Moore, Henry

Moore, Henry (b Castleford, Yorkshire, 30 July 1898; d Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, 31 Aug. 1986). British sculptor, draughtsman, and printmaker. He is regarded as one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century and from the late 1940s until his death he was unchallenged as the most celebrated British artist of his time. After service in the British army in the First World War, he trained at Leeds School of Art and from there obtained a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in 1921; he completed his training in 1924, then taught there until 1931. From 1932 to 1939 he was the first head of sculpture in a new department at Chelsea School of Art. During the 1930s he lived in Hampstead in the same area as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, the critic Herbert Read, and other leading figures of the avant-garde. In 1940, after the bombing of his studio, he moved to Much Hadham in Hertfordshire, where he lived for the rest of his life.

Most of Moore's early work was carved, rejecting the academic tradition of modelling in favour of the doctrine of truth to material, according to which the nature of the stone or wood—its shape, texture, and so on—was part of the conception of the work. He also rejected the classical and Renaissance conception of beauty and put in its place an ideal of vital force and formal vigour that he found exemplified in much ancient sculpture (Mexican, Sumerian, etc.), which he studied in the British Museum, and also in the frescos of Giotto and Masaccio, which he saw in Italy in 1925 in the course of a travelling scholarship. During the 1930s his work was more directly influenced by European avant-garde art, particularly the Surrealism of Arp. Although he produced some purely abstract pieces, his work was almost always based on forms in the natural world—often the human figure, but also, for example, bones, pebbles, and shells. The reclining female figure and the mother and child were among his perennial themes.

By the late 1930s Moore was well known in informed circles as the leading avant-garde sculptor in England ( Kenneth Clark and Jacob Epstein were among his early supporters), and his wider fame was established by the poignant drawings he did as an Official War Artist (1940–2) of people sheltering from air raids in underground stations. Subsequently his reputation grew rapidly (particularly after he won the International Sculpture Prize at the 1948 Venice Biennale), and from the 1950s he carried out many public commissions in Britain and elsewhere. During this time there were major changes in his way of working. Bronze took over from stone as his preferred medium and he often worked on a very large scale. There was a tendency also for his works to be composed of several elements grouped together rather than made up of a single object. Some critics discerned a falling away of his powers in his later work, marked in particular by a tendency towards inflated rhetoric, but for others he remained a commanding figure to the end.

A man of great integrity and unaffected charm, Moore was held in almost universally high esteem. He held broad socialist principles, was pleased to find that his work could be appreciated by a wide audience and not just an elite, and gave his time generously to serve on public bodies. The tributes paid after his death made it clear that he was widely regarded not only as one of the greatest artists of the century, but also as one of the greatest Englishmen in any field. He was a lucid and perceptive commentator on his own and other people's art, and his writings have been collected as Henry Moore on Sculpture (1966). His output was huge, and it has been reasonably claimed that by the time of his death ‘his work had been distributed more widely throughout the Western world than that of any other sculptor, living or dead’ (catalogue of the exhibition ‘Henry Moore’, Royal Academy, London, 1988). From the late 1960s he also worked a good deal as an printmaker, producing several series of etchings such as Elephant Skull (1969). There are particularly fine holdings of his work in Leeds (City Art Gallery), London (Tate), Toronto (Art Gallery of Ontario), and Washington (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden).