Henry Moore

A giant of modernism, Henry Moore engaged the abstract, the surreal, the ancient, and the classical in corporeal forms and organic images—in conjunction with natural found objects such as bones and stones—that are at once accessible and avant-garde. His sculptures, with their imposing physicality combined with pierced forms and hollow spaces, promote a charged interaction between the work, its site, and the viewer. Moore’s oeuvre celebrated humanist themes at a time when traditional representation was largely eschewed by the vanguard art establishment. Moore was born in 1898 in the English mining town of Castleford, near Leeds. After teaching at Castleford Grammar School, he fought in the First World War and, on his return from France in 1919, enrolled at Leeds School of Art, where he was joined by fellow artist Barbara Hepworth. He won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1921 to 1924, and while there, he made Mother and Child (1922), his first sculpture on a subject that would fascinate him throughout his life. He also received traveling scholarships to Paris (1923) and Italy (1925). Afterward, Moore taught in London, first at the Royal Academy Schools from 1924 to 1932, and then at Chelsea School of Art from 1932 to 1939. Moore was innovative from the beginning of his career. For instance, in 1922 he used an experimental pen, ink, chalk, and wash combination in Standing Nude Girl, One Arm Raised , and in 1926 he employed cast concrete, a material that was largely confined to architecture at the time, to create Head of a Woman . Moore achieved early success. His debut solo exhibition was held at the Warren Gallery, London, in 1928. That same year, he completed his first public commission, installed at the headquarters of the London Underground. During the 1930s, Moore absorbed the influence of artists such as Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and the Surrealists, and so developed a more abstract approach to his own practice. In 1938 he met Sir Kenneth Clark, who became a significant early supporter of his work. In 1940, Moore began drawing people sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz, creating a body of work that bolstered the city’s morale and led to his appointment as an official war artist. After their Hampstead home was damaged by bomb shrapnel in September 1940, Moore and his wife, Irina Radetsky, relocated to a farmhouse in the hamlet of Perry Green, near Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, that would become his home and studio for the rest of his life. In the immediate aftermath of the conflict, he produced several commissioned figure sculptures, including Madonna and Child (1943–44) for St. Matthew’s Church, Northampton. Moore’s international reputation grew following a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1946, and after winning the International Sculpture Prize at the Biennale di Venezia in 1948. He continued to receive major public commissions, including Reclining Figure: Festival (1951) for the Festival of Britain—his first fully opened-out figure, in which solid and void are of equal significance—and Reclining Figure (1956–58) for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. By this time, he had become one of Britain’s most celebrated artists, with a highly diverse output that encompassed graphics and textiles in addition to sculptures and drawings. Throughout the 1960s, Moore produced large-scale sculptures mostly inspired by nature, employing undulating landscape as a metaphor for the human body in works such as Reclining Figure (1963–65), commissioned for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York. His success allowed him to work increasingly in bronze rather than direct carving, thus achieving the monumental scale that he had always sought. Today, Moore’s public sculptures occupy university campuses, rural sites, and major urban centers in thirty-eight countries around the world, and his work has been the subject of numerous museum and gallery exhibitions and retrospectives. Moore established the Henry Moore Foundation with his family in 1977, and died in Perry Green in 1986.