Henry Moore

Henry Moore (Castleford, Yorkshire, 1898 - Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, 1986) was a British sculptor best known for his semi-abstract monumental sculptures, usually abstractions of the human figure. Moore's works are usually suggestive of the female body, and his forms alternate pierced or hollow spaces with the perception of depth and fullness. He was born to a mining family of 10, and from an early age revealed an unusual talent for the arts and an interest in ancient sculpture, but was forced to work as a professor, temporarily abandoning his artistic vocation. After the armistice in the Second World War, Moore returned to school, as a student at the Leeds School of Art. Subsequently, he studied at the Royal College of Art in London, a city where he was able to study the primitive art and ethnographic collections of the British Museum up close. He became particularly passionate about primitive Egyptian, Mexican and African sculpture. Fed up with the Victorian style imparted in the school, the artist showed interest in modern sculptors such as Constantin Brancusi, Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. In 1925, he won a scholarship to travel for six months and chose to spend almost the whole time in Paris, the capital of modern art, where he discovered the pre-Columbian Chac Mool, a sculpture with the function of an altar, that would become a recurring subject in his production. Moore also spent several months in Italy, particularly in Florence, studying Giotto, Masaccio and Michelangelo. In 1928 he received his first public commission, West Wind, for the central station of the London Underground at 55 Broadway, in which the influence of Michelangelo and the Chac Mool merge. Parallel to his work as an artist, he continued to teach at the Royal College of Art and established relationships with the members of the Seven and Five Society, developing an art that is increasingly abstract and close to progressive artists such as Picasso, Braque and Giacometti, while also approaching surrealism. In 1938 he met Kenneth Clark for the first time, who was during World War II, in charge of the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) and would acquire from the artist touching drawings depicting people hiding in the Underground to escape bombs and miners working in Yorkshire, like his father. Thanks to Clark's support, Moore's international renown grew and reached the United States, where he presented his work in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art in 1946. Both in America and in Europe he created important and recognisable public sculptures, with the Reclining figure for the UNESCO in Paris being of special note. His exhibitions and commissions increased, confirming a consolidated fame that was crowned by the artist himself with the creation of the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, where he had been living for many years. By the end of his career, Moore was the world's most successful living artist at auction.