Moore's living legacy

It's been a difficult two years for the institute. Key posts have been frozen and substantial reductions to budgets are anticipated. John Roles, the head of Leeds museums and galleries, says that the institute is facing the "inevitable short-term pressures that all arts institutions face at the current time".

But it is also clear that the institute's parent, the Henry Moore Foundation, has been reassessing its activities in Leeds.

The story of the Henry Moore Institute is, in part, the story of Henry Moore's complex relationship with Yorkshire. It begins in 1919 when Moore enrolled at Leeds School of Art. He was 21, just back from the war, living at home in Castleford and determined to win a scholarship to the Royal College of Art.

In later life, Moore was scathing about the Leeds art school whose curriculum he condemned as narrow, technical, old-fashioned and stultifying. He particularly loathed "copying from the antique" – drawing the School's collection of plaster casts – and like generations of students before and since, he wondered "is it me"? He realised only later that "besides not being very good pieces of sculpture... they'd been whitewashed every year for 20 years. All the sensitivity and the form of the original had been blurred under a quarter of an inch of white paint."

If he had been younger, Moore suspected, his time at Leeds might have finished him off. But as it was, he was sufficiently confident to take advantage of other opportunities, most notably the chance to study an extraordinary collection of contemporary art owned by Michael Sadler, the vice-chancellor of Leeds University. Sadler's tastes were wide-ranging and international.

Moore visited his home and absorbed the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and Matisse.

Moore won his scholarship and left for London in 1921. Thereafter, he spent little time in Yorkshire. However, the fact that he was a miner's son from Castleford figured prominently in press reviews and lent his controversial art a reputation for grittiness and honesty. And several of his most crucial relationships continued to be with Yorkshire people, for example Wakefield-born sculptor Barbara Hepworth (a friend and his only significant rival), and the North Yorkshire writer and critic Herbert Read.

Moore returned to Castleford to sketch miners at the beginning of the Second World War. It was an important commission which together with his much more famous drawings of people in the London Underground during the Blitz began a process whereby Moore's work (which had been criticised as inhuman and destructive) became identified first with the suffering of the British people and later with post-war reconstruction.

It was at this time also, that Moore began to develop a relationship with Leeds City Art Gallery whose collections were being transformed from the "pretty poor affair" Moore remembered. The gallery's buildings, however, remained small and dilapidated, and so, when Leeds City Council decided it needed to extend the Gallery in the 1970s, they approached Moore.

He had set up the Henry Moore Foundation in 1977 to conserve his own work and reputation and to "assist the arts in general and sculpture in particular". The gallery refurbishment in Leeds incorporated a special section, the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, and shortly afterwards the Foundation created the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, also based in Leeds, which enabled the creation of new work by international artists.

In the 1990s these two aspects came together in the Henry Moore Institute and Penelope Curtis was appointed the curator in 1999. Over the last 10 years the galleries have hosted a wide range of shows and won a high approval rating among the region's universities and colleges.

Professor David Jackson of Leeds University says: "We benefit greatly from the expertise of the institute's staff, the exhibitions of international significance, and the opportunity to use the collections, the library and the teaching spaces, all for free." Dr Jason Edwards of York University regularly brings students over to the institute, and describes it as 'a wonderful resource'. "We've been doing something unique," says Penelope Curtis, "by combining creatively exhibition-making, collections and research."

The single most common complaint from critics is that it is costly given how many people use it - about 1,000 a week pass through its doors. But Patrick Eyres, the editor of a Leeds-based publication called New Arcadian Journal, says "It shouldn't all be about footfall. Institutions need to be able to do different things. The Yorkshire Sculpture Park for example is a wonderful day out. The institute is another matter altogether. Leeds is fantastically lucky to have such extraordinary resources available for free to someone just walking in off the street."

So where now for the institute? There is among insiders that its focus will narrow, academically and curatorially, particularly if budgets continue to be reduced.

Richard Calvocoressi, the director of the Henry Moore Foundation, says concerns about budgets are 'fairly speculative'.

But Jason Edwards remains worried by the sense of uncertainty that has developed and David Jackson agrees. "'We've developed a strong relationship with the Institute. To undermine that will diminish the cultural life of the University and Leeds. Everybody will lose out.".

YP MAG 1/5/10