Ronald Moody (12 August 1900–6 February 1984) was a Jamaican-born modernist sculptor, writer, broadcaster, and trained dentist. Although he worked in bronze, concrete, resin, fiberglass, copper, and other materials, he was especially celebrated for his powerful wood carvings: stylized human and animal forms that conveyed spiritual searching, interiority, movement, and stillness.
His work is held in major public collections, including Tate, the National Portrait Gallery, London, the National Gallery of Jamaica, the Government Art Collection, and the National Museum Wales. In 2008, an impact crater on Mercury was named Moody in his honor.
Ronald Clive Moody was born on 12 August 1900 in Kingston, Jamaica, into a well-established professional family. He grew up in Knutsford, near Kingston, attended Calabar College, and developed early interests in English, music, art, and football. In 1923, he moved to London to study dentistry at the Royal Dental Hospital, King’s College London.
Moody qualified as a dentist in 1930 and established a practice near Oxford Circus. Yet his encounter with ancient Egyptian sculpture at the British Museum proved decisive. He was struck by what he described as “the tremendous inner force” and “the irresistible movement in stillness” of Egyptian art. Lacking the money and time for formal art-school training, he taught himself: first modeling imaginary faces in plasticine and dental plaster, then learning to carve in wood.
His first wooden carving, Wohin—German for “Whither”—was completed in 1935. It was followed by Johanaan in 1936 and by Midonz in 1937, the monumental carved female head that became one of his best-known works. Moody’s work was exhibited publicly in London from 1935, and his first solo exhibition took place at Galerie Billiet-Vorms in Paris in 1937. Encouraged by its critical success, he moved to Paris with his wife, Helene Coppel-Cowen, in 1938 and established a studio in Montparnasse.
In 1939, twelve of Moody’s sculptures, including Midonz, appeared in the Harmon Foundation’s landmark exhibition Contemporary Negro Art at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The exhibition placed his work within an international Black artistic context linked to the later currents of the Harlem Renaissance.
The outbreak of the Second World War abruptly ended Moody’s Paris period. In 1940, he and Helene fled Paris on foot two days before the German invasion. They travelled through occupied France and crossed the Pyrenees into Spain. Moody contracted pleurisy during the journey and did not return to England until October 1941, after fifteen months as a refugee. The physical effects of this ordeal remained with him for the rest of his life.
The war and its aftermath deepened Moody’s concern with humanity’s capacity for violence, destruction, moral failure, and spiritual development. His later work returned repeatedly to the tension between human self-destruction and the possibility of a more harmonious, evolved existence. Works such as The Warrior and Hiroshima articulated those concerns through his distinctive symbolic figuration.
After the war, Moody resumed his artistic career in London. He held a one-person exhibition at the Arcade Gallery, off Bond Street, in May 1946, and exhibited regularly in the capital from 1950 through the early 1960s. He also produced portrait sculpture, including a bronze head of his elder brother, Dr Harold Moody, the physician and anti-racist campaigner who founded the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931.
Although Ronald Moody was not principally a political activist, his artistic life was closely connected to Black intellectual, cultural, and political networks in Britain. In the mid-1960s, he joined the Caribbean Artists Movement, a major collective of Caribbean writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals based in Britain. The movement’s journal, Savacou, took its name from Moody’s 1964 public sculpture at the University of the West Indies’ Mona campus in Jamaica.
Moody joined the Society of Portrait Sculptors in 1952 and was elected to its council in 1959. His achievements were recognized in Jamaica with the Institute of Jamaica’s Musgrave Gold Medal in 1977 and the Jamaica Institute Centenary Medal in 1980. In 1981, he received the Minority Arts Advisory Service Award in London for his outstanding contribution to sculpture.
Moody died in London on 6 February 1984.
Cynthia Moody’s legacy
Following his death, Moody’s niece, Cynthia Moody (1924–2013), inherited his estate, archive, and remaining artworks. She became the principal archivist, curator, researcher, and advocate for his work, compiling documentation toward a catalog raisonné and preserving letters, manuscripts, photographs, and research materials. She donated the archive to Tate in 1995, making it available to scholars.
Her most remarkable achievement was recovering Midonz. The sculpture had been sent to the United States for the 1939 Harmon Foundation exhibition and remained unseen for decades. Cynthia traced it through museum records to Hampton University Museum in Virginia and arranged its return to England in 1994.
Her sustained work helped restore Ronald Moody’s place in twentieth-century British, Caribbean, and diasporic art history. Tate Britain presented a display of his wood carvings in 2003, which subsequently traveled to Tate Liverpool in 2004; more recently, Ronald Moody: Sculpting Life at The Hepworth Wakefield brought together more than fifty works and reframed the breadth of his sculpture, writing, broadcasting, and intellectual life.
*Photo credit- Ronald Moody with Johanann 1936 in Fleming Close Studio, Fulham, 1963. Photograph © Valerie Wilmer
Source:
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/ronald-moody-2298
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Moody
http://www.absolutearts.com/artsnews/2003/03/26/30871.html
http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/jul/15/cynthia-moody-obituary
