Henry Moore

How different is the Henry Moore we think of as we enter this exhibition from the one we consider at its close? The question arises because Tate Britain is on a mission to reshape the reputation of our most famous modernist. Moore's art, the curatorial argument goes, is so familiar that, while most of us could doodle a Moore-esque figure on demand - achieving the requisite ratio of blobbiness to holeyness - few of us pause to ponder the genesis or significance of those forms.

Our understanding of Moore has a lot to do with his late work, the argument continues, those expensive windbreaks we see in parks and piazzas around the globe. Two-and-a-half decades after his death, Moore's sculpture exists in the collective consciousness as a kind of balm, the embodiment of optimistic, post-war commissioning and state largesse, of ideas well-intentioned but ultimately as woolly as the sheep the artist liked to see grazing around his bucolically located bronzes.

Whereas Moore was in fact piercingly radical, certainly from the 1930s to the 1950s - the main focus of this show - when, haunted by his experiences during WWI, he began to explore darker aspects of the human condition. Though they take their cue from early, non-Western art, as is made explicit in an opening salvo of small, experimental sculptures, the figures Moore presents are far from being placid symbols of cultural continuation.

Moore adopted the Aztec, African and North American forms he saw in the British Museum and subjected them to the sort of pressure that spoke candidly of the twentieth century's trials. Their style may be over-familiar but those bodies, remember, are convulsed, battered and worn. Bodies in trouble, bodies in bits.

The show asks us to see Moore's art as aligned with the dark surrealism of Georges Bataille, the poetry of TS Eliot and the complex emotional tangles unleashed by Freud. Take Moore's most enduring motif: the Mother and Child. In most of the examples on show here the comforting bond is broken. Often the mother looks away while the child seems monstrous, fixated - becoming an alarming penis/serpent in a 1952 maquette. Elsewhere there are negatives where nipples should be, troubling voids… get the picture? Moore's own marriage remained childless for more than a decade, a wall text tells us, unnecessarily.

Of course there are subconscious drives and psychological depths to Moore's art, as was written about by contemporary commentators like David Sylvester. We see them in the crawl spaces of Moore's mine drawings, their claustrophobia accentuated by the horizontal format of the paper. The harrowing vulnerability of the human body is nowhere better expressed than in Moore's drawings of Londoners sheltering from the Blitz, whether or not some of those images were copied from photographs in the Picture Post, as has recently been suggested. And Moore doesn't soften in the immediate post-war period either, finding a voice for his pacifism in a great flowering of works from the 1940s and '50s including the tragic 'Warrior with Shield' (1954).

Yet, in sexing up the Moore brand so consciously, the curators serve to tell us as much about exhibition making today as they do their subject. Which isn't to say that the show misses its mark, just that it works on a less declarative level than you might think. More on Moore's terms in fact. If the richly coloured walls are there to add psychological intensity to the experience, they also serve to draw attention to Moore's preferred topic of conversation: materials. Particularly in the earlier, smaller - and best - works where chunks of marble and alabaster, mercurial greenstone, buttery Hopton Wood stone and flinty Hornton stone are set seductively against intense red and purple.

Throughout, Moore pleases the eye as much as he disturbs the mind. In fact he's pretty much the same artist he always was. The ambiguity in his art remains its defining feature. Moore dodges conjecture, deflects any thesis. Rises above it, you might say. Admittedly that doesn't make for such an exciting-sounding show, but it is, in the end, a ringing endorsement of Moore's art.