Clayton points to the work of Ro Robertson, whose investigations of stone monuments and rock formations initiate conversations around queer identity and gender norms – the idea being that even the perceived solidity of rock shifts and evolves over time. Some 4,500 years later, there has been a renewed interest in this and other standing stones among contemporary artists. Nebra Sky Disc, Germany, dating from c1600BC, also at the British Museum © LDA Sachsen-Anhalt/Juraj Lipták Rather than being built by the druids, as was long believed, it is now thought to have been constructed much earlier, in the days of the Sphinx. According to The World of Stonehenge, an exhibition at the British Museum (until 17 July) presenting the site through the prism of more than 430 contemporaneous objects drawn from regional museums across Europe and the UK, it took more than 1,000 years to assemble the 20-25-tonne, up-to-5m blocks of sarsen stone into their celebrated solstice-aligned configuration. That so much significance can be ascribed to this gargantuan gathering of rocks is perhaps as compelling as the story of the stones themselves. When you look at these monoliths, you’re able to connect to something very ancient” In times of war, she says, it became a beacon of hope and continuity for them, as well as a wider reflection of the holistic, three-dimensional way they experienced the world. For Eleanor Clayton, a Hepworth specialist and author of Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life (which accompanies a survey of her work travelling to Tate St Ives later this year), it’s no coincidence that they were especially attracted to the ancient site. In 1937, both artists contributed to “Circle”, a survey of constructivist art, which saw Hepworth’s essay illustrated by photographs of Stonehenge by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Moore’s friend and contemporary Barbara Hepworth was similarly captivated by the sanctity of Stonehenge – and some of the more than 1,300 stone circles and monuments that are scattered across Britain, Ireland and Brittany. “Just as they were in the minds of our ancestors it’s all part of the great circle of life.”Īncient stones have long imprinted themselves on the artistic community. “In his sculpture, the landscape and the human body are totally interchangeable,” says Mary Moore. For the son of a miner who often worked outside and spent his life carving with English stone – from granite to Hopton-Wood to Cumberland alabaster – these rocks held the power to root humankind, deeply and directly, to the earth.
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Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundationįrom a darkly ethereal series of 1970s lithographs that depict Stonehenge in blackened hues to a quartet of vast bronze renderings of monoliths known as the “Upright Motives”, many of the works on display at Henry Moore: Sharing Form (28 May-4 September) feel like the culmination of Moore’s first solitary night at the henge.
Henry Moore with The Arch at an exhibition of his work in Florence, 1972 © Henry Moore Archive. For Mary, there’s a direct line to be drawn between the ancient megaliths of the Wiltshire Chalkland and the modern abstractions hewn by her father – part of his life-long assimilation of more than 30,000 years of visual art.
More than a century later – and a mere 30 minutes down the A303 – she has collaborated with Hannah Higham of the Henry Moore Foundation on an exhibition presented by Hauser & Wirth Somerset that throws the influence of Stonehenge on the sculptor into sharp relief. “From that moment on, Stonehenge was always in his psyche, just as it is forever embedded in the English psyche,” says the artist’s daughter, Mary Moore. “And the mysterious depths and distances made it feel enormous.” “Moonlight, as you know, enlarges everything,” he said. Bathed in lunar light, the majesty of the standing stones appeared magnified to the Royal College of Art student, still fresh from the terrors of the first world war trenches.
The British sculptor Henry Moore first saw Stonehenge on a clear and silvery night in the autumn of 1921.