This biography from the Archives of AskART:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
 A sculptor of large-scale, abstract figurative work with voids or
pieced areas, Henry Moore was a revolutionary figure in bringing
modernism to the sculpture mediums of marble and bronze in Great
Britain. His home and studio were in Much Hadham, England.
Henry Moore was born, the seventh of eight children in Yorkshire in the
mining town of Castleford. His father was a mining engineer who
loved music and literature, and emphasized the importance of education
to his children. At age eleven, Moore determined to become a
sculptor, and the decision was reinforced when he became familiar with
the work of Michelangelo. However, his parents opposed that
decision because they perceived sculpture as being more manual labor
than art expression. Their observations were likely reinforced by
the fact that many of his early pieces resulted from direct carving,
which took much time and which allowed natural markings on the material
to be part of the sculpture.
Moore served in the army during World War I, and injured with gas,
spent the rest of the war doing physical training. In 1919, after
the War, he received a grant for ex-servicemen and enrolled as the
first sculpture student at the Leeds School of Art. There he
began a life-long association with Barbara Hepworth, who also became
one of England's most famous modernist sculptors. He was also
exposed to African tribal sculpture, and in 1921, enrolling at the
Royal College of Art in London, gained more knowledge on primitive
sculpture. He spent much time in the ethnographic collections of
the Victoria and Albert Museum and British Museums. In 1924, he
studied in Italy on a six-month traveling scholarship.
Returning to England, he took a teaching position at the Royal College
of Art and married a Russian-Polish girl, Irina Radetsky, a student at
the College who posed for Moore. They lived in Hampstead and were
neighbors of Barbara Hepworth and her partner, Ben Nicholson. In
the 1930s, Moore joined the faculty of the Chelsea School of Art, and
became chair of the Department of Sculpture. He became
increasingly active in modernist art, experimenting with Surrealism,
Cubism and other progressive movements, but World War II ended much of
his experimentation because he was a commissioned war artist. He
did many drawings showing Londoners hiding in the London Underground,
and the power of these depictions brought him much attention beyond his
own country.
Because their Hampstead home had bomb damage, the Moores moved
permanently to a farmhouse in Much Hadham in Hertfordshire.
Although he made much money from the success of marketing his
sculpture, Moore lived frugally and gave most of his money to the Henry
Moore Foundation, established to support fine-art education and
promotion through the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and to preserve
his sculptures. The Foundation also helped him avoid taxes,
amounts that were over a million pounds a year by the end of the 1970s.
In 1946, the Moore's had a daughter, Mary, and this event combined with
the recent death of his mother focused the sculptor on the subject of
family, especially women. As a result, many of his sculpture
subjects are family groups such as mother and child or reclining
figures, usually female. In 1946, Moore also made his first
trip to America, where the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibition of
his work. Two years later, he won the International Sculpture
Prize at the Venice Biennale*. In 1951, he declined the offer of
knighthood, but in 1963, received the Order of Merit.
He gave his work simple titles such as The Arch or Oval with Points because he
believed that an artist should not overly explain his or her work but
should leave enough unsaid that an air of mystery would surround the
piece. His working method in the 30's was to make many preparatory
sketches and drawings, and in the 1940s to do most of his preliminary
work with clay modeling instead of on paper. Following World War II
was the period when he did most of his huge works, which were done to
accommodate the many public art commissions he was receiving. At that
time, he had studio assistants, including Anthony Caro and Richard
Wentworth, who worked from the "maquettes" he created, some of them very
small and others half scale. In his studio, he created a collection of
objects that provided ideas for his organic shapes---such as pebbles,
driftwood and skulls.
Increasingly he received commissions including for the UNESCO building
in Paris in 1957. In 1967, to commemorate the achievement of the
first sustained nuclear chain reaction by a team of scientists led 25
years earlier by Enrico Fermi, Moore did Nuclear Energy. It
is twelve feet tall, and has been described as "a mushroom cloud topped
by a massive human skull." However, Moore said that people should
"go around it, looking out through the open spaces, and that they might
have a feeling of being in a cathedral." Exhibitions mounted, and
by the end of the 1970s, over 40 exhibitions a year featured his work.
Henry Moore died August 31, 1986 at age 88 in his home at Much
Hadham. England honored his reputation by placing his remains in
St. Paul's Cathedral. Sculpture by Henry Moore is in
numerous museum collections including the Tate Gallery, London;
Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC; and Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in
Kansas City.
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Moore#Sculpture
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in-depth information about these terms and others, see AskART.com Glossary
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Biography from Denis Bloch Fine Art Ltd.:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Henry Spencer Moore was born on July 30, 1898, in Castleford, Yorkshire the seventh of eight children. Despite an early desire to become a sculptor, having learned of the achievements of Michelangelo at the age of eleven, Moore began his career as a teacher in Castleford. After military service in World War I he attended Leeds School of Art on an ex-serviceman's grant. In 1921 he won a Royal Exhibition Scholarship to study sculpture at the Royal Academy of Art in London.
Moore became interested in the Mexican, Egyptian, and African sculpture he saw at the British Museum, which, to him, exemplified the ideal of vital force and formal vigor. He was appointed Instructor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy in 1924, a post he held for the next seven years. A Royal Academy traveling scholarship allowed Moore to visit Italy in 1925, where he saw the frescoes of Giotto and Masaccio and the late sculpture of Michelangelo. Moore's first solo show of sculpture was held at the Warren Gallery, London, in 1928.
Much of Moore’s early work was direct carved, rejecting the academic tradition of modeling in favor of the doctrine of ‘truth to materials’—according to which the nature of the stone or wood—its shape, texture, and so on, was part of the conception of the work. According to Moore “…a work must have a vitality of its own. I do not mean a reflection of the vitality of life, of movement, of physical action, frisking dancing figures, and so on, but that a work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the object it may represent. When a work has this powerful vitality we do not connect the word Beauty with it. Beauty, in the later Greek or Renaissance sense, is not the aim in my sculpture.”
In the 1930s Moore was a member of Unit One, a group of advanced artists organized by Paul Nash, and was a close friend of Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and the critic Herbert Read. From 1932 to 1939, he taught at the Chelsea School of Art. He was an important force in the English Surrealist* movement, although he was not entirely committed to its doctrines; Moore participated in the International Surrealist Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, London, in 1936.
In 1940, Moore was appointed an official war artist, and was commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee to execute drawings of life in underground bomb shelters. According to Moore: “I spent the time looking at the rows of people sleeping on the platforms. I had never seen so many reclining figures, and even the train tunnels seemed to be like the holes in my sculpture.” From 1940 to 1943 the artist concentrated almost entirely on drawing.
Moore's first retrospective took place at Temple Newsam, Leeds, in 1941. In 1943 he received a commission from the Church of St. Matthew, Northampton, to carve a Madonna and Child; this sculpture was the first in an important series of family-group sculptures. Moore was given his first major retrospective abroad by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1946. He won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale* of 1948.
Moore executed several important public commissions in the 1950s, among them Reclining Figure 1956–58, for the UNESCO Building in Paris. From the late 1960s Moore worked a good deal as a print maker creating several series of etchings such as Elephant Skull and The Sheep Portfolios. In 1963 the artist was awarded the British Order of Merit. In 1978 an exhibition of his work organized by the Arts Council of Great Britain was held at the Serpentine in London, at which time he gave many of his sculptures to the Tate Gallery, London.
In 1977, Moore set up the Henry Moore Foundation in order to advance public appreciation of art, especially his own work, and arranged numerous worldwide exhibitions.
Moore died in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire, on August 31, 1986, and in September 2000 Moore Square was opened on the site of his Castleford birthplace.
QUOTE:
“The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.”
Select Museum Collections:
Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada
The British Museum, London
Tate Gallery, London
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Henry Moore Foundation, UK
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
* For more in-depth
information about these terms and others, see AskART.com Glossary
http://www.askart.com/AskART/lists/Art_Definition.aspx
|
Biography from Rogallery.com:
| Please note: Artists not classified as American in our database may have limited biographical data
compared to the extensive information about American artists.
Born in Castleford, Yorkshire in 1898, Henry Moore was celebrated as a sculptor, but
was strongly influenced in his formative years by painters such as
Giotto, Masaccio, Blake, Turner and Picasso, as well as the
painter/sculptor Michaelangelo.
He attended Leeds School of Art from
1919-21. In 1921 Moore won a Royal Exhibition Scholarship to study
sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London. He taught at the Royal
College from 1924-31 and at Chelsea School of Art from 1932-39.
He
was given his first one-man show in 1928 by the Warren Gallery and in
the same year he gained his first public commission - to carve a relief
in stone for a façade of the new Underground Building, London.
Moore
was a member of the Seven and Five Society from 1931, and in 1933 he was
invited to join 'Unit One'; a group of seven painters and five
sculptors whose members included Edward Burra, Barbara Hepworth, Ben
Nicholson and Edward Wadsworth. During the Second World War, as an
Official War Artist, he made a series of drawings of people sheltering
in the London Underground, as well as studies of miners at the
coal-face. In these pictures he frequently used watercolour over wax
crayon employed as a resist.
In 1946, Moore was given his first
overseas retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1948,
he won the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale. 1948
also saw him begin the bronze family group for the Barclay School of
Art, Stevenage which was to be his first life-size bronze.
He
had a retrospective exhibition at the Tate Gallery, London in 1951 and
1968. In 1952 he began work on the stone screen and bronze Draped
Reclining Figure, both for the Time-Life Building, London. He was First
prize winner at the Sao Paulo Biennale, Brazil in 1953. Moore was a
Trustee of the National Gallery, London from 1955-74. In 1956, he
received a commission for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. He was
given a one-man exhibition at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence in
1972; the first of numerous outdoor exhibitions held in capital cities
throughout the world.
In 1977, he formed the Henry Moore
Foundation at Much Hadham in Hertfordshire. In 1978 he made a gift of
36 sculptures to the Tate Gallery, London. In 1986 he was given major
retrospectives in Hong Kong and Japan.
He was notable throughout
his career for his output of graphic art (drawings, watercolours,
etchings, lithographs), not necessarily closely related to the
development of individual works in sculpture. These unusually for a
sculptor, often used colour and often established a complete pictorial
setting for figures or for imaginary sculptural objects, in a manner
recalling the work of De Chirico or Max Ernst. (He exhibited in the
International Surrealist exhibition in 1936).
In 1986 Moore died, aged 88, at Much Hadham, where he had lived since the 1940’s. |
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