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False Colors: Art, Design, and Modern Camouflage (review)

402 reconstructions of fossil skeletons at South Kensington, and asserting as a kind of uniquely English Surrealist objet trouvé the bones and stones he picked up whilst walking along the Norfolk coastline. This is not to suggest the volume is not ripe for pickings from the perspective of classical modernism. After all, at moments Moore is happy to acknowledge Paris as “the absolute centre of the art world” (154), and to describe his meetings there with Picasso and Giacometti as “far more important than Unit One, and other episodes” back home. There are also some almost epiphanic moments of Modernist cultural history recorded in the text. We find Moore contemplating fighting in the Spanish Civil War with Auden, meeting Yeats and Eliot for tea, and sitting between Breton and Giacometti outside a French restaurant in the 1930s, discussing Guernica. However, although Wilkinson rightly emphasizes Moore’s Modernism, and in particular his rhetorical allegiance to the blasting rhetoric of Pound’s book on Gaudier-Brzeska, more characteristic of Moore’s writing is his Ruskinian belief in the value of the “deep human feeling” and “sense of suffering and tragedy” depicted in Romanesque sculpture (111), and his preference for “fallible” and “human” Gothic carving to the aggressively pre-war Modernist vocabulary of “straight line[s]”, “pure curve[s], solid geometrical forms”, and “perfect sphere[s], cone[s], cylinders, [and] cubes” (114). Looked at from the perspective of the pre-war generation of Pound, Boccioni, GaudierBrzeska and Lewis, Moore’s repeated espousal of Gothic Revival values, such as his praise of Chartres Cathedral as a building where it was wonderfully apparent that the masons were “able to have second thoughts” (279), might seem appallingly old-fashioned, and rather cautious and unsexy. However, this volume makes abundantly clear why Moore’s particular brand of Modernism spoke so eloquently to two generations traumatized by war; and why the publication of this volume is so peculiarly timely now when war is again pressing. In his preface, Bowness recommends Moore’s writings to anyone seeking a “richer understanding” of Moore and of sculpture in general (9). But Henry Moore’s Writings and Conversations does more than that. It provides a uniquely representative twentieth-century biography, and such a firm reminder of a sculptor whose concerns are again so timely that when the volume rather abruptly stops after some three hundred pages, you might find yourself feeling oddly melancholic, with a longing that can only be satisfied by further reading in the extended bibliography of sources that concludes the volume.