Bacon & Moore - more, more!!

On Thursday we went to the Ashmolean in Oxford, before the Bacon & Moore exhibition finishes on 19th Jan. I had high hopes, mainly for the Bacon, but it was the Moore that blew me away. In the first room, his drawings and then in the second room, his sculpture. I guess I used to walk past it in Battersea Park and not even look.

First, his drawings in shelters during the Blitz, like this one below.

The Three Fates - Henry Moore (1948)

He seems to have incorporated a wax crayon resist and a lot of black scribble, and the figures really look as though they are emerging from darkness. Although it's hard to see from this, the one on the left holds a baby and the figure in the middle is knitting.

Then the sculpture. Again, I don't think that this picture really shows what I saw - such a friendly sculpture, a classical head, quite cycladic, I thought. And a lovely rounded handful of a belly. I just wanted to crawl onto her lap!

Woman - Henry Moore (1957-8)

I came home and ordered the book London's War - The Shelter Drawings of Henry Moore.

I got different things out of the Bacon. Funnily enough, the piece that made the most impression was pretty ugly and scrubby even for Bacon, I thought. But a FIERCE composition, so a huge tick!

A massive foreground and a two fingers of a calligraphic green line right across the middle. Take that!