"British police hunted for three men on Saturday who stole a huge bronze Henry Moore sculpture worth up to 3 million pounds ($5.30 million) and a spokesman said they feared the piece would be destroyed for scrap. Police said the 3.5 meter long (11 ft 5.8 in) sculpture, "A Reclining Figure," was stolen from the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire, north of London, on Thursday night by three men who drove it away."
You know Henry Moore. I mean, you do know Henry Moore. Even if you’re not into art or never heard of him, you’ve seen his stuff. You live in Wichita, Kansas or Winnemucca, Nevada? There’s a Henry Moore in your town. It's the pride of the local Civic Plaza and/or Performing Arts Center!
Henry Moore’s annoying ubiquitousness has chased us in our travels. I remember the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) filled with those little and big (mostly huge) pieces of poo for which Moore considered himself as being part of the pantheon of “great artists”. Our visit to the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City almost turned into a nightmare after being surrounded by what the museum claims to be "the biggest collection of Henry Moore’s outside England". (The AGO is said to have “the world’s biggest Moore collection", period).
Taking pride in bad art.
In every one of the sculpture parks we’ve visited in the United States, a Henry Moore never fails to haunt us with amorphous visions of abstract detritus ("dead or decaying organic matter"). That, and a Calder, another artist whose art fails in big size but was and is immensely popular.
Here in New York we suffer Moore’s “organic” things in at least the United Nations (very aptly) and Lincoln Center (not less so).
With so many magnificent (and unknown) sculptors, why was the dreadful Henry Moore always awarded every damn public commission around the world? Moore’s contemporary Barbara Hepworth, the other world-famous British sculptor, is an immensely better artist than him, yet her presence out of England is minimal.
Should I be the Public Art Commissioner of any city, the likes of Walter de Maria, Juan Munoz, Michael Heizer or Richard Serra would be my choice. Henry Moore is so fifties, so United Nations grey bureaucracy. Totally unadventurous- the safe choice of a state functionary.
Big and rich, Henry Moore was paying “about a million pounds a year” in taxes. “By the end of the 1970’s, there were some 40 exhibitions a year featuring his work”. Fame and fortune devoured the imagination and inventiveness he once had in the 40’s. His surrealist sculptures a la Giacometti and his not-so-famous subway drawings, made inside subway shelters while London was being bombed, were probably his last examples of high art. That was the 1940’s.
Now a 2-tons Henry Moore has been stolen right in the face of the Henry Moore Foundation. For once, I agree with the newspapers putting the accent in the monetary value: 5.3 million dollars is a lot of scrap. And crap.
The definition of "scrap" is very clear and fitting to Henry Moore's sculptures:
"Rubbish, worthless material that is to be disposed of"
Stealing a Henry Moore, recycling it and getting some money at the junkyard is one of the brilliant, useful ideas one can come up with for Moore's things. Another two I've found among the stir the theft has caused, as reflected in the press all around the world:
- Turner Prize winner Simon Starling's project for Toronto: submerging Moore's "Warrior With Shield" (completed in 1954) in Lake Ontario to be encrusted with tiny zebra mussels over a six-month period". And then, show it at the Power Plant, Toronto's only center for contemporary art. The Henry Moore Foundation reportedly loves the idea.
- Use a Henry Moore as a legal bribery: Wellington, New Zealand, only Moore sculpture was bought in 1987 by some collector for 900,000 New Zealand dollars (around 620,000 American dollars) "and donated to the city in exchange for the right to build taller buildings", says a New Zealand paper. Too bad the sculpture is threatened (by some art connoisseur, I assume) and "under 24-hour guard", costing the city 4000 New Zealand dollars a week.
My conceptual project:
1.- Melt all the Henry Moores in public plazas around the world in one big blast furnace constructed in the site of the Henry Moore Foundation.
2.- Celebrate the end of bad art while watching the smoke go up, high in the sky.
3.- Use the proceeds from the sale of the biggest amount of scrap ever gathered in doing good to the neediest.
4.- Repeat the process, with Jim Dine.
