Yorkshire miner's son who put holes through bronze giants
Henry Spencer Moore, 30 July 1898 to 31 August 1986, filled plazas worldwide with semi-abstract bronzes of mothers, children, and reclining figures. Pierced forms and hollows became his signature, turning English modernism into public furniture and wartime shelter drawings into witness art.
Moore was the seventh of eight children in a Castleford family that often went short. His father, of Irish descent, rose from pit deputy to under-manager at the Wheldale colliery, taught himself music and literature, and was set on keeping his sons out of the mines through schooling. At Castleford Secondary School the art teacher Alice Gostick widened his horizons and encouraged his ambition, though his parents saw sculpture as mere manual labour. At eighteen he volunteered for the First World War, the youngest man in the Civil Service Rifles, and was gassed at Bourlon Wood during the Battle of Cambrai on 30 November 1917.
An ex-serviceman's grant took him to the Leeds School of Art in 1919, which opened a sculpture studio just for him. There he met Barbara Hepworth, beginning a long friendship and mild rivalry. Turning away from classical ideals under the influence of Brancusi, Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska, he took up direct carving, letting tool marks and flaws in the stone stay visible, which annoyed his tutors. A travelling scholarship in 1924 sent him to northern Italy to study Giotto and Michelangelo; in Paris he saw a cast of the Toltec-Maya Chac Mool, and the reclining figure became his central motif.
Teaching two days a week at the Royal College of Art gave him time for his own work. His first public commission, West Wind of 1928 to 1929, is one of eight reliefs high on London Underground's headquarters at 55 Broadway. In 1932 he became head of sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art, joined Paul Nash's Unit One in 1933, and in 1937 a stone Mother and Child in Roland Penrose's Hampstead front garden provoked a two-year local press campaign.
From 1938 Kenneth Clark championed him and, as head of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, bought his drawings of Londoners sleeping in Tube stations during the Blitz. Shrapnel hit his Hampstead home in September 1940, and he and his wife Irina moved to Hoglands at Perry Green in Hertfordshire, his home for the rest of his life. Though large commissions made him rich, he lived modestly and poured his money into the Henry Moore Foundation.
Source: Henry Moore
