ENCOUNTERS Henry Moore
for next click the pictures
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."
Queen Beatrix
Henry Moore Italy 1
Henry Moore Italy 2
Henry Moore Italy 3
Henry MooreEngland
Jorma Hautala
- Kari Huhtamo - Matti Peltokangas
Christo and Jeanne
Claude
Truus Schröder-Schräder
Donald Judd
