Henry Moore: ingenious hack?

But in retrospect, considering as an example the Madonna and Child that he carved for Walter Hussey when rector of St Matthew's, Northampton, only the setting in a church made it a sacred image; removed from that church it becomes a secular object of a quite different nature.

Remove the sacred images of Michelangelo and Donatello (the sculptors whose mantles Moore is so often claimed to have inherited) from churches to museums, and they remain religious, inspired by religion and inspiring it.

Peter Fuller also had it that Moore "revived and replenished an indigenous romantic tradition" - as though the neo-romanticism of English art in the Twenties and Thirties were solely his achievement and Sutherland, Minton and Vaughan had no part in it.

To me it is inconceivable that sculpture in any 20th century mode (and modish is the word for most of it) is central to the innocent soul wandering in the darkling wilderness, the verdant nook and dripping cranny that are the familiar business of the neo-romantic painter - to all these, though he touches occasionally on them in drawings, Moore the sculptor was a stranger, but Fuller went so far as to assert that his was "an aesthetic of ecological harmony".

Moore, it can perhaps be argued (though only at the risk of being in Pseuds' Corner for a week), treated the human form as a rolling English landscape of the Cotswolds, Dartmoor or the North Riding, but though I concede that most of his figurative sculptures look vastly better in landscape settings than in the bleak and windblown piazzas in which property developers once habitually abandoned them, this hardly amounts to ecological harmony.

One is, indeed, on safer ground arguing that, though the King and Queen sit as comfortably and iconically on a hillside in Dumfries as Ozymandias once stood in Egypt's sands, Moore's sculpture is rarely capable of pastoral dialogue and, for the most part, he and every other sculptor of the 20th century had no business to invade the landscape with intrusive objects.

Perhaps the formal urban park with f loral clocks and hedges trimmed by topiarists is the best place for Moore's sculpture, for it did not look at ease even in the tamed pastures of Kensington Gardens sloping to the Serpentine, when casually dumped there for a while in the late Seventies. Ecological harmony, my foot.

Moore, born in 1898, was by the age of 10 inspired by tales of Michelangelo as a not much older boy, determined to be a sculptor.

After years as a schoolmaster and a soldier (the First World War ended in November 1918), he received his first training as the only student of sculpture in the Leeds School of Art in 1920; the following year he became a student at the Royal College of Art and in 1924 was appointed an instructor there; in 1932 he became first head of sculpture in a new department at Chelsea.

Throughout the Twenties he was very much a creature of the decade influenced not only by the swelling hips and thighs of Frank Dobson's female models, but by the Art Deco shallows of Eric Gill, the condensed forms of Gaudier-Brzeska, the weight and bulk of figures painted by Fernand Léger and by the pseudoclassical inventions of Picasso.

Driven by the spirit of enquiry he looked too at the distant past, at the heavy figures of Giotto and Masaccio, at the absolute simplicity of Cycladic form and feature, at fluttering Greek draperies, at the Fallen Gaul and white-eyed marble busts of Roman emperors, and at whatever he could find from pre-Columbian America, the Oceanic civilisations and the heart of Africa. With this repertory of references he crept forward with his experiments in style while dragging one foot in half-a-dozen pasts.

Throughout the Thirties, Moore contributed to exhibitions, wrote articles on sculpture, made Jacob Epstein a significant friend, joined Unit One (an informal band of English artists determined to be "of today") and the organising committee of the International Surrealist Exhibition.

His critical prestige precarious, he was brave enough to be openly contemptuous (quite rightly) of the Royal Academy, then art's most powerful institution, and through his work rather than polemic, came to the notice of influential men who shared that view - Herbert Read and Kenneth Clark, kingmakers both.

In 1941 he was appointed an official war artist and in 1945, the Second World War scarcely over, he joined the Art Panel of the Arts Council, Kenneth Clark its chairman.

Inconspicuously Moore had become, if not yet the darling of the Establishment, a member of it, and if he was known by the general public, it was less for his sculpture than for the drawings that he had made of sleepers in the tunnels of the Underground while the Luftwaffe demolished London with its blitzkrieg.

His sculpture came to prominence in 1948 when the British Council sent it to the Venice Biennale and he won the International Prize; with that award he could no longer be ignored in England.

Forty years after the pre-pubescent boy in Castleford first heard of Michelangelo, success, fame and international demand suddenly burgeoned and threequarters of his 1,000 sculptures were designed, enlarged and executed during some 25 years of late activity.

In this period of great commercial success, Moore was increasingly an aesthetic, intellectual and ethical failure. Many of his sculptures were original only in the initial stage of the tiny maquette teased into shape by his own fingers, for the enlargements of these (in all sizes) were wholly the work of studio assistants, of whom there were as many as 40; countless late bronzes are little better than reproductions.

That Moore betrayed his early principle of "truth to materials", by which he meant letting wood, stone, marble or bronze affect the final outcome of the form and speak through it, is evident in the crude Arch erected by the Serpentine and almost sliding into it (now dismantled).

This was carved in travertine marble by assistants copying a sevenmetre mock-up in polystyrene, itself a grossly enlarged copy of the original maquette, which is about the same size as the bridge of a violin; Moore was surprised and affected when he saw it for the first time and proclaimed it "jolly good" as though he were looking at a new work by another artist - which, indeed, he was.

One of the consequences of so much copied work is that the quality of an invention that on a tiny scale may look impressive, when enlarged can be embarrassing in exposing the meanness of the idea and the pomposity of its treatment; we shall see this with devastating clarity when Marc Quinn's enlarged Alison Lapper mounts the plinth in Trafalgar Square.

The imminent exhibition, Henry Moore at Dulwich Picture Gallery, dwells on work before 1960 and primarily on that of the early and least familiar years. Many exhibits come from the Henry Moore Foundation, but more from the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich; Robert and Lisa Sainsbury and Henry and Irina Moore established their friendship in 1933 and to some extent this exhibition is a sentimental valediction to it.

We see in depth the exploratory, responsive, fecund young Moore, and without a great weight of late works, can judge him more incisively. Was he, even amid the wretched competition offered in the 20th century, a Michelangelo of sorts? Was he, even for 15 minutes, the greatest living Englishman?

Set aside this and other naive questions, and ask one to which this important exhibition offers something of an answer, before he awed us with sheer bulk and scale, the traditional weapons of totalitarian propaganda art: was Moore ever more than an eclectic, derivative and ingenious hack?

Henry Moore is at Dulwich Picture Gallery, Gallery Road, SE21 (020 8693 5254) until 12 September. Open daily (not Monday) 10am-5pm, Saturday and Sunday 11am-5pm. Admission £7.

Henry Moore