Henry Moore was once asked by a puzzled neighbor, "Mr. Moore, what use is what you're doing?" Moore replied, "Art hasn't any practical value. All it does is to help us to live a full human life."
source: http://admsp.org/profiles/blogs/interview-with-henry-moore-art

Reclining Figure by Henry Moore

Henry Moore (1898-1986) was one of the twentieth century's great sculptors. According to friends and family, Moore was an amiable and friendly man who took an interest in everyone he met. His daugher Mary Moore recalls; 'He was very gregarious and curious about people. He really enjoyed life. You absolutely knew he was genuinely interested in you.'
(source: The Moore Legacy. An Interview with Henry Moore's daughter, Mary Moore, by Elizabeth Day, The Observer, Sunday 27 July 2008)

Even when enamoured art students would knock on his door, he wouldn't turn them away. The only time he would was because Wimbeldon was on; "A whole line was put through the diary and nobody came." - Mary Moore quoted in Henry Moore My father, by Elisabeth Mahoney, The Guardian, Friday 5 February 2007

Moore was the Yorkshire son of a mining engineer from Castleford, the seventh of eight children. From a young age, Henry Moore knew he wanted to be a sculptor;

I knew I wanted to be a sculptor when I was seven or eight. At the elementary school, the lesson I looked forward to most wasn't arithmetic, it wasn't algebra. It was a drawing lesson in the last half hour on a Friday afternoon, when the teacher was tired and everybody was looking forward to the weekend. For me it was the one lesson of the week that I enjoyed most. And it was the same when I got to grammar school.
- Interview with Henry Moore, Art News, October, 1982

At the age of 18, while serving in the army during the first world war, Moore was injured in a gas attack at Cambrai – an experience which has been seen to have influenced his work. On his return, Moore received an ex-serviceman's grant to continue his education and became the first sculptor at the Leeds School of Art, before winning a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London. It was while teaching here that he met his wife, Irina Radetsky, a painting student whose mother had abandoned her, aged six, on the streets of Kiev to flee to Paris during the Russian revolution.
After further study in London, Moore won a six-month travelling scholarship which he spent in Italy and Paris. It was there, in the Louvre, that he came across a plaster cast of a Toltec-Mayan sculptural form, an example of the Chac Mool. The motif (echoed in this 1939 Reclining Figure) was to have a profound effect upon his work
Moore rebelled against his teachers' traditional views of sculpture, instead taking inspiration from non-Western works he saw in museums.He pioneered carving directly from materials, evolving his signature abstract forms derived from the human body. Another theme he returned to throughout his career was that of the mother and child, which was influenced by the arrival of Moore and Irina's baby daughter, Mary. However it was landscape and the female figure that influenced Moore's imagination from the start;

'Everything has a reference to nature. I don't see how anybody can get away from it. There are two biggest influences on my work. The biggest perhaps is drawing and modelling from the nude figure, human figure. I did this for two years as a student at Leeds, four years as a student at the College and then teaching it for another seven years at the College. I've looked at the nude human figure for half of my life....and its on that, that all my work is based and it from our bodies that we understand nature.
Source - Henry Moore reflects on his life as an artist, Interview with BBC radio, 1981.

Moore made his early works from odd slabs of local stone picked up cheap in masons' yards. There were virtually no bronzes before 1939. What he liked was slamming into stone with punch and pitcher, or hewing treetrunks with an axe.Henry Moore once said; "I am by nature a stonecarving sculptor, I like the resistance of hard stone".

However, today he is known for his organic looking bronze sculptures spread accross the world in prominent public locations. His first public commission, West Wind (1928–29), which shows the influence of his contemporary Eric Gill, was placed high on the wall of St James's Park underground station in London. Moore, who was then living in Hampstead and working as head of sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art, joined painter Paul Nash's modern art movement, the Unit One Group. Surrealist influences crept into Moore's work around this time. During regular trips to Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he met Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, André Breton, and others working in the surrealist vein. Their interest in the workings of the unconscious, in what lay beyond the constraints of logic and reason, opened up new avenues of formal expression for Moore. He now exhibited in surrealist circles in London, Paris, and New York.

In 1939, at the outbreak of the second world war, Moore was commissioned as an official war artist, going on to produce troubling drawings of Londoners huddling sleeping in the London underground during the blitz. The drawings captured the popular imagination, winning him a place in the hearts of the public.

After their Hampstead home was hit by bomb shrapnel in 1940, Moore and his wife moved out of London to live in a farmhouse called Hoglands in the hamlet of Perry Green, Hertfordshire.

From the 1950s onwards, Moore's public art became ever more visible on the streets of Britain, especially in cities. Commissions from 1950s English new towns, promptly followed by a reclining figure for the Unesco building in Paris and the Lincoln Centre in New York, made a bronze or marble Moore an international badge of prestige and rank. As the decade progressed, the scale of his sculptures grew, and he started to employ a number of assistants to work with him at Perry Green, including Anthony Caro and Richard Wentworth.

In order to protect his estate from death duties, Moore set up the Henry Moore Trust with the help of his daughter, Mary. The foundation was also established to preserve his sculptures and promote the public's appreciation of art; and since Moore's death in 1988, it has run his home as a gallery and museum. It is also responsible for funding exhibitions and research at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds; and awarding grants to arts organisations in the UK and abroad.

Almost 20 years after his death, thieves broke into the grounds of the Henry Moore Foundation and stole one of Moore's bronze statues. The work, known as Reclining Figure (1969-70), weighed more than two tonnes. In 2009, British officials announced that the sculpture, once valued at £3m, had probably been sold for scrap metal, for which it would have fetched no greater price than £1,500

Amidst a flourishing career, Moore experienced much cricticism of his work, before and after his death. The hostility spread in England by two former presidents of the Royal Academy, Alfred Munnings and Charles Wheeler, was replicated in civic warfare all over Europe and America wherever it was publicly proposed to buy or show Moore's work. His sculptures were decapitated in Dumfries and daubed with blue paint in Leeds. His Recumbent Figure had her head chopped off on a wartime loan to MoMa in New York, his Spindle Piece was vandalised with metal chains in Houston, and his Draped Seated Woman ended up tarred and feathered in the Ruhr.

Whatever the opinion, Henry Moore remains a eternal key figure in the development of 20th Century sculpture.

All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator... Everyone thinks that he or she looks, but they don't really, you know.'
- Henry Moore

http://www.henry-moore.org/

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