Henry Moore Quotes

The observation of nature is part of an artist's life, it enlarges his form-knowledge, keeps him fresh and from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration

I find myself lined up with the surrealists because Surrealism means freedom for the creative side of man, for surprise & discovery & life, for an opening out & widening of mans consciousness, for changing life & against conserving worn out traditions, for variety not a uniformity, for opening not closing.

I prefer Mexican to Mayan sculpture. Mexican stone sculptures have largeness of scale & a grim, sublime, austerity, a real stoniness. They were the true sculptors in sympathy with their material & their sculpture has some of the character of mountains, of boulders, rocks & sea worn pebbles.

All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know.

There is one quality I find in all the artists I admire most – men like Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne. I mean a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle of some sort.. .Great Art is not Perfect. Here the disturbing element comes in. It is instructive to know that Rembrandt copied Mantegna, whose art is the extreme opposite of his own. Why did he do so? Because he was conscious that his own art lacked the classical element. He was aware of the opposite, and that makes him greater.

Too often in a modern building the work of art is an afterthought – a piece of decoration added to fill a space that is felt to be too empty. Ideally the work of art should be a focus round which the harmony of the whole building revolves – inseparable from the design, structurally coherent and aesthetically essential.. .He [the sculptor] will want to consider both external proportions and internal space volumes in relation to the size and style of sculpture that might be required – not merely the decorative function of sculpture.. .I am thinking of the didactic and symbolic functions of sculpture in Gothic architecture, inseparable from the architectural conception itself…

Well, it's the only picture I ever wanted to own ['Three Bathers' of Cézanne ]. It's a Cézanne and the joy of my life. I saw it about a year ago in an exhibition and I was stunned by it. I didn’t sleep for two or three nights trying to decide whether to.. .To me it is marvelous. Monumental.. .It's not perfect, it’s a sketch. But then I don't like absolute perfection. I believe one should make a struggle towards something one can't do rather than do the thing that comes easily. Perhaps another reason is why I fell for it is that the type of woman he portrays is the same kind as I like. Each of the figures I could turn in into a piece of sculpture, very simple. Not young girls but that wide, broad, mature woman. Matronly.

I was a Yorkshire miner's son, the youngest of seven, and my mother was no longer so very young. She suffered from bad rheumatism in the back and would often say to me in winter, when I came home from school: 'Henry, boy, come and rub my back.' Then I would massage her back with liniment. When I came to model this figure [for his sculpture 'Seated Woman', 1957] which represents a fully mature woman, I found that I was unconsciously giving to its back the long-forgotten shape of the one that I had so often rubbed as a boy. Not just her shoulder but her whole back down from the shoulder blades with the skin close to the bone, to the fleshy lower parts. I had a strong sense of contrast between bone and flesh. I was seven or eight at the time [c. 1906].

Yet actual physical size has an emotional meaning. We relate everything to our own size, and our emotional response to size is controlled by the fact that men on the average are between five and six feet high.. .If practical considerations allowed me, cost of material, of transport, etc., I should like to work on large carvings more often than I do. The average in-between size does not disconnect an idea enough from prosaic everyday life. The very small or the very big [sculpture] takes on an added size emotion.

The idea for [his sculpture] 'The Warrior' came to me at the end of 1952 or very early in 1953. It was evolved from a pebble I found on the seashore in the summer of 1952, and which reminded me of the stump of a leg, amputated at the hip. Just as Leonardo says somewhere in his notebooks that a painter can find a battle scene in the lichen marks on a wall, so this gave me the start of The Warrior idea. First I added the body, leg and one arm and it became a wounded warrior, but at first the figure was reclining. A day or two later I added a shield and altered its position and arrangement into a seated figure and so it changed from an inactive pose into a figure which, though wounded, is still defiant.. .The head has a blunted and bull-like power but also a sort of dumb animal acceptance and forbearance of pain.. .The figure may be emotionally connected (as one critic has suggested) with one’s feelings and thoughts about England during the crucial and early part of the last war. The position of the shield and its angle gives protection from above. The distance of the shield from the body and the rectangular shape of the space enclosed between the inside surface of the shield and the concave front of the body is important.. .This sculpture is the first single and separate male figure that I have done in sculpture and carrying it out in its final large scale was almost like the discovery of a new subject matter; the bony, edgy, tense forms were a great excitement to make.. .Like the bronze 'Draped Reclining Figure' of 1952-3 I think 'The Warrior' has some Greek influence, not consciously wished...

The violent quarrel between the abstractionists [like Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, both English sculptors] and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist’s personality must play their part. And I think the first inception of a painting or a sculpture may begin from either end.

As far as my own experience is concerned, I sometimes begin a drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use pencil on paper, and make lines, tones, and shapes with no conscious aim; bur as my mind takes in what is so produced, a point arrives where some idea becomes conscious and crystallizes, and then a control and ordering begin to take place.

The Negroes.. ..their unique claim for admiration is their power to produce form completely in the round.. .Negro sculpture is completely in the round, fully-conceived air-surrounded form.

The disturbing quality of life goes hand in hand with the disturbing quality of our time. The temporal emphasizes the perpetual.. .I willingly accept what I try to bring together. In the heads of my 'King and Queen' (Moore created in 1952/53] or in the head and the body of my 'Warrior' [1953/54], some mixture of degrees of realism is implicit. But we got used to this mixture in Chartres [the famous Gothic cathedral], and we shall get used to it again. I do not suggest that I have intentionally done it.. .It is just that in the head part I could focus, in essence, the intention of the entire figure.. .By contrasting the head to the natural structure of the rest, the whole idea of the figure is pointed out – it is these contrasts which do it.

I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the years