Henry Moore, Hill Arches, 1960

Hill Arches, Henry Moore, 1960

June 1st, and a few schools have opened some of their classes as lockdown is gradually eased... for better or for worse. Children are leaving the ten week cocoon of domestic protection and returning to the wider world, although quite a different one to that they left back in March. However, listening to some radio interviews with returning children this morning, they couldn’t wait to get back to school. After ten weeks, home life had begun to feel more like prison than protection!

This blurring of the boundary between protection and imprisonment is evident when looking at today’s work. Admittedly it’s not a painting. However it, and the other sculpture I’ll refer to later in this article, are currently the only objects from the Fitzwilliam collection that you can actually see, albeit through the museum railings.

Henry Moore (1898-1986) is considered one of the world’s greatest sculptors of the modern era. He is best known for his sculptural work but he was also a very talented draughtsman. Moore’s sculptures are on display throughout the world. 

The metal used to make the sculpture is bronze, an alloy of copper and tin. Bronze will naturally turn a greeny turquoise over time, particularly if left outside. This is because the copper reacts with oxygen in the air making a verdigris hued copper oxide. Iron does the same thing, except it turns to a reddish brown rust. Henry Moore knew this but wanted to be in control and used a special chemical technique to achieve the patina that gives the effect you can see here.

Family Group, Henry Moore, 1949

 Moore’s most familiar works tend to be of figures and often posed as a family group, particularly mother and child – a nod to the typical Renaissance representation of the Virgin and Child.

 At first sight Hill Arches appears to be very different, and almost looks like a landscape – the title of the work reinforces this. However, look carefully... is it just one piece? It’s a shame that you can’t walk up to the sculpture then walk around it and, best of all, walk inside the work for that’s the best way to better understand what I’m talking about. Just imagine walking inside and standing by the round object in the middle. How might it make you feel?

The open spatial relationships between the component parts of this sculpture were a new development in Moore’s work. Not since Reclining Figure: Festival 1951, made for the Festival of Britain, had Moore produced a sculpture in which the tension between solid mass and open void was so exactly balanced. As so often in Moore’s work the piece is open to many interpretations. 

Hill Arches

From a different angle, the protective role of the ‘adults’ is emphasised

A strong internal-external relationship, with the arching forms shielding the ball, connects the work to the internal-external forms of the early 1950s. The ball shape with its protective arches is reminiscent of the carved wood Two Forms 1934. However, in this earlier work there is only one arching shape alluding to the fundamental mother and child image even if its sculptural forms are perceived as abstract. 

With Hill Arches, two linked arches provide a counterbalance that can be read as an additional figure in the composition giving us the sense of the traditional family group for the work as a whole.

The obvious interpretation of the group is of two loving parents doting over their child. However, the looming figures arching over that small figure can equally carry a darker sense of control and constraint as much as care.

Should you choose to stroll down Trumpington Street past the museum to see Hill Arches the other, much more prominent and colourful sculpture on display, is the Architectonic Pineapple set upon its plinth of shocking pink.

Architectonic Pineapple

Installed by Bompas & Parr outside the Fitzwilliam Museum, November 2019

The gilded tropical fruit is an overture to the exhibition that was running before lockdown: Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800. The exhibition aimed to celebrate the production, preparation and presentation of food, its consumption or rejection, its ideologies and identities. But why preface the show with a golden pineapple? 

The Fitzwilliam Museum has close links with the tropical fruit, which is an essential motif of the exhibition. Matthew Decker, a wealthy Dutch merchant and grandfather of the Fitzwilliam’s founder, Richard, Viscount Fitzwilliam, grew the first commercially viable crop of pineapples in Britain.

Decker was so pleased with his triumph that he commissioned Theodore Netscher to paint the portrait of a fully-grown pineapple in 1720, which was depicted as flourishing in an English landscape, rather than a traditional tropical Eden. Decker’s friend, Richard Bradley, the first professor of Botany at Cambridge University, widely publicised Decker’s botanical feat.

Pineapple grown in Sir Matthew Decker's garden at Richmond, Surrey, Theodore Netscher, 1720

To commemorate this link, and celebrate the 300th anniversary, the installation of a giant multi-sensory pineapple by contemporary artists Bompas & Parr on the front lawn of the Fitz seemed an appropriate motif.

The pineapple was an emblem of power, hospitality, and innovation. Its discovery by European colonisers in the late fifteenth century and subsequent trajectory around the world, from an object of luxury and horticultural innovation to an everyday food which now comes in a can and even an emblem of the fair-trade movement, is one of the central stories of early modern globalisation.

The motif is a powerful one and as you peer through the railings you lean across a horizontal bar with large golden finials representing...you guessed it, pineapples.