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The Mediterranean tradition, which on his
Italian trip in 1925 had been in conflict with his interest in primitive
art, had come once more to the surface. In 1946, the year of his first
retrospective at the Museum
of Modern Art, New York, his daughter Mary was born. Two years later
he won the International Sculpture Prize at the 24th Venice Biennale.
His first retrospective at the Tate Gallery was held in 1951. Moore's
worldwide reputation as a sculptor and as a leading exponent of Organic
Abstraction was now firmly established.
1950s
During the 1950s the two most important
commissions were for a screen for the facade and the bronze Draped
Reclining Figure (1952-3) for the new Time-Life Building in London,
and the large Roman travertine marble Reclining Figure (1957-8)
for UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
Although Moore's interest in carving continued
throughout his life, many of his best-known postwar sculptures - such
as Family Group (1948-9; Museum of Modern Art, New York), King
and Queen (1952-3; Joseph Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian
Institution, Washington, DC), Warrior with Shield (1953-4; Art
Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), Reclining Figure (1963-5; Lincoln
Center, New York), and Nuclear Energy (1964-6; University of Chicago)
- were made in plaster and cast in bronze. A fine collection of the plasters
can be seen in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.
Among the most impressive sculptures of
the past two decades are the two and three-piece reclining figures of
1959-62 (examples can be seen in the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo;
the Museum of Modern Art, New York; etc). The landscape metaphor, a source
of Moore's inspiration since the late 1920S, is reversed: the sculptures
are more landscape than human. Fragmentary elements of a rugged landscape
of rocks, cliffs, and caves become the female figure.
By the mid 1950s, as his plastic
art was becoming more three-dimensional, having an organic completeness
from every point of view, drawing no longer served as a way of developing
ideas for sculpture. The point of departure for most of his subsequent
sculpture has been the bones, shells, and flint stones that abound in
the maquette studio at Much Hadham.
Late Period
After 1968 Moore showed a renewed interest
in drawing as an activity independent of sculpture, and in printmaking,
producing more than 260 lithographs and etchings, including the Elephant
Skull, Auden, Stonehenge, and Sheep portfolios.
The major retrospective at the Tate
Gallery in 1968 was followed in 1972 by the magnificent exhibition
at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence. Many large bronzes and fiberglass
casts were placed on the terraces; the architecture of Florence and the
hills beyond made this one of the most splendid sites in the world to
exhibit sculpture on the enormous scale of Moore's late work. October
1974 saw the opening of the Henry Moore Sculpture Center in Toronto; the
Center houses Moore's gift to the Art Gallery of Ontario of more than
500 original plasters, bronzes, drawings, and prints.
Moore continued to work for most of the
year in Much Hadham, and spent a month or two each summer in Italy, carving
at the Querceta marble works of Messrs Henraux. From his small house nearby
at Forte dei Marmi he could see the Carrara Mountains where Michelangelo
(1475-1564) is said to have selected large blocks of marble for his carvings.
The essential humanism of Moore's art
has been nourished by sources as disparate as Paleolithic sculpture and
the work of Picasso. With the human figure as the central subject of his
work, he used elements of landscape, the shapes of bones, shells, and
pebbles to enlarge the three-dimensional language of sculpture. Henry
Moore now ranks among the greatest 20th
century sculptors in Europe, having built on and extended the tradition
to which his work belongs.
Source: We gratefully acknowledge the use
of material in the above article from "A Biographical Dictionary
of Artists" (1983), edited by Sir Lawrence Gowling.
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