truth to material(s)

truth to material(s). A belief, particularly associated with Henry Moore, that the form of a work of art should be inseparably related to the material in which it is made. The origins of the concept, although not the phrase, are found in the writings of the British critic John Ruskin (1819–1900), especially in his book The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1856). His interpretation of the idea is more sophisticated than Moore's, for he relates this ‘truth’ to the knowledge and expectations of the spectator, as opposed to some inner quality of the material itself. In 1934, in Unit One, Moore wrote that ‘Each material has its own individual qualities … Stone, for example, is hard and concentrated and should not be falsified to look like soft flesh … It should keep its hard tense stoniness.’ Although in theory the idea could be applied to any material, in effect it was used by Moore as an argument for direct carving, as practised by himself and contemporaries such as Barbara Hepworth and John Skeaping. Some other sculptors of the period, such as Brancusi and Epstein, even when not dogmatically committed to carving, made a clear distinction in handling in their respective treatments of bronze and stone.

Moore later admitted that the idea of truth to materials had become a fetish and in 1951 he conceded that it should not be made into a criterion of value, ‘otherwise a snowman made by a child would have to be praised at the expense of a Rodin or a Bernini'. (A virtuoso in marble cutting, Bernini was renowned for his skill in creating lifelike effects and therefore exemplified the kind of ‘falsification’ Moore had criticized in Unit One; commenting on the elaborate curls of the wig in his bust of Louis XIV, Bernini—according to a contemporary report—said that it was ‘no easy thing to attain that lightness in the hair to which he aspired, for he had to struggle against the contrary nature of the material'.) The extreme ‘anti-Bernini’ position that Moore had the good sense to warn against was satirized in a Punch cartoon of 1954—by William Sillince (1906–74)—in which two artistic types looking at a snowman admire the child's ‘instinctive understanding of the right use of a medium', unaware that they are about to be pelted with snowballs from behind. Although the phrase itself is closely associated with the aesthetic debates of the 1930s, the concept of truth to materials survived in the emphasis on form as the expression of process and material found in the work of Minimalists and Post-Minimalists such as Robert Morris and Richard Serra.