You've never seen anything like this. Why is it here? It stands out. It slows you down
and you feel that it's something enormous and it certainly reverberates with the landscape
surrounding it. My name is Michael Taylor. My name is Mei Ling-Halm. I'm the curator
of modern art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I'm an installation artist here in Philadelphia.
We're looking at Henry Moore's three YPs, number one, points. It stands on three points. Three
tiny little points. Here is a very heavy piece of bronze which can sit so gently. It seems to float
almost on its base. Up on its toes. It could move at any time. It could at any time collapse.
It's this thing in a collapse. It's a kind of fragile beauty. It's really meant to be
experienced in the round. And, you know, you move around it and you have this little dialogue with
it. Go round the piece. It sort of entices and pulls you around. Go round. Move around it.
Passing your eyes over the entire form. Because as you move around the piece, the views change.
Rounded forms, angular forms. The profile actually becomes like a sharp edge.
Let your eyes wander. It's an easy piece to approach. Really look at it closely. Look at
the surface where it's smooth. But then look at it where it's all rough. Moore leaves the tool marks.
Hacked and gouged. Crevices. He's hacked them. He's gouged them. Scratched them. Made them look
weathered and worn. Those are ways to catch the shadows. He wanted it to seem like something
very old, even though it was made in 1964. Have a look underneath. Look at the tapering points
and get in the crevices. Get on your knees. Get on your knees and have a look underneath.
You see just these three little toes touching down. The shadows underneath it are very
much a part of the work. Moore was an artist who was very in tune to the natural environment.
And one of the things that he liked to do was to look for pieces of flint in the dirt. He was
finding fossils and flints in his garden. And he would enlarge them through processes of casting
and working with a very famous bronze manufacturer in Berlin called NIAC. And in this case,
he produced a mammoth sculpture out of a piece of flint that was just two inches by two inches.
It's something you can hold in your hand. Imagine something in the palm of your hand.
How does that form grow? And of course, it doesn't actually resemble or closely resemble,
I should say, the actual flint that he used, which I've seen in the studio. The points are not
that exaggerated, but it definitely does tape it down. So he's always making amendments,
things that seem to him to make it more sculptural. His work can exist at almost any kind of scale
and still have wonderful presence. I could imagine it twice the size, three times the size,
ten times the size. It seems to be something that is organic. That's growing. And yet the more you
look at it, the more you think, you've never seen anything like this.
