ENCOUNTERS
Henry
Moore
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Lucien den Arend and
Henry and Irina Moore in Forte Dei Marmi, Italy
"In the summer of 1970 I
spent my vacation in Forte Dei Marmi, Italy. I knew that Henry Moore had a house
in that town. Many of his stone sculptures were being made at Henraux in nearby
Querceta. In Pietrasanta he had work cast at a foundry. I looked him up in the
phone book, visited his house in the Via Civitali and
discovered that the blinds were shut meaning that he was probably still in
England. One morning I was having a coffee in the center of town and Henry Moore
and his wife Irina happened to have decided to have a drink at the same
restaurant where I was. They walked into the garden sat at the table next to
mine.
Of course I went to them
and introduced myself. They invited me to have a drink with them there a day or
so later. During that meeting I showed them my work and he told me about the
possibility to work at Henraux. What struck me was his kindness and humbleness. We met again a week later.
During these meetings with
Henry Moore he told me stories I already knew about from
literature and without intending to do so, he actually verified
those to be a fact. Some things though were new
for me. He told me about his meeting with that chubby
princess - "what was her name again?" he asked Irina. I did not know then that
years later I would get to know Queen Beatrix of The Netherlands
personally. But also he talked about his problems
with the pebbles and flint stones he had collected at the
ocean side all his life - which he just saved or used as
sculpture, carving some. The salt in them, or whatever the cause was,
was slowly disintegrating them.
Having read about and very much appreciating the gardens and environments Isamu
Noguchi had done, Moore's ideas about sculpture struck me as rather
conservative. In his opinion it was very important that a sculptor incorporated
his personal sculptural elements in his
environmental work; in this sense, he
found that Noguchi went beyond what was acceptable to him. Looking back now I
think that I didn't realize at that time that Moore had been around a long time
already and had earned a right to his views. He had changed the course of art
history himself and had introduced things which were revolutionary in his time.
The environmental work I was doing at that time did, in fact, have sculptural
elements which I shaped myself. In my first garden -
DSW -
the transparent fountain forms were indeed sculpted by me. He appreciated that
and encouraged me to continue in this direction. It was probably due to Henry
Moore's incentive that I made the bronze element the way I did in my
Walburg project a
year later."
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