Henry Moore Essay -- essays research papers

Henry Moore was the most celebrated sculptor of his measure, and the wink part of his career, in particular, demo that Modernist sculpture was, after all, surprisingly flexible to official needs. In this sense, Moore was the contemporary equivalent of the slap-up Neo determinate sculptors such as Canova and Thorwaldsen. Moore was born in July 1898 in Castleford, Yorkshire, the seventh child of a mine manager who had fixed at the pit face. Both parents were square and supportive personalities, and Moores childhood was a happy one. He became a savant teacher in 1915, and by 1916 was teaching in the local childlike school which he had attended in his boyhood. At seventeen he joined the army, as the youngest member of his regiment, the Civil Service Rifles. For him the First ball War was not the traumatic experience it was for so many others he remembers the army as being just like a bigger family and says that for me the state of war passed in a romantic haze of trying to b e a hero. He was gassed at Cambrai but make a swift recovery, and unblemished the war as a physical training instructor. In kinsfolk 1919, after a brief return to elementary-school teaching, he went to Leeds School of dodge on an ex-servicemans grant. He was soon recognized as a trail pupil, and in 1921 won a scholarship to the imperial College of Art in London I was in a dream of excitement. When I rode on the open top of a bus I felt that I was change of location in Heaven almost. And that the bus was floating on the air.Moore make the most of the opportunities London offered, regularly visiting the museums, where he acquired a great interest in primitive art he was particularly soft on(p) by pre-Columbian sculpture. In his first year at the Royal College of Art he went to Paris with his fellow student Raymond Coxon, who had been with him at Leeds these visits were to be many times repeated. In 1925 he visited Italy on a travelling scholarship - some(a)thing which caused a certain creative blockage as he tried to work his way through what he had seen and experienced. Even earlier he went to Italy Moore had been fortunate enough to be offered a part time post as Assistant in the Sculpture Department at the Royal College of Art. In 1926 he held his first one man show, which attracted some distinguished purchasers including Augustus John, Henry Lamb and Jacob Epstein. He was also commissioned to prov... ...nd for the resulting insensitivity of surface in many of his larger works. The best of his late work is to be found in his drawings. While those of his active maturity near always seem to have been made with sculpture in assessment (almost the sole exception to this being the celebrated series of Shelter Draivings made during the Second World War), the very late drawings are often intense rather than sculptural. Moores studies of trees, made in old age, can be compared to same sheets by Rubens and Van Dyck. In the post war years Moore was plaste red with official honours - it is difficult to think of any which he efficiency have coveted which were not offered to him. He was made a participator of Honour in 1955, and a member of the Order of Merit in 1963. These marks of distinction showed the extent to which Modernist art had now been absorbed and authentic by the traditionally conservative British cultural establishment. They also demonstrated the extent to which Moore himself now identified with this establishment. Though his work remained in exact to the end of his life, and continues to fetch high prices at auction, it now seems very remote from the mainstream of sculptural development.