other artists

• Ana Mendieta
• Francis Bacon
• Hiroshi Sugimoto
• Alexander Calder
• Willem de Kooning
• Jean Dubuffet
• Alberto Giacometti
• Henri Matisse
• Gerhard Richter
• Auguste Rodin
• Ed Ruscha
• David Smith
• Ellsworth Kelly
• Nikki Lee
• Man Ray
• John Baldessari
• Arshile Gorky

in depth: Henry Moore

After studying and teaching at the Royal College of Art in London, Henry Moore (British, born Castleford, England, 1898-1986) determined to create modern sculpture that had dignity, monumentality, power, and timelessness. Although he particularly admired the sculptures of ancient cultures, he believed in creating a visual language appropriate to the twentieth century, so turned to the innovative styles being created in Paris. There, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Moore discovered the organic forms of Surrealist biomorphism and the cool reductivist forms of Constantin Brancusi’s sculptures. This ambiguity between abstraction and representation, art and nature, lies at the root of Moore’s art.
 
In the 1930s, Moore gained international recognition for his purely abstract carvings in wood or stone. Following the devastation of World War II, he deliberately developed a more figurative style celebrating universal themes such as courage and familial love.
 
From 1940 to 1960, Moore fused organic and human subjects. His sculpted figures, especially the more abstract examples, have an organic rhythm that surges from within, suggesting the primal life force. After 1960, Moore departed from traditionally figurative images. Using the reclining figure as his preferred motif, he returned more to the abstract biomorphic style he had first developed in the 1930s.
 
Adapted from The Human Figure Interpreted: Modern Sculpture from the Hirshhorn Museum (1995), by Valerie J. Fletcher.