Moore, Henry

Moore, Henry (1898–1986). 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. He was born in Castleford, Yorkshire, the son of a miner, and despite an early desire to become a sculptor, he began a career as an elementary school teacher at the insistence of his father. In 1917–19 he served in the army (he was gassed at the Battle of Cambrai), then after a brief return to teaching went to Leeds College of Art (1919–21) on an ex-serviceman's grant; Barbara Hepworth, who became a close friend, was one of his fellow students. In 1921 he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, and after completing his training in 1924 he taught there until 1931. His first one-man exhibition was at the Warren Gallery, London, in 1928, and his first public commission was a stone relief of the West Wind (1928–9) for the exterior of the new headquarters of the London Underground Railway. Jacob Epstein was among other sculptors who worked on the building, and there was a predictably hostile public response to the grandly simplified figures—‘grotesque caricatures’ according to one letter to The Times. In 1932 Moore became the first head of sculpture in a new department at Chelsea School of Art and he continued there until the school was evacuated to Northampton on the outbreak of war in 1939. During the 1930s he lived in Hampstead in the same area as Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, the critic Herbert Read, and other leading members 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 materials, according to which the nature of the stone or wood—its shape, texture, and so on—was part of the conception of the work (see also DIRECT CARVING). He also rejected classical conceptions of beauty in favour of 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 (see PRIMITIVISM), and also in the frescos of Giotto and Masaccio, which he saw in Italy in 1925 in the course of a travelling scholarship. In 1934 (in Unit One) he wrote: ‘For me a work must first have a vitality of its own. I do not mean a reflection of the vitality of life, of movement, physical action, frisking, dancing figures, and so on, but that a work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the object it may represent. When a work has this powerful vitality we do not connect the word Beauty with it. Beauty, in the later Greek or Renaissance sense, is not the aim in my sculpture.’

During the 1930s Moore's work was influenced by European avant-garde art as well as ancient sculpture, particularly the Surrealism of Arp. Although he produced some purely abstract pieces, his sculpture 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 he was well-known in informed circles as the leading avant-garde sculptor in Britain ( Kenneth Clark and Eric Gregory 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 Londoners sheltering from airraids in underground stations. After the war his reputation grew rapidly (particularly after he won the International Sculpture Prize at the 1948 Venice Biennale), and from the 1950s he carried out numerous public commissions in Britain and elsewhere. Many of these commissioned works stand in prominent places in the great cities of the world, for example outside the Lincoln Center in New York and the National Gallery in Washington.

In the postwar period there were major changes in Moore's way of working. Bronze took over from stone as his preferred material and he often worked on a very large scale, requiring the use of assistants (over the years they included Anthony Caro, Phillip King, and Bernard Meadows). There was a tendency, also, for his works to be composed of several elements grouped together rather than of a single object. Some critics discerned a falling away of powers in his later work, marked by a tendency towards inflated rhetoric, but to 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. 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 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. ‘In personal appearance … it was often said that he looked more like a successful farmer than an artist. He had an attractive modesty that hid great self-confidence and ambition. He kept a light Yorkshire accent all his life, and expressed himself in simple straightforward terms, avoiding any philosophizing. Interpretations of his work he left to others; he was the maker, driven by some creative force that he could not and perhaps did not wish to understand’ (DNB).

Moore's output was immense. The complete catalogue of his sculptures lists almost a thousand works, and the bronzes usually exist in about three to ten versions each, bringing the total number of pieces up to something in the region of 6,000. It has therefore been reasonably claimed that ‘By the time Henry Moore died in 1986, his work had been distributed more widely throughout the Western world than that of any other sculptor, living or dead’ ( Peter Fuller in the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Henry Moore', Royal Academy, London, 1988). From the late 1960s he also worked a good deal as a printmaker, producing several series of etchings such as Elephant Skull (1969) and the Sheep Portfolios (1972 and 1974). He did little formal writing, but often made perceptive comments on his own and other artists' work, a collection of which has been made as Henry Moore on Sculpture (1966). In 1977 he set up the Henry Moore Foundation, a charitable foundation to advance public appreciation of art, especially his own work. As well as arranging exhibitions of his work worldwide, it funds fellowships and publications. Most major collections of modern art have examples of his work; those with particularly fine holdings include the Moore Sculpture Gallery (opened in 1982) at Leeds City Art Gallery, the Tate Gallery, London, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington.