The skeletons in Henry Moore's closet

There was more to the bluff Yorkshireman than his monumental sculptures and morale-boosting drawings of Londoners in the Blitz. Beneath Henry Moore’s wartime record lies a file of murky secrets

I can see him before me now. A short, stocky, grey-haired Yorkshireman with a comb-over worthy of Bobby Charlton, dressed boringly in brownish dad trousers and a greyish tweed jacket. God, he looks ordinary. He’s the kind of utterly typical ageing Yorkshireman you might find driving a tractor in front of you on the road to Whitby, or sporting an apron at the village butcher’s in Butterwick. There’s a resignedness to him as well, which feels ingrained. Whatever real happiness is, the glum feeling emanating from this old boy is its opposite.

But don’t think for one moment that the dressed-down Yorkshireman is alone, or that nobody gives a damn about his sense of resignation and his gloom. In fact, he’s hugely famous. And right now an army of hungry, even desperate photographers is pressing in on him from all sides, begging him to do this and that. “The hands, the hands,” they shout. So the old boy dutifully holds up his thick, stubby, farmer’s fingers, and pretends to rub them across the back of the lumpy metal sculpture round which we have gathered. “This way, Mr Moore,” they scream. So he turns this way. “Stroke it again,” they insist. So he strokes.

That is how I remember my first face-to-face encounter with Henry Moore in 1978. There were other meetings later on. I interviewed him a couple of times. But it is the first, outside Cartwright Hall in Bradford, where yet another of the seemingly countless exhibitions of his work was about to open, that sticks in my mind. Mainly because I could not believe, and cannot believe, the old boy’s compliance. Here was the most famous sculptor on Earth, a gigantic cultural presence whose name was known from Brisbane to Beijing, dutifully obeying every demand barked at him by a pack of local camera-dogs from Bradford.

As the yapping snappers barged me out of the way to get to him, I wondered why he didn’t just turn round and tell them all to f*** off? But the old boy with the comb-over and the brownish trousers, the greyish sports jacket and the gloomy air, was not the type to start slapping paparazzi and throwing public wobblies. He was not the kind who makes a scene. So what kind was he?

Right now, that is an exceedingly pertinent question. A huge Henry Moore exhibition is heading our way, and one of the things it seems determined to prove is that Moore was not who we think he was. The avuncular Yorkshireman with the cloth cap and the polite twinkle was just a front. Underneath, he was altogether darker, edgier, weirder.

According to the catalogue of this image-denting event at Tate Britain, the country’s most popular post-war artist was actually driven by powerful secret urges. His art may usually have appeared pleasantly blobby and as sentimental as a Christmas card from yer nan, but its real aim was to explore aspects of the human condition that were “abject, erotic, vulnerable and visceral”. The Tate is about to imply that Postman Pat was Hannibal Lecter!

Or something like that. At the very least, the show is suggesting that Moore was a dissembler, a pretender, who explained one thing while he did another. To make its point, it will re-examine his so-called Shelter Drawings, the distressing images he made in the early years of the second world war, of wrapped-up Londoners huddled in temporary shelters on the London Underground, waiting darkly for the bombs to pass.

The shelter drawings are probably the most celebrated works Moore ever made, and certainly the best loved. They seemed to capture, so movingly, the resilience and stoicism of the British during the Blitz. Buried together in their living tombs, swaddled like bandaged maggots, the poor, sightless London masses are silently withstanding everything that Jerry could throw at them. These weren’t just scenes of solemn resistance on the Underground. This was the most moving portrayal of the unbreakable British spirit anyone had ever produced. Or so we thought.

According to the Tate, however, the shelter drawings are not what they seem to be. There are problems with their origins. Complications. In his own words, which Moore repeated to me when I interviewed him in Bradford after the camera-dogs had dispersed, the underground drawings were inspired by an unforgettable real-life encounter. The way Moore told it, a few days after the Blitz began, he and his wife, Irina, made arrangements to dine with friends in the West End. Henry would usually drive into town from his flat in Belsize Park in his new Standard 8, but on that particular night the car was out of action. So they took the Tube.

On the way home, the train stopped at every station. At each new platform, more and more frightened Londoners flocked into the tunnels to spend the night on the platforms: burying themselves in the dark to keep safe. Shocked, moved, inspired, Moore claimed he immediately began the great series of doomy underground scenes that were to endear him so fully to the British public and which seemed to put such a vivid face to a moment of national darkness.

The shelter scenes changed his career. He was internationally admired before he made them, but not generally loved. After he made them, he was quickly promoted to national treasure. They sold well too. And the huge financial success that Moore was about to enjoy can be traced back to them. He emerged from the war in a pack of one: Henry Moore was now Britain’s most famous, best-loved and richest artist.

So what are the interesting questions that the Tate is now asking of these famous images? The most surprising thing about the shelter scenes is that they were not sculptures. Although Moore was already Britain’s best-known modernist sculptor, the War Artist’s Advisory Committee — the official body charged with handing out commissions to Britain’s war artists — was not allowed to employ sculptors. It was against the rules.

But the chairman of the committee, Kenneth Clark, a passionate supporter of Moore’s work, appears to have decided to get round that. When Moore showed Clark his new shelter drawings, Clark was supposedly so moved that he insisted Moore take up an official post. “See, Henry, you can be a war artist,” Clark is reported to have wept. A decent income came with the job. Moore could not refuse. The Tate, however, is now suggesting things happened differently. Some plotting went on. And some dissembling.

Back in 1938, during the Spanish civil war, the great war photographer Robert Capa had already published a series of photographs of republican wives and their children huddled in the Spanish metro: blanketed, swathed, hunched. “If there is safety anywhere it is in the subways now. The men at the front, the women and children underground,” lamented Capa in his captions.

Moore must have seen the book. Three years before the supposed encounter with the underground Londoners at Belsize Park, he was already contemplating the scene. It also seems that some months before he was appointed an official war artist by Clark, moves were already afoot to get him the job. First, he needed to stop being a sculptor. The most damning evidence that Moore essentially made up his Belsize story is a set of photographs of mothers and children huddled in the dark that appeared in the magazine Picture Post a full month before the supposed encounter on the Underground.

These photographs were clearly the inspiration for the first shelter drawings. The poses are identical. Which not only challenges the chronology of Moore’s version of events but also proves that the pictures of the huddled mothers were found in a magazine rack. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that: artists steal stuff all the time. But the new storyline seems to diminish the mythic origins of Moore’s work. The image of him nicking his poses from Picture Post rather than discovering them at the core of the human condition feels culturally inglorious.

Moore’s daughter, Mary, who was born in 1946, missing the war by a whisker, watched her father working every day, heard him talking every day, but remembers little mention of the conflict. Her father, she ponders, was from a generation that did not share their inner darknesses. The one event that did trouble him, mightily, was a projected memorial for Auschwitz.

He was on a committee assembled to decide on the task, and Mary remembers it causing her father constant anxiety. On and on he tussled with the issues, before finally deciding that Auschwitz did not need a memorial. “I think the place itself is the memorial,” he told his nine-year-old daughter, who was hardly in a position to understand.

“It says everything that needs to be said.”

Mary’s view — a correct one, I imagine — is that the shelter drawing triggered sculptural memories buried deep within her father, of claustrophobic sand burrows explored as a boy, dark Yorkshire undergrounds in which fear fused with excitement. When she saw them recently at the Imperial War Museum, she found them freshly moving. “I suddenly realised that these people were not just sleeping. These people could be dead. They took on so many more meanings than just people in a tunnel, asleep.”

However or whenever they were made, the shelter drawings capture the tenor of their times, and that’s all that counts. But if Moore was indeed guilty of telling Yorkshire porkies about something as central to his own mythology as the drawings from the Underground, what else have we been mistold about him? What other secrets lurk in his story?

When I started out as a critic, Moore was by far the biggest artist around. His shadow fell everywhere. You couldn’t avoid him. So famous was he that he seemed to hover over us all like a baddie’s spaceship in Doctor Who. The King of Holes, they called him, or on posh occasions the Count of Concavity.

In fact our Henry, bless him, turned down a real knighthood when he was offered one as far back as 1951. He thought it wasn’t right for a working-class Yorkshire lad like him, whose father had been down the mines, and whose mam never took a day off in her life from the cooooking and the scrubbing in Castleford, to be going around calling himself Sir Henry. What would t’neighbours think?

If you imagine, therefore, that he must have been a modest Yorkshire sort, humble and self-deprecating, let me assure you he was not. By the time he died in 1986, aged 88, Moore held 75 assorted international gongs: honorary degrees, international art prizes, memberships of foreign art academies. He had the Order of Merit and was a Companion of Honour. The man had a gigantic appetite for public approbation.

By 1980, there had already been 70 ambitious Moore exhibitions in 25 countries. Anyone wishing to get away from his work would have needed the escape skills of Squadron Leader Roger Bartlett and his boys. What have they got outside Unesco in Paris? A Henry Moore. What stands outside the Lincoln Center in New York? A Henry Moore. What sits on a plinth outside our Houses of Parliament? A Henry Moore. What do I see every day on my constitutional as I tramp from Hampstead Heath to Kenwood House? A goddam Henry Moore.

We are dealing here with a presence so vast and total and thrusting that it felt like a pillow being pushed down on your head. A fame so suffocating that it seemed to cut off your air supply. When the acerbic Tom Wolfe made his famous complaint about modern art, that it had led to the depositing of “a turd in every plaza”, whose ubiquitous turds did he have in mind? Henry Moore’s.

So when Moore finally expired after his seemingly interminable gong-encrusted innings, I confess to feeling little sadness and lots of relief. Everyone else must have felt this way too, because the avoidance of him that started the moment he died was, in its way, every bit as spectacular as his fame had been. Overnight, a total silence on the subject of Henry Moore appeared to descend upon the land.

Part of the problem, I now see, was that Moore’s bluff, goody-two-shoes Yorkshire image had become as obsolete as a miner’s strike. By 1986, the world was on the cusp of a whizzy new digital future. The whole of Britain felt as if it were heading south, looking for jobs in banking. Nobody wanted to stare at Yorkshire rocks any more, or bring home interestingly shaped pebbles from the beach. The 1950s were over. Goodbye, Henry Moore.

How interesting, then, that the new Henry the Tate is hoping to slide by us is distinguished by hidden sexual yearnings and dark copyright steals. It’s a thoroughly predictable rebrand: Marks & Spencer getting taken over by Agent Provocateur. Frankly, you would have to be as eyeless and blind as one of Moore’s reclining blobbies not to suspect naughty origins for his provocative lumps and bumps: the sunken sculptural orifices, the dangly protruding bits.

When I interviewed him in Bradford, he told me how, as a boy, he had rubbed oily liniment into his mam’s naked back to relieve her aches and pains. Moore reckoned that was where his feeling for sculpture was born. When he told me the story it sounded entirely innocent. Thinking about it now, I wonder how it can have been?

The wartime darknesses had a murky chronology too. Moore was old enough to have fought in the first world war as well, and although his stay at the front was brief, just a few months in northern France as a teenage soldier in the Civil Service Rifles, there was time enough to dump him in the Battle of Cambrai, one of the deadliest encounters of the campaign. Of the 400 men in his regiment, 52 survived Cambrai. Moore himself was gassed, and had to be sent back to England to recover.

He must have seen much that was awful and terrifying. Yet the few words he left behind about his war have an air of schoolboy excitement about them, as if modelled on a Biggles story: “In one pothole we found a bottle of rum. The corporal got tight and I had to take control. I said, Come on, we are going to run. It looked as if he was pulling me! The lance corporal got the medal and I didn’t.” Missing out on a medal was the chief grievance he nursed.

Strangely though, in the 1950s, Moore’s war wounds seemed to open up again and begin hurting. He produced a set of spiky sculptures of flaying figures writhing on their backs, which he called his Fallen Warriors. In their hopelessness, they appear to skip back half a century to the first world war. The Tate, in another display of cool iconoclasm, reveals that they were probably inspired, once again, by the photographs of Robert Capa. In this case, by that celebrated image of a dying militiaman that Capa himself had probably faked during the Spanish civil war.

What does it all prove? That Moore was sneaky? Oh, yes. That you should never trust a straight-talking Yorkshireman? Oh, yes. That he dissembled and plotted and hid his sources? Oh, yes. That all this newly discovered deviousness is the tip of an iceberg, and that beneath the avuncular surface of Henry Moore an inferno was probably burning? Oh, yes.

• Henry Moore, February 24-August 8, Tate Britain; www.tate.org.uk. Tel: 0207 887 8888

Waldemar Januszczak, The Sunday Times 07-02-2010