"A sculpture is like a person, it shouldn't just be seen on display. It should always be valid: when the sun shines and when there is a storm, in public and in privateHenry Moore said one day.
The artist resided in Much Hadham, Hertfordshire where he built his house and workshop there.
Once the works are finished, Moore loves to walk around them as around a fruit tree. One of his own works "the Archer" had called it that because people were convinced they saw a man with a bow and arrow. His ability to always discover new shapes, starting from gnarled trunks or grazing horses was more than enough to inspire him. Let's not talk about the crows... who, to see them pompous and swaying, threw them pieces of meat. He also observed rhinoceroses, much more "wonderful" than swans in his opinion. A decidedly monumental way of seeing nature.
But his plastic vision has always been concentrated on the human figure, which is found in his sculpture in the form of variants to the first, "art does nothing but move around it” he stated with great conviction.
Moore's monumental figures are numerous, often copied by other artists, but similar though no artist has ever managed to copy him, no one will ever be able to excite as much as his plasticity, sometimes even distressing, as if it were locked up inside an enigma.
The son of a miner, he was born in 1898 in Castleford a town near Leeds and was the seventh of eight children. They lived in a modest house and his passion was mainly to observe what surrounded him, a bit of everything, things, animals, nature and people with their way of doing or moving.
One day, he recovered some fine clay from abandoned quarries and began to model figures, inspired by what he had seen in a Gothic church, i.e. stone figures posing on tombs.
He then left for the First World War, when he returned he decided to go to London to learn how to draw and shape clay. The city quite conquered this young boy from Yorkshire; every day he visited museums, and the more powerful a sculpture was, the more he was involved. A scholarship allowed him to spend six months in Italy, which served him greatly to complete his artistic training. He called Michelangelo his master, as he marked everything on his sketch pad: sculptures in churches and works displayed in galleries.
Back in England he went to teach at the Royal College of Art which, however, judged it a little too unconventional, so he decided to leave the College to go to the one in Chelsea which had a more modern address.
In 1928 he had his first solo exhibition in a London gallery, but he sold nothing. His sculptures were described as "monstrous and abnormal", but despite the criticisms he was never discouraged. During the summer holidays he moved to Canterbury where he carved sculptures in wood or stone surrounded only by nature and perhaps humming military songs. He was very social and cheerful and artists of all kinds often gathered at his house.
In 1929 he married a girl, his student, of Russian-Polish origins with whom he had a daughter, Mary. This period of happiness also gave Henry an artistic moment of great beauty.
His apparently "exaggerated" and "immobile" sculptures, if you turn around them, you realize that they are alive and that they ask for participation. They are animated actors. When she was in his studio, she wore a blue apron, mixed the plaster in a bowl and kneaded the mass until it became a block, from which her first plaster shapes were born. He placed them on the table, walked around them, rounded them and "wounded" them with dentist's tools, and little by little the sketch of what would have been the sculpture to be created in monumental form arrived. While those in stone were almost always small.
His real fame began almost immediately after the war and continued steadily over the years, in 1948 the Venice Biennale awarded him the first international prize for sculpture.
The artist's most loved work was the figure of the Lincoln Center, a work merged into 65 sections and according to his thought "Sculpture teaches people to use their innate sense of form, to improve the environment in which they live, to make life beautiful!".
Some of his sculptures are considered fundamental stages of modern art, such as the female figure reclining at the entrance to the UNESCO building in Paris…
…or the statue”knife blade” almost three meters high placed on the promontory of the Golden Gate in San Francisco, not to mention the two distinct reclining figures, over 5 meters tall at the Lincoln Center in New York.
One of his exhibitions at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, England
2 May – 29 September 2019
