The Grapevine Art & Soul Salon

Reflections

by Barbara Knott

A Look at Erich Neumann’s The Archetypal World of Henry Moore

Of the art critics who have taken measure of Henry Moore’s work, perhaps none, in assessing its cultural and historical importance, has made a higher claim than Erich Neumann, who wrote on art and creativity and consciousness from the standpoint of a gifted Jungian theorist and therapist. Neumann focuses on the principles that govern our habitual ways of seeing, which he calls archetypes, after psychologist C. G. Jung’s theory that we live and experience life according to patterns passed from ancestors to descendents over long periods of time as distillations of human experience, visible everywhere, including in dreams and myths and works of art. In The Archetypal World of Henry Moore (1959), Neumann (13) says that the essence of Moore’s work lies in its concentration on the archetype of the feminine.

Without the prompting of an art critic, one has only to look at Moore’s reclining female figures to be reminded of landscapes one may have seen. I think of the Eastern Forest area of the United States, among the Blue Ridge Mountains, where the traveler can see hills that resemble breasts and knees, and valleys that locate the in-betweens.

When I first saw Moore’s work in 1972 at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence, I was in Europe to study the work of C. G. Jung. I was delighted to find this exhibition, which could be seen as a massive three-dimensional illustration of the feminine archetype. Perhaps I first saw Moore as an archetypal artist, but I moved rather quickly into an appreciation of his work for its own sake, as having no need for a theoretical context supplied by the viewer. Nevertheless, I find Neumann’s ideas about Moore to be stimulating.

Neumann has written extensively on the archetype of the mother and the eternal feminine. Moore offered him ample instances of this archetypal constellation in modern art. The mother-child motif is a paradigm of the human relationship to the world, to nature, and to life itself (Neumann 21). To establish the analogy of mother-child and artist-work, Neumann suggests (25), In the creative act the artist identifies himself with the thing created, as though giving out a part of himself, like a mother with her child. And on Moore’s relationship to his created work, he observes (44): For him its origination from the creative “Mater” is still so alive in “living” matter that one could almost say he serves only in the capacity of a midwife, helping her to bring forth into reality the intention slumbering within.

For Moore, nature is maternal, and it is Nature who creates the world of forms. That is the true object of Moore’s work, according to Neumann (29):

The basic phenomenon that all life is dependent on the Primordial Feminine, the giver and nourisher, is to be seen most clearly in the eternal dependence of the child on the mother. And it is precisely because the creative individual, being dependent on the nourishing power of the maternal creative principle, always experiences himself as the “child” that the mother-child relationship occupies such a central place in Moore’s work. Analogies between Woman and Nature, Child and the Created, play throughout Moore’s art.

Although Moore’s sculpture is distinctly modern in its somewhat abstract style, it hearkens back in form and content to totems in tribal cultures and to fertility figures like the Venus of Willendorf, one of thousands of small figures characterized by the presence of exaggerated breasts, belly and buttocks and the absence of face, discovered throughout Europe and Asia, some dating from as far back as 30,000 years ago. These small figures have been found in locations identified as dwelling thresholds and once-planted fields, likely places to lay a carved prayer for fertility. In such instances, the figure of a woman, who brings forth her offspring from her body, is already seen to be like a seed pod that, with the blessing of a fertile deity, unfolds the new life within it.

Neumann says (44) that Moore makes an attempt—and a successful one—to get at the essential nature of the stone or the wood and to shape it, as it were, ‘from inside,’ from its own center, with all the piety with which stones are worshipped as sacral objects in primitive cultures. In these figures, as in Moore’s art, we are led into the realm of the deeply human, where we consider how we give birth not only to the offspring of our bodies but also to artistic offspring conceived in imagination.

Neumann spends considerable time discussing and demonstrating that Moore does what great artists of any age are called to do: to set right any one-sidedness of conscious attitude in the cultural world view. He identifies the dominant values of Moore’s time as decidedly masculine, patriarchal, abstract, rational, upward-striving, and increasingly sterile. The role of the artist, Neumann says, is to open the doors that have been closed and release the values, in this case, of the feminine.

Here is what Neumann says about Moore’s place in our cultural evolution:

The artist’s fascination by the mother archetype is … by no means only a personal phenomenon of his individual history; it represents an advance into a psychic realm that is of fateful importance not only for himself but for his whole age, if not for mankind in general. We have repeatedly emphasized that man’s relation to nature and the creative forces of life is reflected in the mother archetype. In an age when Western man, through his exaggerated respect for the patriarchal spirit and the techniques it has engendered, is in danger of losing contact with the roots of existence, there has arisen in the unconscious, in accordance with a general psychic law, a compensatory tendency that is reactivating this feminine, maternal, earth-nature aspect, which has been too much repressed. Moore’s work … is the clear expression of this countermovement… (61-2).

Neumann points out that Moore was not unconscious of what he was doing (31): But his understanding of himself goes even deeper, and in his “Notes on Sculpture” he formulates the essential elements of the feminine archetype’s form and content in exactly the way that depth psychology and especially analytical psychology conceive them. He quotes Moore:

I am very much aware that associational, psychological factors play a large part in sculpture. The meaning and significance of form itself probably depends on the countless associations of man’s history. For example, rounded forms convey an idea of fruitfulness, maturity, probably because the earth, woman’s breasts, and most fruits are rounded, and these shapes are important because they have this background in our habits of perception. I think the humanist organic element will always be for me of fundamental importance in sculpture, giving sculpture its vitality.

Neumann says of one of Moore’s figures (Verde di Prato l931), The woman and her child are shown—still in concretely representational style—as a living cluster of fruit, creative Nature made manifest as the Maternal Feminine.

Moore, according to Neumann, takes us back to the roots of our existence in nature by exploring the natural world through organic forms and through the reclining female figure and the mother and child motif. World, body, woman, child: the cluster of motifs that stirred in Moore the wonder that worked through his fingers toward expression over and over again.

What would Moore make of Neumann’s interpretations of his vocation and his work? Well, we happen to know (Wilkinson 115):

Part of the excitement of sculpture is the associations it can arouse, quite independent of the original aims and ideas of the sculptor. But I do not have any desire to rationalise the eroticism in my work, to think out consciously what Freudian or Jungian symbols may lie behind what I create. That I leave for others to do. I started to read Erich Neumann’s book on my work, The Archetypal World of Henry Moore [1959], in which he suggests a Jungian interpretation, but I stopped halfway through the first chapter, because I did not want to know about these things, whether they were true or not. I did not want such aspects of my work to become henceforth self-conscious. I feel they should remain subconscious and the work should remain intuitive. Perhaps the associations it can arouse are all the stronger for that very reason.

Moore appreciated the work that had been done by Neumann and others to understand his art, and he also had the good sense to protect his artistic vision from contamination by the critics' interpretations.

Works Cited

Neumann, Erich (1959). The Archetypal World of Henry Moore, trans. R.F.C. Hull. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.

Wilkinson, Alan. Ed. (2002). Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations. Berkeley: University of California Press.