Henry Moore
Henry Moore, (born July 30, 1898, Castleford, Yorkshire,
England—died August 31, 1986, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire),
English sculptor whose organically shaped, abstract, bronze
and stone figures constitute the major 20th-century
manifestation of the humanist tradition in sculpture. Much
of his work is monumental, and he was particularly
well-known for a series of reclining nudes.
Background and education
Moore was born in a small coal-mining town near Leeds in
the north of England. He was the seventh child of Raymond
Spencer Moore, a Lincolnshire man of Irish ancestry, and his
wife, Mary Baker, who came from Staffordshire, in the
English Midlands. Moore’s father was a coal miner, a
self-educated man, a socialist, and a trade unionist.
Moore won a scholarship to the Castleford
Grammar School, where he studied from 1909 to 1915 and was
much encouraged by the art instructor Alice Gostick. Already
ambitious to become a sculptor, the young Moore acceded to
his father’s wish that he should first train to be a
schoolteacher. For several months he practiced teaching, but
because of World War I further training had to be postponed,
and in February 1917 Moore joined the British Army. He was
sent to France, where, after an intensive bombardment, Moore
suffered from the effects of gas shells. He collapsed and
was sent back to England for hospital treatment and
convalescence. In September 1919 he was given a
rehabilitation grant, which he used to go to the Leeds
School of Art, where he studied for two years. In his first
year at Leeds, Moore spent most of his time studying
drawing. Although he wanted to study sculpture, no teacher
was appointed until his second year; Moore became his first
pupil. He was soon joined by a young student from nearby
Wakefield, Barbara Hepworth, who also became a major
sculptor.
Moore’s intellectual horizons slowly began
to broaden, and he was excited by the modern paintings that
he saw in the private collection of the vice-chancellor of
the University of Leeds, Sir Michael Sadler. At the end of
his second year at Leeds School of Art, Moore passed the
sculpture examination and was awarded a Royal Exhibition
scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London.
In September 1921 he moved to London and began three years
of advanced study in sculpture; he took his diploma at the
Royal College after two years and spent a third year doing
postgraduate work. Moore found a good friend and lifetime
supporter in the director there, William Rothenstein, who
was not unsympathetic to modern artistic tendencies,
although he remained a conservative artist himself.
Instruction at the Royal College of Art
was less important to Moore than the opportunity to study
the works in the museums of London—particularly in the
British Museum, with its wide-ranging collection of ancient
sculpture. Also close at hand was the fine collection of
Auguste Rodin’s sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
but Moore was already reacting against the European
sculptural tradition and turning instead to “primitive” and
archaic art. He was discovering for himself the power and
beauty of Egyptian, Etruscan, and, later, pre-Columbian and
African sculpture.
Travel and further artistic influences
Upon graduating from the Royal College in 1924, Moore
was appointed a part-time instructor in sculpture there for
a seven-year term. His exceptional gifts and potential
stature were already recognized by those who knew him best.
He was also awarded a traveling scholarship and spent the
first six months of 1925 in France and Italy. Back in
England, Moore began work in 1926 on the first of his
depictions of reclining women. He was also carving a variety
of subjects in stone, including half-length female figures,
mother-and-child groups, and masks and heads. Though certain
works show his awareness of the Romanian sculptor Constantin
Brancusi and the Cubist sculptors, the most important
influence on Moore’s work at this time was that of ancient
Mexican stone carving. In the Trocadero Museum in Paris he
had been impressed by a plaster cast of a limestone Chac
Mool—a Mayan representation of the rain spirit, depicted as
a male reclining figure with its knees drawn up together,
its staring head at a right angle to its body, and its hands
holding on its stomach a flat dish for sacrifices. Moore
became fascinated with this sculpture, which seemed to him
to have qualities of power, sensitivity, three-dimensional
depth, and originality of form that no other stone sculpture
possessed. Disdainful of conventional standards of the
beautiful, and seeking a way to imbue his own work with such
qualities, he changed the Mexican male figure into a female
one, the better to express a more human, earthy, and
rhythmic image of his own. This image of a reclining woman
would continue to be a major motif throughout his career.
In 1928 Moore was given his first one-man
exhibition, at the Warren Gallery in London, and he began
his first public commission, a relief carving of the North
Wind on the new headquarters building for the London
Transport Board. In 1929 he married Irina Radetzky, of
Russian-Austrian parentage, who was a painting student at
the Royal College of Art. The young couple moved into a
large studio in Hampstead, one of the northern suburbs of
London. Moore was a member of a group of young artists who
in 1933 formed Unit One in a deliberate attempt to make the
indifferent English public aware of the international modern
movement in art and architecture. The driving spirit behind
Unit One was the painter Paul Nash, but the leading members
were Barbara Hepworth and her painter husband, Ben
Nicholson. Another friend and advocate was the poet and
critic Herbert Read, who wrote the first monograph on Moore
in 1934.
Achievements in the 1930s
The most advanced artistic activity in England in the
early 1930s was centred around this circle of friends. They
were all interested in abstract art at a time when this was
considered the ultimate in artistic extremism. In his own
work from 1931 onward, Moore moved tentatively away from the
human figure to experiment with abstract shapes and also to
combine abstract shapes with references to the figure. In
1931 he had the first of many one-man exhibitions in the
Leicester Galleries in London. His work was enthusiastically
introduced by sculptor Jacob Epstein, but it aroused violent
criticism in the press and made Moore a notorious figure. He
was urged to resign his position at the Royal College of
Art, and, when his contract expired in 1932, he left to
start a sculpture department at the Chelsea School of Art,
also in London.
Throughout the 1930s Moore displayed in
his work not the slightest inclination to please the public.
He was very interested in Pablo Picasso’s drawings and
paintings of the late 1920s, which have strong sculptural
implications, and he felt free to distort and break up the
forms of the body in a much more radical way than before.
Sometimes he seemed to leave the human figure behind
altogether. The pages of his sketchbooks of this period show
that he was full of ideas for abstract sculptures that would
make use of organic and natural forms rather than pure
geometrical shapes. He was collecting pebbles, rocks,
shells, and bones, making drawings of them and studying them
to find what he called “nature’s principles of form and
rhythm,” which he sought to apply to his own sculpture. In
particular, this meant opening up the carvings with
concavities and even with holes pierced right through the
forms—a practice that the public initially found shocking
and abhorrent when the sculpture retained a strong
suggestion of the human figure.
Changes wrought by World War II
When the war broke out the Chelsea School was evacuated
from London, and Moore stopped teaching. At first he worked
mostly in his cottage in Kent, until its propinquity to the
Channel coast, where invasion was hourly expected, forced a
return to London. The Moores eventually took a house at
Perry Green, Much Hadham, in Hertfordshire, which became
their permanent home. There, in the tranquil countryside
about 20 miles north of London, he slowly added studios and
extra rooms to an ancient farmhouse.
Shortage of materials in the early years
of the war forced Moore to concentrate on small sculptures
and then exclusively on drawing. Seeing the people of London
seeking shelter in the stations of the London Underground
during the German air raids that began in September 1940 led
him to begin his series of shelter drawings. Moore would
spend the night observing and making small sketch notes;
then, in the next days at the studio, he would work his
ideas up into large coloured drawings that expressed in
permanent form the resigned but indomitable spirit of
Londoners during the bombing of their city. He also visited
the colliery in Castleford, Yorkshire, where his father had
worked, and made drawings of the coal miners at work that
have a strength and dignity similar to the shelter drawings.
In 1943 Moore accepted a public commission
to create Madonna and Child for the church of St. Matthew in
Northampton. The possibility of reviving the great tradition
of religious art appealed to him, and he tried to give his
figures for Northampton what he called “an austerity and a
nobility, and some touch of grandeur (even hieratic
aloofness) which is missing in the everyday ‘Mother and
Child’ idea.”
Another commission, for a sculpture
depicting a family group, followed in 1944, and the result
was a dramatic change in Moore’s style, away from the
experimentation of the 1930s and toward a more naturalistic
approach and humanistic subject matter that had an immediate
popular appeal. Moore had made dozens of studies in clay and
terra-cotta when working on the Madonna and Child and
family-group commissions, and these were cast in bronze and
issued in editions of seven to nine copies each. In this
way, Moore’s work became available to museums and collectors
all over the world.
This humanistic work was the basis of
Moore’s international reputation, which dates from the large
retrospective exhibition held in 1946 at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York City. On this occasion Moore visited
the United States for the first time. American collectors
began to buy his work, and henceforward he was freed of
financial worries and was able to work on the scale he felt
his sculpture demanded. In Europe, too, Moore’s reputation
as an outstanding sculptor was confirmed when he won the
sculpture prize at the 1948 Venice Biennale. In Britain
Moore fulfilled several commissions that extended the range
and scale of his work: family groups for the new towns of
Stevenage, Hertfordshire, in 1948, and Harlow, Essex, in
1954–55; Three Draped Standing Figures in stone (1947–48)
for Battersea Park, London; a Madonna for St. Peter’s Church
in Claydon, Suffolk, in 1949; and the large Reclining Figure
for the 1951 Festival of Britain. The death of his mother in
1944, and the birth of his only child, Mary, in 1946, made
the theme of the family—particularly the mother-and-child
relationship—a more personal one that Moore treated in
several major works in the late 1940s and ’50s.
Later years
Critics who had begun to think that Moore, the
revolutionary sculptor, had been tamed, were proven wrong by
the appearance in 1950 of the first of Moore’s series of
bronze standing figures, with their harsh and angular
pierced forms and distinct feeling of menace. When, in the
summer of 1953, Moore was ill, he began to turn inward in
his work, showing a willingness to experiment and to follow
private concerns. A large marble carving he made in 1957–58
for the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris belongs to a long
series of reclining female figures, but the brick sculpture
relief made in 1955 for the Bouwcentrum in Rotterdam,
Netherlands, reintroduced biomorphic forms into his work,
which led to the series of freestanding totemic upright
figures made in 1955–56. Moore also varied his subject
matter in the 1950s with such works as King and Queen
(1952–53), and the two warriors—Warrior with Shield
(1953–54) and Falling Warrior (1956–57)—that were rare
examples of Moore’s use of the male figure. All three works
owe something to Moore’s visit to Greece in 1951, when he
saw the cities of Athens, Mycenae, and Delphi for the first
time. Most of his sculpture since the war was in bronze,
though he had not altogether stopped carving in wood and
stone. Furthermore, even when the sculptures were cast in
bronze, they were not modeled in clay but built up initially
in plaster over a wire and wood armature. Moore always liked
to work like a carver, cutting and scraping and chiseling
the surfaces with a carver’s tools.
From the time of his 60th birthday in
1958, Moore seemed to be less concerned with his public role
as a modern sculptor and more inclined to pursue his private
interests. He continued to accept commissions, most notably
those for Lincoln Center (New York City) in 1963–65 and for
the University of Chicago in 1964. However, in both of these
instances, unlike earlier commissions, Moore made no attempt
to provide a sculpture that was specifically appropriate for
the site: he instead used the commission to work out on a
larger scale than would otherwise have been possible an idea
that had long occupied his imagination. Thus, the Lincoln
Center sculpture is the largest of a series of multipart
reclining female figures in which Moore makes use of
symbolic correspondences between the body and such elements
of landscape as cliffs, caves, and hillsides, and between
the body and organic forms, particularly human and animal
bones. Although the University of Chicago’s Atom Piece, with
its mushroom-cloud formation at the top, commemorates the
splitting of the atom, the sculpture is also closely related
to other large abstract sculptures of the 1960s: Knife-Edge
Two-Piece (1962), Locking Piece (1963–64), Three-Way Piece
No. 1: Points (1964), and Three-Piece Sculpture No. 3:
Vertebrae (1968)—all of them quite massive objects that have
lost their obvious human connotation as a consequence of
their enormous size. Some of his abstract sculptures from
the mid-1960s were executed in marble rather than in bronze.
Beginning in 1965, Moore maintained a summer cottage at
Forte dei Marmi, Italy, near the Carrara stone quarries,
and, with the assistance of Italian workers, he began to
create stone carvings again.
In his final years Moore established an
unostentatious way of living, and two or three young
sculptors helped him with the more laborious and
time-consuming activities entailed in sculpting. He also
became a prolific printmaker, executing hundreds of etchings
and lithographs from the late 1960s to the early 1980s,
including notable series such as Elephant Skull Album
(1969), Stonehenge (1972), and Sheep Albums (1972 and 1974).
In 1977 Moore created the Henry Moore
Foundation to promote art appreciation and to display his
work, and in 1982 the Henry Moore Sculpture Gallery and
Centre for the Study of Sculpture opened in the city of
Leeds. During his own lifetime Moore achieved international
critical acclaim; he was the first modern English sculptor
to do so. He is still regarded as one of the most important
sculptors of the 20th century.
Sir Alan Bowness
Encyclopædia Britannica
