Henry Moore
(1898-1986):
The Graphics Portfolios

Henry Moore's career spanned over sixty years and he became one of the most recognized and acclaimed artists of the twentieth century. His work is represented in almost every important public and private collection, and his sculptures have been placed in more public places throughout the world than any other sculptor in history. At the time of his death in 1986, the Daily Telegraph declared that "Since the death of Sir Winston Churchill, Henry Moore has been the most internationally acclaimed of Englishmen, honored by every civilized country in the world.

Henry Spenser Moore was born in 1898 in the mining town of Castleford, Yorkshire, the son of a coal miner. He attended elementary school in his hometown and, in 1910, won a scholarship to Castleford Secondary School. It was during this time that he began carving in wood and modeling clay. By the time he was eleven, he had decided that sculpture would be his life's work.

In 1917 he enlisted in the 15th London Regiment (Civil Service Rifles), His regiment was sent to France where he suffered from a gas attack at the battle of Cambrai. After the war and his recovery he returned to Yorkshire to attend Leeds College of Art where he was the first student to study sculpture.

The 1920s were important years for his development as an artist. He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. There he drew extensively from sculpture in the British Museum. An extended visit to Paris in 1923 and a six-month tour of central and northern Italy in 1925 were also important influences on his development. A turning point in his career came in 1928. In that year, he had his first one-man show at the Warren Gallery in London and received his first commission: a relief for the new London Transport Headquarters.

During the 1930s, he became more closely associated with avant garde groups such as 7&5 Society, Unit One, and the English Surrealist group. Drawing continued to be an important part of his work. Some of the most powerful drawings from this time are his studies of Londoners sheltered from the German bombings in the Underground. By the end of the thirties and the advent of World War II, Moore had become an artist of international stature. The War gave him a broad base of recognition, particularly among Americans. Ironically, though, at this time he was better known for his Shelter Drawings, than his sculpture.

Moore's career as a printmaker began in earnest in 1950 with his suite of illustrations to Goethe's Promethée, translated by André Gide, and gathered momentum with the increasing international clamor for his work. During the last 30 years of his life, Moore produced some 700 original prints, comprising an important aspect of his work as an artist. From his student days, Moore had drawn assiduously in life classes, and his sculptural concepts often began as drawings. In his printmaking, Moore is rarely far from those imaginative roots. His prints, taken as a whole, express what the distinguished writer and art critic John Russell has referred to as "the anarchical imagination that has kept Moore's art from ever settling down"--the swing between the sweetness of some of his imagery and the probing, misshapen, "night side" of the artist's creative persona.

The important lithographs for Prometheus [1950] reflect the direction Moore's sculptural work was taking at the time. With the Shelter Sketchbook portfolio of the 1960s, Moore explores the possibilities of the lithographic medium in translating and updating his drawings of the 1940s. The Elephant Skull portfolio show's Moore at his most spiky and sculptural-a series of rhapsodic abstractions based on the skull of an elephant, not unrelated in ethos to his multipartite reclining figures of the 1960s. In the Reclining Figure portfolio [1977], Moore extemporizes on the idea of the figure against a background or within a confined setting, which he had explored in his sculptural work of the previous decade. In his final portfolio, the Mother and Child, Moore returned lovingly to a theme that had been his alone since the 1920s. These autumnal images run the gamut from sculptural ideas and reminiscences to the quasi-naturalistic drawing style of the life class, all bearing the mark of Moore's unique vision of the human form.