HENRY MOORE: MY SEARCH (summary with chronological order)

Moore was born in July 1898 in Castleford, Yorkshire. He was the seventh child of a mine manager.

1915: He became a student teacher and the next year was teaching in the local elementary school which he had studied in his boyhood.
At seventeen he joined the army but he thought the Fir

st World War wasn’t a traumatic experience for him and said that 'for me the war passed in a romantic haze of trying to be a hero’. The result of this was he finished the war as a physical training instructor.

1919 : He went to Leeds School of Art on an ex-serviceman's grant.

1921: He won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. In his first year at the Royal College of Art he went to Paris with his fellow student Raymond Coxon.

1925: He visited Italy on a travelling scholarship which caused a certain creative blockage.

1926: He held his first one man show. He was also commissioned to provide a sculpture for the new London headquarters of the London Underground. The job came to Moore on the recommendation of Epstein

1929: Moore got married with a beautiful Russian, Irma Radetzsky.

1931: He was obsessed with the idea of direct carving. He made his second one man exhibition also. Epstein who wrote the catalogue saying: 'For the future of sculpture in England Henry Moore is vitally important.' His works of art was attacked in more newspapers and periodicals.

1932: Moore was able to move to the Chelsea School of Art, which had already approached him.

1934: He went to live to London. He came together with the group which included Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth. Nicholson inclined to Constructivism but Moore was more interested in Surrealism.
He visited the north of the Spain during a touring holiday in 1934 and the powerful and primitive forms he found in the famous cave paintings at Altamira were a tremendous source of inspiration, both immediately in drawings and carvings, and later in bronzes such as Woman 1957-58.

1936: The International Exhibition of Surrealist Art held in London, the year in which his work was first seen in the USA. His works were included in an Cubism and Abstract exhibition of art, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

1939: After the outbreak of the Second World War he began making the first drawings of people sheltering in the London Underground during the Blitz. He show their own feelings in what he had to show them.

Tube Shelter Perspective 1941 (courtesy Henry Moore Foundation; photography Michel Muller)

1943: He was able to return to sculpture, with a figure of a Virgin and Child for the church of St Matthew's, Northampton. This was his first draped figure and a more traditional and accessible image.

1946: A retrospective exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was a triumphant success.

1954: The shift from direct carving to the modelling was accelerated after 1954 when he had a brief illness. Another reason for reverting to techniques was the fact that he was being offered commissions for works on a massive scale: like the massive Reclining Figure for the Lincoln Center in New York (1961-65) or Reclining Figure made for the Unesco Headquarters in Paris (1957-58). His work became in a works with quasiindustrial lines.

UNESCO Reclining Figure 1957 (LH 416)

The best of his late work is to be found in his drawings but he always seem to have been made with sculpture in mind pictorial rather than sculptural. He can be compared to similar sheets by

Rubens and Van Dyck.

1955: He was made a Companion of Honour in 1955.

1963: Member of the Order of Merit in 1963.

With both mentions the Modernist art had been accepted by the conservative British cultural establishment.

Others…

Working Model for 3 Piece #3: Vertebrae bronze, 1968