Henry Moore

British sculptor

• Born: July 30, 1898
• Birthplace: Castleford, Yorkshire, England
• Died: August 31, 1986
• Place of death: Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, England

Through an elemental understanding of form and materials, Moore created sculpture of archetypal significance, universally recognized yet uniquely his.

Early Life

From the beginning, earth and stone were an important part of Henry Moore’s life. After years of sculpting outdoors in Hertfordshire, Moore reflected that it was the landscape of Yorkshire, where he grew up, which inspired him to do sculpture in the open air. The moors of the northern countryside, a monumental rock formation near Leeds, and the slag heaps of the Yorkshire mining villages educated his eye on natural forms.

At an early age, Moore knew that he could work in three dimensions. At home, he would whittle wooden game pieces and other small carvings. Outside, Moore was acutely aware of the Gothic sculpture at the nearby cathedrals of Adel and Methley. Their archaic stone forms shaped his imagination. A Sunday school story about Michelangelo named his dream: sculptor. From that moment, Moore claimed, he knew what he wanted to do, and ardently applied himself.

It was in the Yorkshire mining village of Castleford that Moore was born. He was the seventh of eight children born to a miner father of Irish descent, Raymond Spencer Moore, and to a mother from Staffordshire, Mary Baker, who suffered from arthritis. While Moore was growing up, it was his chore in the evening to rub her back with ointment. As a daily ritual, this provided the sculptor’s hands with an exercise in the contours of the body.

For inspiration in academic exercises, Moore looked to his father, who was self-educated. Raymond Moore was a stern presence in the home, but he was also a loving father, ambitious for his children not to end up in the mines.

When young Moore announced his intentions to pursue art, his father, though not against the notion, insisted that he be qualified to teach. At the age of twelve, Henry Moore won a scholarship to Castleford Grammar School, where he trained to be a teacher. Nevertheless, a teaching position, he knew, would not be his ultimate achievement.

In his studies at the grammar school, Moore was encouraged by Alice Gostick, the art teacher, to pursue his artistic interests. He was chosen to carve the wooden memorial scroll to commemorate alumni enlisting in the war effort. Having completed the course of study, Moore returned as a student teacher to his elementary school.

His teaching days were cut short by World War I. In February, 1917, he joined the Fifteenth London Regiment and was stationed in France for the summer. In the Battle of Cambrai, he was gassed, and subsequently he was sent back to England. A photo of Moore from this period, looking very young and dressed in military garb, shows a serious countenance. The high forehead curves in an oval above bushy brows that shadow deep-set blue eyes. The nose is a triangular volume; its lines extend to a straight, thin-lipped mouth. Later photos focus on the hands: long fingers on well-used hands, attached to strong arms and a sturdy frame that show the strength of one who carved stone.

In February, 1919, Moore resumed teaching. By September, he had secured a former-serviceman’s grant to study at the Leeds School of Art. As the only full-time sculpture student in the Leeds program, Moore received a thorough grounding in technique. The first year he spent in drawing. Though the whitewashed antique Roman copies of Greek sculpture he was required to copy offered little inspiration, the disciplines of drawing and sculpting academically gave Moore the skills for his later work. He devoted the following year to sculpture, completing the examination course in half the usual time and winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art.

Moore’s examination piece for the Royal College of Art, a drawing of a pair of hands, proved so satisfactory that it circulated to other art schools as an example for all other students applying to the Royal College of Art.

By the time he got to London, Moore was well versed in the basics of his craft and had read Roger Fry’s Vision and Design (1920), which had a profound influence on his work. The book is a collection of essays on art, including several devoted to understanding archaic sculpture from Mexico, Africa, and assorted islands. Moore found in this writing and in the accompanying illustrations a touchstone for aesthetics.

With Fry’s book as a guide, Moore would spend afternoons in the British Museum, visiting first the Egyptian exhibit, which seemed more accessible to the Western eye accustomed to art with Hellenistic origins. As he grew accustomed to the ancient works, he inspected the galleries of other ancient civilizations. He found the rough stone and elongated wood sculpture of these “primitives” superior, in their truth to material, to Western works. That is, the sculptures did not obscure the qualities of their media. Moore also admired the way the forms were conceived and executed as full volumes.

The primitive art influence that began to appear in his work prompted strong, though not always approving, reactions from the art department. Nevertheless, in 1925 the Royal College appointed Moore a lecturer in sculpture, and the following year he won a traveling scholarship to Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice, and Ravenna. He was most impressed by Giotto and the later work of Michelangelo. As for classical art, he called Praxiteles “the first hack.” When Moore returned to London, the college offered him a seven-year appointment as an instructor. This job put Moore in an environment in which he could meet some talented, creative people, and gave him the time and means to carve his early sculptures in stone and wood.

Life’s Work

Sculpture defines space, and one of Moore’s goals was to teach his audience, through sculpture, how to appreciate three-dimensional space. His first commission, however, was not a sculpture in the round. In 1928, the new headquarters of the London Underground Railway needed a relief carving of the North Wind. Moore was one of several artists selected. His North Wind , though grounded in the wall, suggests the forms of his reclining figures. Moore’s figure of the North Wind looks forward, as if in motion. The legs, though massive, appear to float effortlessly behind.

In addition to his first commission, Moore also presented his first one-person show in 1928 at the Warren Gallery in London. He exhibited ninety-three works, presenting subjects that he would further develop over the years. Most often, at these early shows, it was the drawings that sold, and Moore found satisfaction in the number bought by other artists.

The sculptures in his early shows were small, compared to his later work. Nevertheless, photographs of the early works, many of them female figures or mother-and-child configurations, show a monumental quality. His Mother and Child from 1925 is less than two feet tall, yet not diminutive. The solemn expression of the mother’s face, the roundness of the rock, and the unity of the mother with the baby on her shoulders could accommodate a much larger scale.

Following his professional debut, Moore married the painting student Irina Radetzky, internationally educated and graceful as a dancer. During this era Moore’s reclining-figure sculptures emerged. Carved in stone or wood, these solid, benevolent earth mothers lounge like great mountains in assorted positions. For these sculptures, Moore worked with easily available stones, carving out the shape “imprisoned” inside a particular piece of rock.

Although World War II severely curtailed Moore’s activities, the War Artists Advisory Committee commissioned him to sketch the Underground shelters. Critics compare these drawings to William Blake’s illuminations. Moore’s illustrations are sculptural in feeling, and the combination of dark crayons and bright paints lends these works a surreal quality. The sketches provided themes that Moore would continue to develop in later works. The many mother-and-child groupings wrapped in blankets foreshadow Moore’s draped figures, and also his leaf figures. The sleepers’ open mouths, reminiscent of the legend of souls that leave the body through open mouths to roam at night, influenced Moore’s 1950’s helmet heads. The subway shelters themselves offered an emblematic study of the earth mother as a shelter, a cave.

Moore entered the caves of the coal miners for the committee, as well. His drawings of coal miners are a rarity in his opus, because they record people at work. Men became part of Moore’s sculptural repertory only after his daughter, Mary, was born in 1946. Though he continued to develop his mother-and-child motif, he also worked on a series of family-group arrangements that included a father figure. For these he used bronze, a sculptural medium that he had largely neglected because, in the artist’s view, there could be no such thing as “truth to bronze.” Bronze, however, offered the artist freedom to move into the vertical mode of the family groupings and the series of seated and standing figures. Bronze also allowed Moore to direct the way light would interact with the form, reflecting off the smoothed curves and shadowing in the etched areas.

Around this time, the Moores moved to a seventeenth century farmhouse in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire. At the farmhouse, Moore was able to undertake large-scale works, and though he summered in Italy and traveled widely, he would call the farmhouse home for the rest of his life. In fact, as the property grew, Moore built nine studios to accommodate his casting of small bronzes, photographing of completed works, printmaking, drawing, and sculpting. The studios became a village, with a small group of neighbors working as staff.

The staff attended to correspondence and the growing responsibilities of shipping sculpture all over the world for exhibit at galleries and museums. Meanwhile, Moore worked on an increasing number of large-scale commissions, including Moore’s Reclining Figure for the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris (1957), the two-piece Reclining Figure for Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York (1965), and Double Oval Bronze (1967) for the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, a sculpture through which the public could walk.

Even during his final years, Moore continued to explore the possibilities of the reclining figure. His Draped Reclining Mother and Baby (1983-1984) is a bronze of 104 inches. The attention to texture contrasts the shadows with the smooth, rounded surfaces. The heart is hollowed out, and the lower arm and leg have sharp angles, forming a protective pen for the baby. The baby itself looks like a small reclining figure, supported by the mother’s arm as the mother looks up and off into the infinite vista.

Significance

Depending on the critic, there are different estimations of Moore’s artistic accomplishments. According to John Read, Moore’s greatest contribution to sculpture was a “blending of human and natural form [in the Reclining Figure sculptures], this ability to see figures in the landscape, and landscape in the figures.” Other critics cite the emotional impact of his works. Still others commend Moore’s sculpture of the vitality inherent in each piece. These assessments are not particularly amazing. The wonder comes from Moore himself, whose vision for sculpture turned rock into beauty and bronze into form. The sculptor’s vision was so strong that the critics seem merely to echo his intentions when appraising his work.

In his own life, Moore mirrored the liveliness of his sculpture with his vigor as a citizen. He was not an artist who withdrew from society or held people in disdain. When both world wars called, he answered with action. He served as a trustee for the Tate Gallery, on the Royal Fine Arts Commission, and on the Arts Council of Great Britain, among other organizations. He received several honorary doctorates and awards. Though he moved to the country, it was not as an escape. Rather, the move allowed him to make large sculpture; to work in the natural English light, to which he attributed truth-telling powers; and to gain the perspective of distance for his work.

Moore refused to criticize publicly other artists. He cooperated with writers, filmmakers, and book publishers, providing photographs, spending time with interviewers, and making needed materials available to all. This characteristic cooperation mirrors the technique of the carving sculptor. Whether Moore was working with available stone or stone specially selected for a project, he sculpted in harmony with the material itself.

Sculpture, he thought, should be in harmony not only with its materials but with its location and purpose as well. For the Madonna and Child commission at the Church of St. Matthew in Northampton in 1943, Moore strove to make a sculpture that would transcend the usual mother-and-child works. The final effect he described as “a sense of complete easiness and repose as though the Madonna could stay in that position for ever (as, being in stone, she will have to do).”

While submitting to the qualities of the materials and the specifics of commissions, Moore was still able to create sculpture of a highly original quality. Moore’s brand of modern art was not merely a reaction to classicism. It reestablished the line of an archetypal style by which sculpture accomplished its own reality, rather than imitating real life.

Bibliography

Berthoud, Roger. The Life of Henry Moore. 2d rev. ed. London: Giles de la Mare, 2003. Updated edition of the first full-length biography of Moore, originally published in 1985. Berthoud, who knew Moore for thirty years, traces his life and artistic development.

Fry, Roger. Vision and Design. New York: Brentano’s, 1920. This is the book credited with giving Moore an understanding of archaic sculpture. Of particular significance are the essays “The Art of the Bushmen,” “Negro Sculpture,” and “Giotto.”

Grohmann, Will. The Art of Henry Moore. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1960. A wonderful collection illustrating Moore’s drawing and sculpture. Though this book at times frustrates the reader with belabored prose and poor identification of photos, the author has done the research to make this a good introduction to Moore and his work.

Kosinski, Dorothy M., et al. Henry Moore: Sculpting the Twentieth Century. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. This book, which accompanied an exhibit of Moore’s art, features essays examining the entire body of the artist’s work. Includes more than one hundred photographs of Moore’s sculptures, drawings, and other art works.

Lieberman, William S. Henry Moore: Sixty Years of His Art. New York: Thames & Hudson, and Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983. Probably among the best published photographic reproductions of Moore’s work, accompanied by a well-organized introduction and excellent labeling of the collection.

Moore, Henry. Energy in Space. Photographs by John Hedgecoe. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1974. A visual and artistic delight. Shows works in progress, works on location, and works superimposed on photographic backgrounds.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Henry Moore on Sculpture. Edited by Philip James. New York: Viking Press, 1967. Comprehensive. Incorporates statements made by Moore over the years with biographical notes and commentary on the sculpture and its inspirations.

Neumann, Erich. The Archetypal World of Henry Moore. Translated by R. F. C. Hull. New York: Pantheon Books, 1959. When the author sent the sculptor a copy of the newly published book, Moore put it aside after the first chapter. “It explained too much about what my motives were and what things were about,” he wrote in Henry Moore on Sculpture. All psychological analysis aside, this book contains some very good work on the themes inherent to Moore’s sculpture.

Read, John. Portrait of an Artist: Henry Moore. London: Whizzard Press, 1979. A well-written, though biased, introduction to the life of the sculptor. The author is the son of Sir Herbert Read, a friend and biographer of Henry Moore.

Sweeney, James Johnson. Henry Moore. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1946. This book offers a fine summary of Moore and his art. One wishes only that Sweeney could have followed it up with a book on the last forty years of Moore’s life.