I should probably start by explaining that I can’t claim to be a massive Patti Smith fan. I know who she is of course, I can hum a couple of songs, but I wouldn’t jump through fire to go and see her, if you get what I mean. Fortunately for me then, there was a complementary Cherwell ticket going spare, and the event was five minutes from my room. No excuse.

Smith was at the Literary Festival to promote her new book, Just Kids, about her relationship with famous photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The pair met in New York in the 70s when Smith was just twenty, and remained firm friends until he died in ’89. The book is, Smith explained, the fulfilment of the last promise she made to him: to put their story into writing.

During her interview with David Freeman, Smith described how she met Mapplethorpe several times before he rescued her from an awkward park bench scenario with a bearded science-fiction writer by pretending to be her boyfriend (I know – we’ve all been there, right?). Smith then proceeded to regale the audience with tales of their time living at the Chelsea Hotel, hanging out with Janice Joplin and avoiding drugs in the late sixties.

Smith revealed that the iconic image on the front of Horses (Smith’s first album) had taken Mapplethorpe only eight shots to perfect. Mapplethorpe needed no assistants and requested only that Smith “didn’t get spaghetti stains on my shirt”, she added that “for Robert, taking pictures was no big deal.”

During the talk Smith had a tendency to slide towards that brand of slightly-bullshitty-artsy-indulgence: her first song was “a young person’s declaration of existence”, while Mapplethorpe “was not rebelling against anything, he was himself, he was his own vision”. I’m not entirely sure what that means.

The heights of silly were not reached, however, until the audience put their frankly bizarre questions to Smith, ranging from: “Who is the coolest person you have ever met?” to “Do you have any advice for a 13 year old?” (To which Smith’s answer was: “Take care of your teeth”). Enlightening indeed.

The high point of the event followed the question everyone was hoping someone would ask: “will you sing for us?” Smith whipped out her guitar and sang two songs for the audience – the second was about William Blake (“whenever I start to feel sorry for myself I think of William Blake”). I emerged from the marquee into the rain with a smile on my face; Smith’s wit, modesty and extraordinary voice (talking and singing) made the event a thoroughly well-spent hour of my life. I even enjoyed the artsy-bull if I’m honest. Patti Smith is almost certainly the coolest person the Sunday Times literary festival has seen for some time. I’m sure the book is a good read.

Revered as one of the great sculptors of the twentieth century, a wide-ranging collection of sculptures, drawings and sketches by Henry Moore has been brought together at the Tate Britain. Works span his entire career from the 1920s to the early 1960s.

Moore emerged on the art scene with the concerted intention to place himself apart from classical sculptural tradition and its restrictions of academic modelling. Maintaining the integrity of the materials he worked with – stone, plaster, bronze and wood – he engaged in direct carving.

His sculptures are all at once beautifully simple and complex. There is a duality about them. On the one hand, their fluid forms seamlessly punctuate the gallery spaces, but on the other hand, they are evidently the culmination of meticulous anxiety-ridden workings at the hands of Moore, who explores themes of apprehension, claustrophobia and the violated in much of his work. Bryan Robertson, the exhibition’s curator has commented, “His work is grim, and on occasion tragic. There is no easy reassurance in it. It is anything but gentle.”

Whilst I do not wholly agree with this as a generalized statement of all the work on display, it is true that some pieces are imbued with a great sense of the agonizing processes undertaken to nurture the sculptures to completion. His forms are sinewy and very deliberate.

The exhibition’s breadth means that we see how Moore’s artistic processes change and develop. The works in the first two rooms are figurative and cement his principle and enduring interest in the human form. This is revisited at the end of the exhibition with a focus on the reclining female figure. In the interim, Moore’s work departs in a Modernist direction, and two rooms are dedicated to work that reflects a concern for the abstract, the allusive and the suggestive. Sculptures in this phase of his career have sensuously undulating surfaces and subtle protuberances. They are sexy and evocative.

What follows is Moore’s lesser-known work. The outbreak of the war marked a switch in Moore’s medium of choice from sculpture to drawing. Using a combination of pencil, wax crayon, watercolour washes and ink, Moore produced an array of drawings, diversifying his artistic repertoire. His ‘Shelter Drawings’ depict the hostile environment faced by the masses as they huddled in the London Underground, away from the full force of the bomb attacks above ground. Moore also made drawings of coalmine workers and like his official ‘war art’, these reflect the artist’s tremendous sensitivity towards his subject matter.

The exhibition ends on a high with a room of Moore’s sculptures made out of  elmwood. The recumbent female forms are complemented by the use of the warm, smooth wood. Moore once said, “Trunks of trees are very human… To me they have a connection with human life.” These sculptures bear associations with sexuality and fecundity. They have an all-encompassing presence that pervades the whole room and the viewer is drawn into the admiring their every curve.

I’d be hard pressed to say what I liked most about this exhibition. Moore’s early figurative work is executed with such great tenderness particularly those sculptures that reference his ‘Mother and Child’ motif, whilst his wartime drawings are wonderfully nuanced and reveal the artist’s affinity with political and intellectual issues of his time.

His works are profoundly resonant, and though it’s a shame that there is a limited display of his larger scale work (which admittedly are often placed outdoors), I shall be going back to see more of Moore before the exhibitions closes in the summer.

Four stars.

This exhibition runs until 8th August.
Admission is £11 for students. Full price tickets cost £12.50.

Image: Henry Moore – Reclining Figure (1939), Detroit Institute of Arts © Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation

The Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival takes place in and around Oxford until Sunday, hosting talks by some of the biggest names in literature, science and the media. Read regular reviews from Cherwell‘s correspondents here on cherwell.org

Robert Winston is one of the foremost scientific voices in political debate in this country at the moment. Less abrasive than figures like Richard Dawkins yet well-recognised outside the scientific community for his media appearances, he is not only a highly respected medical scientist with hundreds of published papers and pioneering research under his belt, but a life peer. As a speaker he is eminently calm and sensible while never dull; even when one disagrees with him, one cannot help but respect him.

His introduction, however, as a controversial man who turns your understanding of the world on its head, was frustrating and far from the case, for, engaging as he is when explaining early man’s stone tools or modern experiments with lasers, very little of what he says is controversial. Winston has countless historical anecdotes and snippets of scientific research about the fat content of brains or the development of swine flu, but his warnings over the dangers of battery farming or global warming are eloquent examples of points broadly accepted by scientists which need to be better communicated to the public, rather than surprising revelations.

After all, his latest book, Bad Ideas?: An Arresting History of Our Inventions, is part of his more general mission in his other books and media appearances to improve the public’s understanding and relationship with science. Its particular purpose is to look into a history of human invention and argue that every significant invention has had both good and bad consequences. We must learn our lessons from the sort of dangerous inventions of the past which have led us to destruction of the environment, new diseases and the threat of nuclear war.

His talk, sadly, seemed to lack many specific lessons; he preferred rather to ramble through various examples of human invention which, while interesting, made the experience seem rather like reading Aesop’s fables and skipping the morals.Even when he did come to a point he went into little detail. For example, he was eager to stress the importance of research with no foreseeable positive benefits for humanity, for expanding human knowledge itself is a wonderful thing which may well unexpectedly lead to discoveries of vast benefit. However, with the distribution of research funding such a big debate in the scientific community and amongst politicians, he failed to address how it should be dished out if not in light of foreseeable outcomes.

Indeed, one of the best moments of his speech was when he discussed how the Genome Project, often described, not least by the scientists involved in it, as one of the most significant steps forward in our knowledge of genes in decades, has so far led to no practical outcomes of any use to humanity. He seemed oddly pleased by the notion, despite the sort of media distortion the project has obtained being opposed to his fundamental beliefs about the way the public should engage with science.

Winston has warmed up the book festival’s science audience: Simon Singh and Ben Goldacre are revisiting Oxford to discuss their books later this week. Though I doubt they will be quite as agreeable figures, or as authoritative representatives of science in national political debate, their talks will hopefully do a better job of turning the world around you on its head.

Bad Ideas?: An Arresting History of Our Inventions by Robert Winston was released by Bantam Press on 18 Feb 2010 Simon Singh ( event 681) will be speaking at on Thursday 25th March at 6pm. Ben Goldacre (event 843) will be speaking on Saturday 27th March at 2pm. More information about the festival can be found at www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com