Carving a Reputation: The 1920s

Henry Moore was born and raised in Yorkshire, a rugged mining region in northern England. After serving in the trenches of World War I, he studied and then taught at the Royal College of Art in London--a stronghold of academic formalism that afforded students few opportunities to explore nontraditional sources for their art. His chance discovery of Roger Fry's seminal book Vision and Design in 1921, with essays on African and pre-Columbian art, led Moore to the British Museum, where he found inspiration in its vast collections of non-European art. The art of ancient Mexico particularly appealed to him: "Its 'stoniness,' by which I mean its truth to material,...its approach to a full-dimensional conception of form, make it unsurpassed in my opinion by any other period of stone sculpture."

The encounter with the bold forms of non-Western art liberated the young artist from the constraints of the neoclassical tradition. His sculpture from the 1920s was, for the most part, intimately scaled work created in response to the sensuous colors and textures of wood and stone. He favored native British materials, such as Hornton stone and English elm, over traditional Italian marbles. During a visit to Paris in 1923 he saw the work of contemporary sculptors, including Constantin Brancusi, whose radical reduction of the human figure and understanding of sculpture in the round defined the path of his art. At home in London, Moore was most deeply affected by the works of the French expatriate Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and by the American sculptor Jacob Epstein, who fostered the young man's penchant for tribal art and bold formal expression.

Both Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska passionately advocated the art of "direct carving." Deeply convinced of the sculptor's symbiotic relationship with his or her craft, they shunned preliminary techniques such as pointing-up (which translated the proportions of a small model to a larger scale), seeking instead to release their forms directly from within their materials. "A sculptor," Moore noted, "gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head--he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form all around itself; he identifies himself with its center of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in air."

In 1928 Moore's first solo exhibition in London won him favorable reviews and a lifelong friend, the influential critic Herbert Read. That same year, Moore created his first masterpiece, a reclining figure, touching upon a theme he would revisit many times. The work was inspired by a photograph of a pre-Columbian carving of the rain spirit Chacmool that Moore had discovered in a 1922 book on Mexican art. The horizontal, earthbound pose of both the Chacmool and of Moore's Reclining Woman powerfully suggests connections with landscape, an idea that would preoccupy him throughout his creative life.