Henry Moore Analysis

Henry Moore was born 30.07.1898 and lived for 88 years. Moore would have prioritised his art over his academic study. After numerous visits to the ethnographic collections of the British museum, Europian modernist; i.e Picasso, Arp, Brancusi and Giacometti became influences. Uniting these inspirations was a deeply felt humanist. He often used abstract form to draw comparisons between the human body and landscapes. Moore’s images of figures sheltering in London subway stations sheltering during World War II are still loved.
Moore loves drawing from the human figure ‘studied it for half my life’ he quoted. Moore believes that our bodies help us understand nature and are the biggest influence on art. ‘If our bodies were the sizes of elephants, the whole scale of architecture and art would be different.’
Moore loves landscape as well as figures, ‘if landscape was different, all of our lives would be different. You can’t get away from nature.’ He believes that it is ridiculous for something to have no real connection to real life and nature.
During the 1930’s, Moore became experimental with abstract and was inspired by surrealism. Surrealism shaped his mature style; it encouraged his love for biomorphic forms and also suggested how the figure could be split into parts and reduced to essentials.
Henry Moore takes natural/ realistic things and uses abstract form to rearrange and magnify them to show hidden quality. Moore’s etchings are quality to viewers because of the expression and liveliness they carry each appropriate to what the image is. In the 1960s Henry Moore became so intrigues by the skull of an African elephant kept in the garden of his friends that eventually they gave the skull to him, Moore examined the object’s internal and external features through a number of etchings. When Moore published these works, he called them “a mixture of observation and imagination,” as while he studied and drew the skull up close he “could begin to see in it great