Henry Moore, "Reclining Figure Bunched"

About Henry Moore (1898 - 1986)

Henry Spencer Moore was born on July 30th, 1898 in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England, the 7th of 8 children. Having developed a strong interest in sculpture at a very early age, Moore’s interests were nurtured by one of his teachers who encouraged him to apply to a local art school. 

 

At the age of 18, Moore volunteered for army service during the First World War and was wounded in a gas attack in 1917. After the war, Moore enrolled at the Leeds School of Art in 1919 where he studied alongside artist Barbara Hepworth. By 1921 Moore won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London.

 

It was in London where Moore was exposed to the collections of ethnographic art at the British Museum which would have a lasting impact on the direction that his art would take. Abandoning classical sculpture, Moore started to hone his eye on a more abstract idiom. 

In 1929, Moore married Irina Radetsky, a fellow art student at The Royal Academy of Art, and together they settled in the Hampstead area of London which started to become known as an artist colony of avant-garde artists. It was during this time when Moore was teaching, working on his art, and traveling a good deal, that he discovered the Toltec-Mayan sculpture at the Louvre Museum in Paris. This encounter had a lasting impact on his art and helped develop his interest in one of the themes that he would explore throughout the rest of his career – that of the reclining figure.

 

In 1940 during the Second World War when their home and studio were damaged by shrapnel, Henry and Irina decided to move to the countryside and settle in a farmhouse in the Hoglands, Perry Green near Much Haddam, Hertfordshire. It was here that the Moores would spend the rest of their lives, eventually expanding the studio spaces and becoming the home of the Henry Moore Foundation.

 

During the 1940’s Moore’s reputation began to explode, and by the 1950’s he had become an international sensation. In 1946 the Moores would welcome the birth of their only child, Mary, and in that same year, Henry was celebrated with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mary’s birth was also the impetus behind another one of the themes that Moore would continue to explore in his work, that of “mother and child”, and “the family group”.

 

Early in his career, Moore worked in a direct-carve method where he chiseled his forms directly from stone or wood. As time went on and his reputation grew, he was commissioned for ever larger public works. For these pieces, he turned to a technique whereby he first modeled his forms in clay or plaster in a maquette-size, and then blew them up to a monumental scale, which were cast in bronze. Moore’s work can be described as semi-abstract where he melded undulating forms suggestive of reclining figures together with pebble or rock forms suggestive of the landscape at the same time. He is best known for the “holes” in his work, in which mass is punctuated by holes, or voids. He kept a collection of skulls, driftwood, pebbles, rocks and shells that would often become the impetus for his forms.

 

Henry Moore died at his home in Perry Green on August 31, 1986. By the end of his life, he was internationally known as one of the most successful artists at auction and, although his market has gone up and down since, he will forever be remembered as one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century.

 

 

   Wikepedia: Henry Moore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore