Henry Moore: Sculpture

“The violent quarrel between the abstractionists [like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, both English sculptors] and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist’s personality must play their part. And I think the first inception of a painting or a sculpture may begin from either end.”

Henry Moore

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), pp. 254-255

Art , Imagination , Thinking , Parting

“The idea for [his sculpture] 'The Warrior' came to me at the end of 1952 or very early in 1953. It was evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952, and which reminded me of the stump of a leg, amputated at the hip. Just as Leonardo says somewhere in his notebooks that a painter can find a battle scene in the lichen marks on a wall, so this gave me the start of The Warrior idea. First I added the body, leg and one arm and it became a wounded warrior, but at first the figure was reclining. A day or two later I added a shield and altered its position and arrangement into a seated figure and so it changed from an inactive pose into a figure which, though wounded, is still defiant... The head has a blunted and bull-like power but also a sort of dumb animal acceptance and forbearance of pain... The figure may be emotionally connected (as one critic has suggested) with one’s feelings and thoughts about England during the crucial and early part of the last war. The position of the shield and its angle gives protection from above. The distance of the shield from the body and the rectangular shape of the space enclosed between the inside surface of the shield and the concave front of the body is important... This sculpture is the first single and separate male figure that I have done in sculpture and carrying it out in its final large scale was almost like the discovery of a new subject matter; the bony, edgy, tense forms were a great excitement to make... Like the bronze 'Draped Reclining Figure' of 1952-3 I think 'The Warrior' has some Greek influence, not consciously wished…”

Henry Moore

Quote from Moore's letter, (15 Jan. 1955); as cited in Henry Moore on Sculpture: a Collection of the Sculptor's Writings and Spoken Words, ed. Philip James, MacDonald, London 1966, p. 250
1940 - 1955

Pain , War , Feeling , Idea

“And for me Michelangelo's greatest work is one that was in his studio partly finished, partly unfinished when he died 'The Rondanini Pietà'. I don't know of any other single work of art by anyone that is more poignant, more moving. It isn't the most powerful of Michelangelo's works – it's a mixture, in fact, of two styles…. the changing became so drastic that I think he knocked the head off the sculpture… So the figure must originally have been a good deal taller. And if we see also the proportion of the length of the body of Christ compared with the length of the legs, there's no doubt that the whole top of the original sculpture has been cut away. Now this to me is a great question. Why should I and other sculptors I know, my contemporaries – I think that Giacometti feels this, I know Marino Marini feels it – find this work one of the most moving and greatest works we know of when it's a work which has such disunity in it?… But that's so moving, so touching: the position of the heads, the whole tenderness of the top part of the sculpture, is in my opinion more what it is by being in contrast with the rather finished, tough, leathery, typical Michelangelo legs. The top part is Gothic and the lower part is sort of Renaissance.”

Henry Moore

Quote of Henri Moore in his interview with David Silvester, in 'The Sunday Times Magazine', 16 Febr. 1964, pp. 18, 20-22
1955 - 1970

Art , Feeling , Question , Thinking

“I was a Yorkshire miner's son, the youngest of seven, and my mother was no longer so very young. She suffered from bad rheumatism in the back and would often say to me in winter, when I came home from school: 'Henry, boy, come and rub my back.' Then I would massage her back with liniment. When I came to model this figure [for his sculpture 'Seated Woman', 1957] which represents a fully mature woman, I found that I was unconsciously giving to its back the long-forgotten shape of the one that I had so often rubbed as a boy. Not just her shoulder but her whole back down from the shoulder blades with the skin close to the bone, to the fleshy lower parts. I had a strong sense of contrast between bone and flesh. I was seven or eight at the time [c. 1906].”

Henry Moore

Quote of Moore, 1978; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, pp. 32-33
1970 and later

School , Home , Boy , Sense

“Yes, Wordsworth often personified objects in nature and gave them the human aspect, and personally I have done rather the reverse process in sculpture. I’ve often found that by taking formal ideas from landscape, and putting them into my sculpture I have, as it were, related a human figure to a mountain, and so got the same effect as a metaphor in painting.”

Henry Moore

Quote in 'The Listener', 13 November 1941, pp. 657-9; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, pp. 126-27
1940 - 1955

Mountain , Idea , Nature , Painting

“Yes. There was a period when I tried to avoid looking at Greek – and Renaissance – sculpture of any kind; when I thought that the Greek and Renaissance were the enemy and that one had to throw all that over and start again from the beginning of primitive art. It's only in the last ten or fifteen years that I've begun to know how wonderful the elgin Marbles are.”

Henry Moore

Quote from 'Henry Moore', an interview by Donald, in 'Horizon', New York, Nov. 1960
1955 - 1970

Art

“Actually Rogers Fry's Vision and Design [1920] was the most lucky discovery for me. I came on it by chance while looking for another book in the Leeds Reference Library. Fry in his essay on 'Negro Sculpture' stressed the 'three-dimensional realization' that characterized African art and its 'truth to material'. More, Fry opened the way to other books and to the realization of the British museum. That was really the beginning.”

Henry Moore

Quote of Moore in 'Partisan Review', New York, March-April 1947
1940 - 1955

Truth , Books , Art , Way

“The Negroes.... their unique claim for admiration is their power to produce form completely in the round... Negro sculpture is completely in the round, fully-conceived air-surrounded form.”

Henry Moore

Quote of Henri Moore in 'Unpublished notes', c. 1925-1926, HMF archive; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, p. 96
1925 - 1940

“.. these reproductions were in Zwemmer's bookshop [in the 1920's]. I can see them now. They were black. There was one on Negro sculpture, one on Mexican sculpture, one on an Egyptian sculpture, and so on. And all these I knew. And in one of them was this small reproduction of the Chac Mool [famous Toltec-Maya sculpture]. It was the pose that struck me – this idea of a figure being on its back and turned upwards to the sky instead of lying on its side, which is a different sort of idea from the Renaissance, or Greek reclining figure, which is usually on its side. And this gave me all sorts of chances of making variations on it.”

Henry Moore

Quote from The Donald Caroll interviews, Talmy Franklin, London 1973, p. 377
1970 and later

Lying , Idea , Chance

“All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know.”

Henry Moore

Elizabeth Day, "The Moore Legacy," http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2008/jul/27/1 The Observer (2008-07-27),
Henry Moore is quoted here by Mary Moore, the artist's niece
1970 and later

Art , Thinking , Effort , Parting

“The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation. The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is possible, where the stone contains only the hole, which is the intended and considered form. The mystery of the hole – the mysterious fascination of caves in hill sides and cliffs.”

Henry Moore

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 251

“Yet actual physical size has an emotional meaning. We relate everything to our own size, and our emotional response to size is controlled by the fact that men on the average are between five and six feet high... If practical considerations allowed me, cost of material, of transport, etc., I should like to work on large carvings more often than I do. The average in-between size does not disconnect an idea enough from prosaic everyday life. The very small or the very big [sculpture] takes on an added size emotion.”

Henry Moore

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 253

Life , Men , Idea

“Mexican sculpture, as soon as I found it, seemed to me true and right, perhaps because I at once hit on similarities in it with some eleventh-century carvings I had seen as a boy on Yorkshire churches. Its 'stoniness', by which I mean its truth to material, its tremendous power without loss of sensitiveness, its astonishing variety and fertility of form-invention and its approach to a full three-dimensional conception of form, makes it unsurpassed in my opinion by any other period of stone sculpture.”

Henry Moore

Quote of Henri Moore in 'The Listener', 24 April 1941, pp. 598-9; as cited in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, p. 104
1940 - 1955

Truth , Boy , Loss

“When the Surrealist exhibition [in London, 1936] was held Barbara [Hepworth] was by then married to [the sculptor] w:Ben Nicholson, they were strongly against it [against Surrealism ], though I felt, and feel, that there needn't be the sort of division in art that sprang up then. And Ben had also been much influenced by Mondrian. He was devoted to abstract art and she became much more interested in the abstract form. But for me, the essence of sculpture has always been the human figure. Still, of course, one kept in touch and one met and one's paths crossed.”

Henry Moore

1970 and later
Source: 'The Sunday Times', 25 May 1975; as quoted in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, p. 121

Art , Feeling

“Well, it's the only picture I ever wanted to own ['Three Bathers' of Cézanne ]. It's a Cézanne and the joy of my life. I saw it about a year ago in an exhibition and I was stunned by it. I didn’t sleep for two or three nights trying to decide whether to... To me it is marvelous. Monumental... It's not perfect, it’s a sketch. But then I don't like absolute perfection. I believe one should make a struggle towards something one can't do rather than do the thing that comes easily. Perhaps another reason is why I fell for it is that the type of woman he portrays is the same kind as I like. Each of the figures I could turn in into a piece of sculpture, very simple. Not young girls but that wide, broad, mature woman. Matronly.”

Henry Moore

1955 - 1970

Life , Girl , Sleep , Joy

“Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and make us once more shape-conscious. To do this he has had to concentrate on very simple direct shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious.... it may now be no longer necessary to close down and restrict sculpture to the single form unit. We can now begin to open out. To relate and combine together several forms of varied sizes, sections, and directions into one organic whole.”

Henry Moore

Source: 1925 - 1940, The sculptor speaks' (1937), p. 250

“When I was offered the site near the House of Lords... I liked the place so much that I didn't bother to go and see an alternative site in Hyde Park — one lonely sculpture can be lost in a large park. The House of Lords site is quite different. It is next to a path where people walk and it has a few seats where they can sit and contemplate it.”

Henry Moore

Quoted by Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, in Tate Gallery Catalogues: The Modern British Paintings, drawings and Sculpture, Volume II (Oldbourne Press, London, 1964), p. 481 http://www.henry-moore-fdn.co.uk/matrix_engine/content.php?page_id=3689
his remark, concerning the placement of his large sculpture 'Knife Edge – Two Piece', 1962 https://www.parliament.uk/about/art-in-parliament/global/print/?art=S715 - located near the House of Lords.
1955 - 1970

People , Housing

“My work may be balanced on the second side [the Romantic tendency]….- but I believe it has some elements of order & unity, some design, even balance & abstract qualities, some tenseness. When its all classical, its too obvious & cold & deadly perfect - when its all romantic, its too loose uncontrolled wildly chaotic & shapeless – But in my opinion – Gothic sculpture – Mexican, all primitive sculpture, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Tintoretto, El Greco, Rubens, Michelangelo, Masaccio, are all more romantic than classic [Moore is reacting here on Stanley Casson's critic in 'The Listener' 25 Aug. 1937”

Henry Moore

Source: 1925 - 1940, Unpublished notes' for 'The Sculptor Speaks' (1937), p. 116

Perfection

“Too often in a modern building the work of art is an afterthought – a piece of decoration added to fill a space that is felt to be too empty. Ideally the work of art should be a focus round which the harmony of the whole building revolves – inseparable from the design, structurally coherent and aesthetically essential... He [the sculptor] will want to consider both external proportions and internal space volumes in relation to the size and style of sculpture that might be required – not merely the decorative function of sculpture... I am thinking of the didactic and symbolic functions of sculpture in Gothic architecture, inseparable from the architectural conception itself…”

Henry Moore

Quote of Moore, as cited by Unesco, International Conference of artists, Venice 1952; typescript, in HMF Library
1940 - 1955

Art , Thinking

“The conflict between the theories of Surrealism & pure abstraction leads many to look upon one as black & bad & the other as white & good. Yet it seems to me that a good work of art has always contained both abstract & surrealist elements – just as it has both classical & romantic elements (order & surprise?)... Surrealism is widening the field of contemporary art & is giving more freedom to the artist (& perhaps what is not unimportant, – stretching the appreciation of the public). Abstraction is re-establishing fundamental laws; bringing back form to painting & sculpture. There are many products of surrealism which I personally dislike,.... but equally Unimportant to me are the empty decorations produced in the name of abstraction.”

Henry Moore

Source: 1925 - 1940, Unpublished notes' for 'The Sculptor Speaks' (1937), pp. 112-113

Law , Art , Freedom , Painting