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“Art is the expression of imagination and not the imitation of life”

Henry Moore was born in Castleford, West Yorkshire, on July 30, 1898, the seventh of eight children. Since a young age he wanted to study art, contrary to the wishes of his coal miner father, who wanted him to become a teacher. Initially Moore followed his father’s wishes, and started teaching in a school in Castleford.

At the age of eighteen, however,... “Art is the expression of imagination and not the imitation of life”

Henry Moore was born in Castleford, West Yorkshire, on July 30, 1898, the seventh of eight children. Since a young age he wanted to study art, contrary to the wishes of his coal miner father, who wanted him to become a teacher. Initially Moore followed his father’s wishes, and started teaching in a school in Castleford.

At the age of eighteen, however, the artist volunteered for army service, joining the Price of Wale’s Own Civil Service Rifles regiment. The next year, he was injured following a gas attack during the Battle of Cambrai, and retired from active service.

Moore went back to teaching in Castleford, but his desire to study art, and sculpture in particular, was too strong to continue this work. He received an ex-serviceman’s grant to enroll at the Leeds School of Art, setting up a sculpture studio there. At Leeds he met Barbara Hepworth and was exposed to the works of several modernist artists. At the end of his second year there, Moore won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art, London, along with Hepworth.

In 1924, Moore won a travel grant, and spent six months in Italy, studying the work of masters like Michelangelo, Bondone and Pisano. He also travelled to Paris, where he took classes at the Académie Colarossi, and encountered in person primitive sculptures that he had read about as a student. These were to have a profound impact on his work, particularly a Pre-Columbian Chac-Mool statue.

On his return, Moore was appointed a sculpture teacher at the Royal College of Art, a post which offered him a considerable amount of time to dedicate to his own practice. It was during this period, in 1928, that the artist received his first public commission from the London Transport for their headquarters. In the same year he held his first solo exhibition at the Warren Gallery where he exhibited forty-two sculptures and fifty-one drawings.

In the 1930s, the Leicester Galleries hosted three more solo exhibitions of Moore’s work, and the artist also exhibited in several important group exhibitions. Moving to a studio in Hamstead, Moore came into contact with a group of artists and critics including Hepworth and Herbert Read, who helped publicize his work further.

In 1932, Moore was appointed Head of the Department of Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art, and experimented with abstract forms as well as Surrealism. This was the time that Moore also transitioned from direct carving to Bronze casting, and from preparatory sketches to three-dimensional maquettes.

During the war, Moore resigned the Chelsea School, and was later commissioned as a war artist, producing several works that depicted people sheltering from air-raids in the London Underground. These works and those representing coalminers are considered among his best. In 1940, after his house was damaged in a bombing, he moved to Hertfordshire where he continued to live and work until his final days.

In 1946, Moore was honoured with his first international retrospective in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. From this point onwards Moore achieved great popularity and secured several important shows and commissions. In 1948, Moore was awarded the Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale, and was featured at the Festival of Britain in 1951 and at Documenta 1 in Kassel four years later. In 1958, Moore was commissioned by UNESCO to create a public work for its offices in Paris, and in 1967 by the University of Chicago to commemorate Fermi’s nuclear experiments.

The sculptor was honoured with the Companion of Honour in 1955 and the Order of Merit in 1963. In 1972, an impressive exhibition of Moore’s work was held at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence. Two years later, Moore donated more than two hundred sculptures and drawings and a collection of graphics to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, now the largest public collection of his works. Over the next few years other works were donated to the Tate Gallery, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the British Council in London.

Before his death, Moore left all of his possessions and works in inheritance to the Henry Moore Foundation, with the intention of promoting the arts and art education within the United Kingdom. The Foundation also manages the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds.

The artist died on August 31, 1986, at his home in Hertfordshire.

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