The Helmet Heads review – Henry Moore should never have gone near a chisel

Wallace Collection, London
This exhibition invites you to compare the British artist’s work to antique armoury and Picasso – both show him up as slow, ponderous and complacent

Henry Moore should have been a teacher. He was, of course, a tutor at London art schools, like many artists are before they can afford to work in the studio full time. But he should have taught full-time and never gone near a chisel. That way his enormous erudition and civilised appreciation of art, history and mythology could have inspired generations of pupils – he was 88 when he died in 1986 – instead of becoming grist for his massive but mediocre artistic output.

The Wallace Collection gives a textbook demonstration (and it really is as thrilling as a textbook) of why knowledge is not the same as inspiration in its pointlessly scholarly exhibition of some of Moore’s silliest sculptures. It is a tragic encounter between fascinating historical sources and the woolly jumper he knitted from them.

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