Flock and Dread: Inside the Big Changes in Henry Moore’s Glorious Sheep-Filled House of Hoaglands | Art and design

IIn September 1940, Henry Moore and his wife Irina left London to escape bombing during the war, ending up in the rural village of Berry Green, where Hertfordshire meets Essex. What was envisioned as a temporary refuge eventually became permanent, and the collection of buildings in which Moore lived and worked has now become a kind of cultural ecosystem dedicated to his genius. It’s part small stately home, part sculpture garden, part archive – one of the largest dedicated to a single artist – and is now overseen by his eponymous foundation, founded in 1977.

Today, it houses a constellation of studios and workspaces spread across the Arcadian landscape. Sheep graze in the distant fields and huge sculptures loom on the horizon. Moore’s home, Hoaglands, has been preserved exactly as he left it, and is filled with his collections of books and artefacts — Dogon and Ashanti carvings, a centipede tusk dangling casually in the corner, a Picasso print in the kitchen — as well as abundantly stocked beverage trays to entertain visitors and potential buyers. Over the years, Moore has clinked glasses with a stream of admirers, from Lauren Bacall to German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, who had a senior Moore set outside his Chancellery in Bonn in the 1970s, noting that she combined “nature with intelligence.”

Before he ascended to this rural apotheosis, Moore’s life was shaped by childhood poverty – the son of a Yorkshire coal miner, the seventh of eight children – and the formative experiences of the two world wars. After being wounded in a gas attack during the Battle of Cambrai in 1917, he was the youngest man in his battalion, enlisting when he was eighteen. Ultimately, the horror instilled a deep and lasting sense of despair about human capacity to wage conflict. “Seeing a khaki uniform,” he wrote, “began to mean everything in life was wrong, wasteful, and anti-life.”

The Second World War displaced him to Perry Green, but it also saw him working as a war artist, descending every night like a modern Dante onto the London Underground to make powerful, poignant drawings of people taking shelter from the blitz, summing up moments of collective weakness and stoicism. “He was very sensitive, and he didn’t want to take pictures or draw people,” says Leslie Weick of the Henry Moore Foundation. “He literally took notes and drew from them.”

The shelter drawings, which established his reputation, are central to understanding Moore’s response to conflict—and pivotal to his development as an artist. “He created people, but he was making sculptures,” says Wick. “And it all came from seeing people taking shelter in the shadows.”

With a sense of things coming full circle, the shelter drawings, among Moore’s first works after arriving at Berry Green, are the subject of a new exhibition in the estate’s Sheep Field Barn, marking its reopening after a major redesign by London-based architects DSDHA. “An important aspect of the brief was this dichotomy of wanting it to feel like it did when Moore was here, but also recognizing that today’s visitors have different expectations,” says DSDHA director David Hills.

For such an ordinary, everyday building, the Sheep Field Barn has a surprisingly complex provenance. Originally a steel frame structure covered with asbestos sheets, it was constructed in the 1970s and was used by Moore to store working materials and sheep feed. In 1999, it was converted into a gallery space by architects Hawkins/Brown, its stark geometric volume wrapped in a skin of timber, typical of local agricultural buildings. As the largest structure on the property, its size – combined with the matte black painted cladding – gave it a fairly monolithic presence.

The latest reimagining sees new sections added to the north and east sides surrounded by a sloping roof that actually becomes the fifth height of the building. Paradoxically, the effect of extending the roof serves to reduce the volume of the building, despite its enlarged footprint, making it easier to fit into the landscape and making it appear less uniform. The new exterior shield of silver fir, reclaimed from the original building, is also softer on the eye. Overall, the redesign process reflects a sense of rigor and precision: with the limited scope of architectural moves, each one had to be carefully considered.

A portion of the renovated gallery will be devoted to a permanent display exploring the arc of Moore’s life and work. A changing exhibition program opened by Shelter Graphics will run concurrently, focusing more on specific aspects of his work. The expanded building also includes new spaces for art education, a passion of Moore’s. His various studios, like his home, are still as he left them, the tools and work still in place, as if the great man had just gone out for a cup of tea.

Different studios were used for different activities, from creating figures to sculpture, drawing and printmaking. Improvisation was a common theme. A greenhouse-like structure was used to prepare massive plaster casts and the painting studio was a compact summer house that was originally placed on a turntable so that it could be rotated to follow the sun. Moore’s small studio, modest on the outside, is a bustling cornucopia on the inside, an eye-catching cabinet of curiosities crammed with models, bits and pieces: stones, wood, feathers, bones and the skull of a giant elephant.

In this spirit, DSDHA’s design strategy is admirably simple. The generative prototype, which will happily sit in Moore’s mock-up studio, shows off the dark portion of the original building with the new parts carefully sheathed above it, a subtle but elegant transformation. The idea of ​​containing one volume within others parallels Moore’s tendency to place one form within another, as exemplified by the Large Interior/Exterior Figure, a massive bronze sculpture from the early 1980s that now stands near the building’s entrance. The horn-like features of the womb echo the straight lines of architecture.

The expanded volume contains two new workshops for making, experimentation, talks and other activities, along with additional spaces. The foundation hosts visits from more than 2,000 schoolchildren each year, free of charge, and these improved facilities will elevate its educational offer, and perhaps even embrace the next Moore or Sarah Lucas. Moore claimed that he decided to become a sculptor when he was eleven years old after learning of Michelangelo’s achievements in Sunday school.

In an age where art and design are increasingly relegated to the margins, it’s a good attempt at practical reform. Over time, the workshops will be invigorated by the cacophony of crafted works. “Kids go out, find things, put them back in, and we wonder, ‘What does this look like to you?’” Wick says. “What can you achieve? They’re using that to inspire action. So they’re doing exactly what Moore did, in the same location.”

In good weather, people and activities can spread out into the adjacent field, protected by the overhang. Standard zinc sheep troughs provide the water needed to clean dirty hands, but there was some confusion from the plumber who installed them when choosing something clearly agricultural.

However, that was exactly the point. Although Moore became very wealthy, with his sculptures generating huge sums, he lived a modest life, embracing a “frugal innovation” mentality. “He was in the recycling business even before that phrase was coined,” says Wick. “But he did it from the standpoint of waste, not need. He used everything he had.” The no-frills remodeling of the shed into a slightly larger shed is entirely in keeping with his artistic and philosophical spirit.

He would no doubt agree with the project’s goal of being a model of reuse and sustainability. Sheep’s wool insulation, triple-glazed windows and an airtight envelope enhance energy efficiency, while integrated solar panels on the large roof generate power, powered by ground source heat pumps. The retrofit may be twice the size of the original building but will consume half the amount of energy.

There is a delicious irony in the insulation made of sheep’s wool, as Moore regularly painted sheep in the surrounding fields, tapping on the window of his studio to attract them. These groupings of sheep formed the basis of Sheep Piece, one of his most famous bronze sculptures. When Moore placed a block in the fields of Berry Green, the sheep would take shelter under it and use it as a scratching post. But whether by animals or humans, Moore always believed that sculptures should be touched and their shapes and textures savored.

With the renovation of the Sheep Field Barn and a major new show opening in May at London’s Kew Gardens, Moore is having a moment. It’s hard to believe he was born in 1898 – but his practice represents a radical break with Victorian romanticism, a break that has not always been well received. His sculptures were beheaded in Dumfries and painted over with blue paint in Leeds, while his Reclining Statue was vandalized during wartime loan to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. However, as the decades passed, he became a national treasure, and was always clear about where he stood. He once declared that “art is an expression of imagination, not a reproduction of reality.”