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British artist

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.


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.

Alan Bowness The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica



More About Henry Moore








 
July 30, 1898
Castleford, England

August 31, 1986 (aged 88)



