Henry Moore
The sculptor of the reclining figure.
Henry Moore made large sculptures with holes and soft forms inspired by stones and bones. They stand in parks all over the world.
Henry Moore was born in 1898 in Castleford, Yorkshire, the seventh of eight children of a miner. He decided early on to become a sculptor. During the First World War he was injured in a gas attack at Cambrai in 1917. After the war he studied at the Leeds School of Art, where he got to know Barbara Hepworth, and then at the Royal College of Art in London.
He spent a great deal of time at the British Museum and was influenced by sculpture from Mexico, Africa and Oceania, in which he saw a power he found lacking in the classical European tradition. One model was an ancient Mexican Chac Mool figure, a reclining form. The reclining figure became his great theme throughout his life, often a woman whose body resembles a landscape of hills and valleys.
For a long time Moore worked by direct carving in stone and wood, letting the material guide the form. He opened up his sculptures with holes and voids, so that the air and surroundings become part of the work. He drew inspiration from stones, bones and shells. Later he worked mostly in bronze and on an ever larger scale.
During the Second World War he was an official war artist and made the famous shelter drawings of people sleeping in the London Underground during the bombing. In 1948 he won the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale, after which he became world-famous. He made large public works for the UNESCO building in Paris and for the Lincoln Center in New York, and King and Queen of 1952–53 is among his best-known sculptures.
From 1940 Moore lived at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, where the Henry Moore Foundation now displays his work in extensive parkland. He died in 1986. He is regarded as one of the foremost sculptors of the 20th century, and his bronze figures stand in parks and outside institutions all over the world.