It’s as though you have something trying to make itself come to a shape from inside itself. This is perhaps, what makes me interested in bones as much as in flesh because the bone is the inner structure of all living form.
– Henry Moore
Henry Moore (1898-1986) was one of Britain’s preeminent Modernist sculptors. Often taking aesthetic inspiration from foundational organic forms like bones and rocks, Moore combined these perennial references with a humanist viewpoint in works of immense scale and ambition. Remembered as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century, his oeuvre encompasses a vast array of media including sculpture, drawing, tapestry, and graphics. His art is typified by a semifigurative visual language and muted tonality, and is often concerned with the dynamic between human bodies and their environments – both in the context of art viewership and the wider world.
Moore was born in 1898 in Castleford, Yorkshire, a relatively small town close to Leeds in the North of England. He initially trained as a schoolteacher but, following his army service in World War One between 1916 and 1918, he decided to follow his passion for art. He studied first at the Leeds College of Art, Yorkshire from 1919-21 before securing a scholarship to complete his postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art, London, where he studied between 1921 and 1924. He was also granted travel scholarships to France and Italy (1922 and 1925 respectively), where he immersed himself in both the avant-garde and classical traditions of European art. After completing his education, Moore began teaching regularly. His first position was as a part-time sculpture tutor at the RCA between 1925 and 1931. In 1932, he became the Head of Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art, London and remained in the position until the outbreak of World War Two in 1939.
Moore was included in his first major group exhibition in 1924 at the Redfern Gallery, London alongside fellow RCA students Edward Burra, Barbara Hepworth, Percy Horton, Roland Vivian Pitchforth, and Charles Tunnicliffe. By this point Moore had gained a reputation for his distinctive visuality and humanitarian philosophy. It was soon after his Redfern group show that he had his first solo exhibition in 1928 – at the Warren Gallery, London. His work would go on to be consistently commercially successful and he exhibited regularly throughout his life.
Also in 1928, a landmark year for the artist, Moore received his first public commission – for the headquarters of the London Underground. Public work was thenceforth a major element of his practice, allowing him to expand his scale to monumental proportions. Some major publicly commissioned works include UNESCO Reclining Figure (1957-58) for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris and Three Piece Sculpture: Vertebrae (1978) for the plaza outside Dallas City Hall, Texas.
Moore’s iconic work has been the subject of countless local and international museum exhibitions. He had his first institutional retrospective at Temple Newsam, Leeds in 1941, and subsequent major museum exhibitions include at the Tate Gallery, London (1951, 1968, 1978, 2003, and 2010-11), Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1960), Serpentine Gallery, London (1978), and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1983). In 1981, the British Council arranged the largest ever exhibition of Moore’s work, which toured Madrid, Lisbon, and Barcelona. During his lifetime, he was also included in the Venice Biennale in 1930 (alongside Jacob Epstein, John Skeaping, Augustus John, Wilson Steer, and Walter Sickert), 1948 (alongside J.M.W. Turner, for which Moore won the International Sculpture Prize), and 1952.