THE YORKSHIRE MINER’S SON WHO DOMINATED ART WORLD
A Yorkshire pit town formed an unlikely backdrop to Henry Moore’s early life. David Behrens traces the artist’s story.
A MINER’S son from Castleford, seventh among eight children, Henry Moore was always an outsider so far as the establishment was concerned. It was a world view that was the making of him.
Considered now to be one of the most significant British artists of the 20th century, it was his formative years in Yorkshire that opened his eyes to a life beyond the slag heaps that formed the depressing backdrop to his home. He sketched the hills and collected stones, bones and tree roots, taking inspiration from their twisted forms and replicating them in his sculpture.
His parents had disapproved of art as a career, and the young Moore had gone to train as a teacher – but it was not for him.
He was lucky to see the 1920s at all; a gas attack during the Battle of Cambrai in 1917 had nearly killed him. In the event, it was an ex-serviceman’s grant that allowed him to study at Leeds School of Art. It set him up with a studio, and he met another Yorkshire sculptor and a kindred spirit, Barbara Hepworth.
It was also in Leeds that he first encountered the non-Western sculpture that was to be his lifelong fascination.
By the end of the 1920s he had developed a distinctive modernist style of his own, and in the years that followed he was a significant figure in the creative world, as these pictures from the archive bear witness.
But the experience at Cambrai never left him, and when he was commissioned during the next war to draw the people of London huddled into underground stations that had become makeshift bomb shelters, he depicted them in wax crayon as wiry, near-death figures rising from the darkness.
Yet it is for optimism, not gloom, that Moore’s work is celebrated, and when the 1951 Festival of Britain opened as a symbol for post-war optimism, it was he who was at its centre.