Henry Moore | Graphics

Escaping the Blitz, Henry Moore moved from London to Hertfordshire in 1940 and, due to the scarcity of marble and bronze, ceased production of large-scale sculpture in favour of works on paper.

An important project to emerge from this period was André Gide’s adaptation of Goethe’s Prometheus, a book for which Moore provided eight full page illustrations and typography.

This exhibition brings together these eight lithographs alongside the cover, title page and letters Moore designed to begin each chapter.

One September evening in 1940, Henry Moore was returning home from dinner on the tube and got stuck. Above ground, the Nazis were carpet-bombing London for the fourth night in a row and, like hundreds of his neighbours, Moore was forced to take refuge underground, awaiting the all-clear.

Moore recounted: "We weren’t allowed out for an hour because of the bombing. I spent the time looking at rows of people sleeping on the platforms. I had never seen so many reclining figures... Amid the grim tension, I noticed groups of strangers formed together into intimate groups and children asleep within feet of the passing trains."

Moore would go on to spend time in several tube stations during the Blitz, carefully recording his experiences in a series of sketches that would prove to be some of the most important artworks to emerge from the Second World War. Under Moore's supervision, collotype prints were later made from his sketchbooks and published in 1967, forming an important landmark in British figuration of the 20th Century.

These astonishing depictions of human resilience take on a renewed poignancy in today’s world as we come to terms with the loss of life brought about by the pandemic and in the light of the ongoing war in Ukraine. £50 from the sale of each of these works will be donated to charity to assist our Ukrainian neighbours.

More works from the Shelter Sketchbook series can be viewed here

Moore lived in Much Hadham, a small village in East Hertfordshire, and worked in a studio overlooking a sheep field. It was whilst working in this small room that Henry Moore first became aware of the sheep grazing outside. He began to draw them, exploring the way they moved and the shape of their bodies under the fleece. In 1972 Moore presented a large number of these sketches to his daughter Mary in a Sheep Sketchbook.

"I watched a ewe standing between two big rocks the shape of goat’s cheeses. They were just far enough apart to allow the animal in, and I began to understand the relationship Henry Moore perceived between sheep and stones. He saw sheep as animate stones, the makers of their own landscape."

- Roger Deakin, quoted in Robert Macfarlane, “Force of nature“, The Guardian, 2006.

Sheep Back View

1972

Original etching on paper.

Signed in pencil.

Numbered from the edition of 80.

 213 x 187mm

£4,500

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