Bill Brandt | Henry Moore

"The camera," said Orson Welles, "is much more than a recording apparatus, it is a medium via which messages reach us from another world." It was the camera, and the political and cultural circumstances of picture-making during the Second World War, that first brought Bill Brandt (1904–1983) and Henry Moore (1898–1986) together. During the Blitz, these two artists produced images for the British government of civilians sheltering in the London Underground. Widely disseminated through news media and exhibitions, their haunting depictions of this human crisis became defining images of the war.

The exhibition begins with these early works and traces the artists' intersecting paths and creative exchange across the postwar years. For both artists, Britain's landscape and its majestic megaliths such as Stonehenge and Avebury demonstrated the arresting power of sculptural forms. At a time of national recovery, Brandt and Moore looked to forms in nature as a means of expressing subjective experience and evoking the human body. Reworking these motifs across different media, the two artists explored the ability of images to reflect different social, political, and artistic contexts.

Drawings, photographs, and sculptures are shown alongside experimental photo collages, unprinted negatives, rare color transparencies, and the popular magazines that published the artists' work. Viewed together, these diverse creative materials demonstrate the interdisciplinary nature of art making in the twentieth century.

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