Brian Sewell’s epic rant against Henry Moore provoked by the Tate show of the sculptor’s work looks for a villain to blame all this Moore upon. He finds it in Kenneth Clark:
The Establishment took him to its bosom. Kenneth Clark began that rot — the precocious Kenneth Clark who was the National Gallery’s worst director and is known to us all as the vain master of Civilisation — for it was he who appointed Moore an official war artist in 1941, and he who that very year displayed the Shelter Drawings that made Moore so widely popular during the Second World War. I have no doubt that it was his support that led to Moore also having a retrospective exhibition in Leeds and being appointed a trustee of the Tate Gallery in 1941, to his appointment to the Arts Council in 1945, to his representing Britain at the first post-war Venice Biennale in 1948, and to his becoming so often the subject of British Council exhibitions in Europe and America that, to reduce the formidable transport costs, its wistful staff dreamed of commissioning fabric replicas that were as inflatable and dirigible as Zeppelins.
Does Henry Moore Deserve His Monumental Reputation? (This Is London/The Evening Standard)
