the time I thought: ‘You’re
offering me a passport to a world I don’t want to be a citizen of, it seems
overwhelming dull.”

Hume left school with three O-levels, and a vague hankering to make films. “I
went to Soho every day knocking on the doors of editing suites. I got a job
as an assistant film editor, which lasted for a few years but I found
writing incredibly difficult, and I thought: ‘How am I going to make a film
if I can’t write?’ I didn’t really comprehend that someone else would do
that bit.”

After two years he fell out with one of the directors, was fired and returned
to Kent. He worked as a petrol-pump attendant for six months before getting
a job making life-insurance- trading films.

“That was awful, truly dreadful. I realised that I had to do something
where I could be in charge of what I was doing, so I thought then that maybe
I could do pictures.” He enrolled in evening classes in art at the
Working Men’s College in Camden, London, and later signed up for an art
foundation course.

After a year at Liverpool Polytechnic, Hume transferred to Goldsmiths, where
he found himself working amid a group of hugely confident and like-minded
people. His tutors later said that there was a chemical reaction between the
students that was unprecedented and very exciting.

It was a competitive yet supportive environment that Hume found thrilling. “Everyone
was simply trying to find a way of making their own work and finding their
own voice. When they found that voice, and made something good, you’d say:
‘How brilliant. I wish I’d done that myself, but how brilliant.’”

After the fabled Freeze exhibition, Saatchi bought two of Hume’s door
paintings and commissioned four more. By the mid-Nineties, Hume and friends
were the toast of Britain’s cultural scene and were rubbing shoulders with
pop stars, film-makers, writers and actors.

“My wife thinks the Brit-art thing is a load of rubbish, but that’s
because she wasn’t in it,” he grins. “I wasn’t out and about so
much because of my son but it was definitely an exciting time. You had a bit
of money in your pocket and you felt that there was this power, a sense of
entitlement. It gave us confidence and for a while that was nice.”

Since then Brit-art’s enfants terribles have become contented figures of the
establishment. Hume was the first of the group to be welcomed into the Royal
Academy in 2001, having already represented Britain in the Venice Biennale
in 1999. Since then his old chums – with whom he is still in touch – have
branched out. Emin writes newspaper columns; Hirst runs a multimedia empire;
Sam Taylor-Wood makes feature films. Meanwhile Hume has stuck doggedly to
his original vision. His palette has darkened, and he has even started
dabbling in sculpture again (and has, finally, found a way of keeping them
upright) but his aesthetic hasn’t altered radically since his YBA days.

“I really love making things and I don’t really have the confidence to
do much else,” Hume reflects with apparent contentment.

“It’s the great pleasure and pain of life that you really are stuck as
yourself and however much you wish you were capable of making someone else’s
work, you can’t. So you don’t.”

‘Hume’ is published by Other Criteria. Gary Hume: New Work is at the New
Art Centre, Roche Court, Salisbury until 4 May (Sculpture.uk.com). He is
also exhibiting at Sprth Magers gallery in Berlin from 2 July – September – www.Spruethmagers.com

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It was when 20th-century British artists stopped trying to be modernists that they started to create honest, significant work

What with Henry Moore at Tate and Paul Nash at Dulwich Picture Gallery, it seems the art of 20th-century Britain is enjoying an unexpected revival. Obviously, coincidences like this are just coincidences. But… makes you think, dunnit.

British art from the years 1900 to 1950 is unlikely to be found in huge quantities in many museums of modern art you visit around the world. The Moore show is at Tate Britain and not at Tate Modern: in his lifetime, had the two museums been divided, he’d have been at Modern. But nowadays, Francis Bacon is the first British artist of the 20th century who seriously holds his own in international collections. I’m sure lots of people will put me right on this one, but it’s my strong perception.

British art in 1930 is arguably comparable in quality with American art at the same moment: both countries were outside the avant-garde swim of continental Europe yet both had artists who created original homegrown interpretations of modern art. In the 1940s both took off for themselves, in radically divergent directions – while American painters and sculptors discovered an inner voice of abstraction, Britain found itself in existentialist figurative painting.

Of course, there were British abstract artists, before and after the 1940s, but they so often seem brittle and precious. I can’t keep awake in the pre-war abstraction room at Tate Britain. In the room that has paintings such as Kossoff’s Man in a Wheelchair, I feel I am seeing actual art.

It was as if, in the early 20th century, British artists put on modernist clothes but felt terribly uncomfortable in them. When Evelyn Waugh satirises British art deco in his novels, I suppose nowadays we’re supposed to shudder at his snobbery – but don’t you recognise the chilly British version of the international style he’s mocking?

When the British stopped trying to be modernists their art became more honest, more real and more significant – from the 50s painters to Gilbert and George to You Know Who. Our artists are better at living in this world than they are constructing utopias – and perhaps that speaks well of them, and us.

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Chiharu Shiota is a spider-woman – one who clambers around in the skeins of our unconscious. In her best-known installations she weaves black yarn into hectic webs that take over entire galleries and in which personal objects are found cocooned. The Japanese Berlin-based artist has ensnared everything from the wedding dresses seen in last year’s Walking in My Mind exhibition at the Hayward gallery, to a grand piano and childhood toys. In one of her sleeping performances, you might even find Shiota herself ensconced beneath layers of mesh.

Born in Osaka, the artist moved from Japan to Germany in 1997, to study under the performance art maven Marina Abramović. For one of her early works, Try and Go Home of 1998, Shiota fasted for four days and then smeared her naked body with earth before taking to a muddy hole. With its suggestions of both womb and grave, the work hinged on feelings of loss and oblivion that have underscored much of her work since. A later installation first shown in 2000, Memory of Skin, featured similarly dirt-stained dresses, suggesting knowledge that won’t wash off.

Personal experience is central to Shiota’s work. For a project initially staged as Dialogue from DNA in 2004 in Poland and then recreated in Germany and Japan, she invited people to donate footwear with a memory attached – resulting in thousands of old shoes, many of which had belonged to loved ones who had died. She attached each to a taut red thread, a symbol of the path through life as well as the imprint of journeys taken.

There’s a similar push and pull between closeness and separation in her sleeping performances, where women doze on neatly arranged hospital beds beneath a canopy of black threads. However intimate watching these people sleep might have felt, the artist implies that we can never know what’s going on behind their closed eyes.

“It would be nice to banish every trace of myself, my looks, my papers, my passport, and even my fingerprints,” Shiota has said, “and only create my works in dialogue with the cosmos.” While exploring the hinterlands between waking life and dream states and chasing fading memories, in Shiota’s labyrinthine installations the passage into oblivion always feels close at hand.

Why we like her: One Place, currently on show in London, features hundreds of old glass windows taken from East Berlin building sites. Stacked to the ceiling in cathedral-like domes, they draw out a spiritual dimension to relics from the communist era.

Sound of silence: When Shiota was nine years old her neighbour’s house burned down; the following day the artist saw a charred piano amongst the ruins. This instrument that lost its sound has haunted the artist and inspired various works in which she sets alight to a grand piano, then displays the remains within an installation of black thread.

Where can I see her: Chiharu Shiota, One Place, is at Haunch of Venison, London until 27 March.

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A Leeds-based artist’s life affirming exploration of new ways of working, carried out in collaboration with a small group of fellow artists, formed the basis for a visual arts exhibition shown recently in Wakefield.

Pretending to be a mermaid and other stories featured new work by Michelle Leon working with Paul Farago, Conrad Cookson and Nick Claiden.

Michelle, an exhibiting artist for more than twenty years, originally made large scale sculptures using found objects, mixed media and wood. The diagnosis of multiple sclerosis in 1991 led her to change her practice and work with printmaking and, more recently, collage.

Creating the work in her latest exhibition, Michelle explored and developed new techniques and ways of working in a collaborative process with three other artists, who also offered physical and technical assistance.

Much of Michelle’s previous work and imagery acted as a starting point and catalyst for the new pieces which reinterpreted, reconfigured or used only parts of them to produce new work which was developed by all the artists involved.

Some of the pieces from which the inspiration was drawn were shown alongside the new work in the exhibition, which took place at The Art House from November 2009 to January 2010.  The project and exhibition were supported by a Grants for the arts award from Arts Council England, Yorkshire.

Jennifer Hallam, Visual Arts Officer, Arts Council England, Yorkshire, said: ‘In her quest to find new ways of working, Michelle and her co-artists produced a fascinating exhibition, that once again affirms how an artist’s individual creativity and the artistic community can find positive ways forward and expand the horizons of their own and others’ artistic practice when faced with incredibly challenging circumstances.’

The Art House is a unique national membership organisation for visual artists that campaigns for equality of access to opportunities for work, training and exhibiting for both disabled and non-disabled artists equally.  It opened its new studio building in Wakefield in July 2008, housing 12 resident artists and welcoming artists from the UK and abroad for short residential visits.

For more information visit Michelle Leon or The Art House

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Ackermann’s exhibition at White Cube references century-old techniques but feels thrillingly contemporary

Recently I moaned about the abuse of the term “modern art” to describe the art of today. The joy of working as a critic is that every theoretical notion you may have is going to be contradicted by empirical reality. And lo and behold, I walked into an exhibition yesterday afternoon that proves art is still able to rise in an ambitious and intelligent way to the challenges posed by modern life.

Franz Ackermann (born 1963) lives and works in Berlin. His current exhibition at White Cube, Mason’s Yard in London is a whirligig of ideas and impressions. If cinema director Michael Haneke tries to trace the connections of a globalised world in fractured narratives, Ackermann captures the fissions and fusions of our unmoored age through an art of kaleidoscopic energy.

At first glance, his paintings and the playground-like installations in which they are displayed are so bright and hard you begin to dismiss them as just another pop contrivance. But stay a moment. The gallery upstairs is given over to a spectacular, fizzingly theatrical installation where your mind finds it hard to settle on anything: to register the subtlety behind it you need to go downstairs where his paintings are more conventionally displayed and there’s enough quiet to assimilate their complexity.

Pulses of colour that resemble computer graphics are interrupted by drawn perspectives; broken images of buildings and city squares judder across storms of energetic random marks. The aesthetic is new and yet it has a history: it responds to the confusions and liberations of contemporary urban life with techniques of fragmentation, explosion and juxtaposition that go back a century, to cubism.

Go back upstairs after taking in his paintings and you can properly appreciate the power and excitement of his installation called Wait. Its hybridisation of painting, sculpture and kinetic art amounts to a street-cultural grotto containing the possibility and menace of modern life: the modern life that we are living, now.

Ackermann’s dynamism and colour capture something about the contemporary. Is the exhilaration he depicts that of a new democracy or an impenetrable chaos? It’s a great place to visit, Franz Ackermann’s 21st century. But would we want to live there?

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Well I have just been back home for about an hour or so and it has taken me that long to warm up having been out looking for treasure for four hours! I really am hopeless at all this field work..went out in my favourite vintage farmer style coat again and lost a precious gold button in the brook that I am carefully and probably pointlessly extracting broken pieces of ceramic from. Not all was lost though as I found the most wonderful piece with a fab cat on it! a fair exchange for my coats button. 

Every day I struggle to come to terms with what I have chosen as a career path as truly it is very stupid indeed..I have no money, no commercial gallery awaiting my new work (I do have a solo show at the end of this residency but Ill be perfectly honest with you It aint much cop and frankly with a name like ‘The Michael Heseltine Gallery’ I wonder if anyone will turn up anyway. I am going to refer to it as the ‘MH Gallery’ myself..and its anyones guess what it stands for. 

Ive got to laugh at myself really for finding old bits of china so fascinating, perhaps I am actually mad, who knows..certainly nobody should bother to care but me If I am.

Anyway, forgetting my self deprecating nonsense, onto the arty nonsense..this is what I wrote in my notebook sitting on a ruin mound in the village earler…

‘What I find so fascinating about this place is how it seems to have so easily become part of the earth, it reminds me of the fields i was taken to at La Somme as a teenager..and i suppose they do have something in common apart from visual similarities as their histories are both inextricably linked by the first world war (Hazelford being abandoned in 1914 due to the onset of war).

The softness of its decline into the earth I find very moving and a great comfort, it seems to have willingly buried itself under a soft, dewy green blanket. 

There are fruit trees and planted roses still to be seen and I await the beginning of spring to see what if any remnants of a traditional English cottage garden grows and flowers. 

As I write this I am sitting on a large mossy mound and I do feel as if I am treading on the dead but of course this is not a graveyard, however, removing small pieces of china from the brook feels to me like grave robbing and i have started to wonder about the ethical implications of this removal, although this place is not protected by heritage status it is a memorial site and these things do not belong to me. I will most probably put it all back next week. 

I remember going to Herculaneum and Pompeii when I was about 13 and seeing people kicking up pieces of Roman mosaic tiles and putting them in their pockets as souvenirs (I hope this has changed now) and wondering how they could do it. I could never even bring myself to take those little green bits of glass off graves..not even one, even though I wanted them so much because they sparkled..’

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From office blocks to shopping streets, Moore’s sculptures are part of the fabric of Britain – so much so that we no longer notice. A new Tate retrospective wants to make us look again

As a new Tate retrospective prepares to open, it can be difficult to judge the reputation of Henry Moore, in his own lifetime one of the most famous and wealthy artists in the world. It’s not that Moore has vanished from the public stage in the years since his death in 1986 – far from it, in fact. Moore’s problem is that he has become so ubiquitous as to become near-invisible.

Stand on London’s Bond Street, just beneath a massive work by Moore – the four-panel Portland stone Time-Life Screen, installed in 1953 as part of the building of the same name – and you guess that of the thousands of people who pass by every day, barely one looks up, still less admires. The nice American couple I found waiting to have their photograph taken on a park bench between a bronze Churchill and bronze Roosevelt looked startled at being asked what they thought of the Henry Moore. “But that’s not by him, is it?” the man said in surprise. “Isn’t Moore the guy who punches holes through everything?” If only they’d looked up. Like so much of Moore’s work, the Time-Life Screen has become so familiar as to disappear into the background texture of 20th-century British urban life.

It’s the same story just down the road in Millbank, where smokers shelter behind the gigantic bronze Locking Piece, and use it as a windbreak. Half a mile away there’s another thumping great bronze, the two-section 1962 Knife Edge, opposite the House of Lords – a site chosen by Moore for its high visibility. Half a mile again, and you find Moore’s very first public commission, made when he was a teacher at the Royal College of Art, the singularly un-airy West Wind high on the facade of the London Underground block over St James’s Park tube station. Take a train to Stevenage and you can locate his first family group – one of many made after the death of his mother and the birth of his only child, Mary, named after her – outside a school, and another that used to be out in the precinct but now takes refuge in the civic centre in Harlow.

An elegant interactive website maintained by the Henry Moore Foundation lists scores more works on public display across 30 sites in Britain alone, from the 1944 Family Group in Aberdeen Art Gallery to the memorial to his friend Christopher Martin in the grounds of Dartington Hall, and even more all over the world, in stone, plaster, bronze, wood, on paper, in tapestries – around 800 works in all.

As the Turner prize-winning artist Simon Starling writes in the catalogue to the new Tate show: “From the beginning, Henry Moore seemed omnipresent – a state-endorsed, global player, the first of his kind perhaps. His huge bronzes seemed to drop from the sky in great meteor showers and felt to my young mind rather clumsy and anachronistic, even provincial.” Starling, who won the Turner in 2005 for pieces including Shedboatshed – the shed he dismantled, built into a boat, paddled down the Rhine to a museum and reconstructed as a shed – has also made work directly responding to Moore’s, and not necessarily with an admiring eye.

In 2006–07, Starling created a work called Infestation Piece for the Toronto Art Gallery of Ontario, a museum and a city with a complex relationship with Moore. In the late 1950s, a go-getting mayor, Philip Givens, commissioned a major Moore sculpture, The Archer, for its new City Hall. Starling’s Infestation Piece is a Moore replica, lowered into the lake until it became encrusted with an invasive species of mussels: a hint that the sculpture itself is a form of alien in the landscape.

The Toronto Art Gallery is the Tate’s partner in organising this exhibition. Both museums have world-class collections that were acquired in Moore’s lifetime, but Toronto’s is much the larger – and the story of how that happened is a fascinating insight into attitudes to Moore in his lifetime. Moore donated major sculptures, drawings, maquettes and other works to the Tate, of which he was a trustee. In the late 1960s, there was discussion of creating a special Henry Moore wing at Tate Britain, which would certainly have attracted many more donations – but the project was seen by some artists as memorialising Moore himself, and attracted bitter criticism. One of the show’s curators, Chris Stephens, has written of the episode in an article for the Tate magazine, and of what he terms the “final insult” when in 1968, the year of Moore’s 70th birthday, a letter appeared in the Times condemning the proposed wing. It was signed by 41 artists, including his former studio assistants Anthony Caro and Phillip King; not much of a birthday present. Moore donated more than 900 pieces – including some of the works he must have intended for the Tate – to Toronto in 1974, before eventually making another donation to the Tate with no strings attached.

In much the way that his public art now seems commonplace, it is easy to see Moore as invincibly nice and decent: the seventh of eight children of a Yorkshire mining engineer, a scholarship boy who never forgot his working-class roots, whose work speaks of home and family, peace and plenty, a man with socialist sympathies and a pacifist heart. When their London home was damaged in the blitz, the Moores moved to a modest two-storey rented farmhouse, Hoglands, at Perry Green in Hertfordshire – still a surprisingly remote and rural corner of the home counties. They eventually bought the house and the surrounding fields. Moore added workshops no grander than his neighbours’ farm sheds, and extended the house slightly, but it has none of the grandeur you might expect of an artist who became a millionaire many times over while he lived there. Indeed, the Henry Moore Foundation, which now maintains the estate as a museum, archive and outdoor sculpture park, was established not just to ensure his legacy but to mop up some of the millions he would otherwise have spent in tax.

Visitors to Perry Green can tour the house, the handsome antique-filled dining room, the bright drawing room with Scandinavian-design modern furniture where grander visitors were received – and the claustrophobic sitting room where the Moores actually spent most of their leisure time, a space filled with rickety furniture that you wouldn’t be surprised to see in a charity shop. The house reflects the popular image of the artist as “an easygoing, avuncular figure who produced an equally easygoing form of modern sculpture”, as Stephens says – an image which the exhibition will attempt to destroy. There is, the curators aim to show, a lot more to Moore than monumental decency, despite his undergoing the national beatification which befell John Betjeman and has almost smothered Alan Bennett.

The exhibition will bring together more than 150 works, from the early white marble Dog carved in 1922, to a Reclining Figure in seductively polished elm, completed in 1978 when Moore was 80. There will be works in stone, bronze and plaster; working drawings and finished works on paper – including the famous blitz sleepers in London’s Underground – and his cramped and contorted miners, who are given an archaic grandeur by the artist. Stephens sees anger, darkness and violence in many of these works – born, he believes, from the first-world-war experience that marked Moore for life: the artist was gassed at Cambrai and was among just 52 survivors from a 400-strong battalion. There is a sinister edge to many pieces, he argues, and a raw sexuality in all those holes and protruberances.

The elm reclining figures are exceptional. Moore himself never saw them together: the first was begun in 1935, and in his lifetime they were scattered across different collections. The surrealist painter Gordon Onslow Ford, who bought the 1939 version of the sculptures, wrote: “I felt that I was in the presence of the mother earth goddess.” The critic David Sylvester was one of many who saw something almost menacing in its form – “the sacrificed and resurrected god of a fertility rite”. Such views are a timely reminder that the artist was once seen as so threateningly modern that Roland Penrose’s neighbours reacted in outrage when he put a Moore Mother and Child in his Hampstead front garden. And when an Essex new town commissioned a work entitled Harlow Family Group, it provoked a public demonstration by people fearful that the sculpture was an obscene jeer at Harlow’s “pram town” nickname.

“In contrast to the dominant idea of Moore, we propose that he presented the body as abject, erotic, vulnerable, violated and visceral,” Stephens writes. “They are part of a wider challenge to reason, of the redefinition of the human body as discontinuous, fluid and driven by deep unconscious forces, and of a world characterised by apprehension and anxiety, the uncanny and the absurd. Moore’s is a troubled and troubling art that digs into the very essence of modern experience.” That would be news to the tourists in Bond Street and the Millbank smokers – but maybe it is indeed time they looked again.

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