Henry Moore British, 1898-1986

Henry Moore (1898–1986) was the most widely known British sculptor of the twentieth century, and photography was integral to his practice, extending from the studio into the landscape. An avid amateur photographer, he accumulated cameras, film, equipment, and thousands of prints in his home office and studios at Perry Green, which the Henry Moore Foundation preserves as he left them. He photographed his sculptures continually, positioning them on plinths in the clerestory light of the studio or setting them against open country. These photographs were more than documentation: they were a means of seeing, evaluating, and ultimately determining what the sculpture could be.

Born in Castleford, Yorkshire, in 1898, the seventh child of a coal miner, Moore served on the Western Front and was gassed at Cambrai in 1917. He studied at the Leeds School of Art and then at the Royal College of Art in London, where the pre-Columbian and African carvings he encountered at the British Museum proved more formative than the classical tradition he was being taught. Direct carving and fidelity to the material became defining principles of his early work.

The reclining figure, the mother and child, and the relationship between internal and external form remained central to Moore’s practice for six decades. By piercing the figure, he allowed the space passing through it to carry as much weight as the surrounding mass. From the late 1930s, he increasingly drew inspiration from found bones, pebbles, and flints, enlarging small objects until they became bodies or landscapes. An elephant skull given to him by the biologist Julian Huxley and his wife, Juliette, inspired a suite of thirty-eight etchings in 1970 and informed the sculpture Oval with Points. Family Group (1949), his first large-scale bronze, was among the last works he developed from preliminary drawings; thereafter, he worked increasingly from maquettes and found objects.

Moore’s Shelter Drawings, made while serving as an official war artist in the London Underground during the Blitz, brought his work to a public far beyond the world of sculpture. He photographed virtually everything he made and exercised close control over how it was seen. His photographs isolate the sculpture, most often against a pastoral background, reflecting the presentation he came to favor. They shaped the public identity of his work as decisively as the exhibitions themselves. Considered alongside Auguste Rodin, who employed photographers to study sculpture in progress, and Constantin Brâncuși, who believed that an image of a sculpture could communicate more than any written account, Moore’s photographs constitute an extensive record of artistic process, one that has rarely been exhibited in its own right.

Moore settled at Perry Green in Hertfordshire in 1940 and remained there for the rest of his life, placing sculptures throughout the fields surrounding his home. In 1977, he established the Henry Moore Foundation to preserve his estate and support sculpture, drawing, and the fine arts.

Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented Moore’s photographic work in Brancusi, Moore, and Smith (2002), Discoveries (2010), and Photographer as Sculptor, Sculptor as Photographer (2023).