Henry Moore Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

Henry Moore
It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

Henry Moore
The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

Henry Moore
The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for your whole life. And the most important thing is—it must be something you cannot possibly do!

Henry Moore
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.

Henry Moore
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.

Henry Moore
I have always paid great attention to natural forms, such as bones, shells, and pebbles, etc. Sometimes for several years running I have been to the same part of the seashore – but each year a new shape of pebble has caught my eye, which the year before, though it was there in hundreds, I never saw... Pebbles show Nature's way of working stone. Some of the pebbles I pick up have holes right through them... A piece of stone can have [for the sculptor] a hole through it and not be weakened – if the hole is of a studied size, shape and direction. On the principle of the arch, it can remain just as strong.

Henry Moore
.. these reproductions were in Zwemmer's bookshop [in the 1920's]. I can see them now. They were black. There was one on Negro sculpture, one on Mexican sculpture, one on an Egyptian sculpture, and so on. And all these I knew. And in one of them was this small reproduction of the Chac Mool [famous Toltec-Maya sculpture]. It was the pose that struck me – this idea of a figure being on its back and turned upwards to the sky instead of lying on its side, which is a different sort of idea from the Renaissance, or Greek reclining figure, which is usually on its side. And this gave me all sorts of chances of making variations on it.

Henry Moore
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.

Henry Moore
Recently I have been working in the country, where, carving in the open air, I find sculpture more natural than in a London studio, but it needs bigger dimensions. A large piece of stone or wood placed almost anywhere at random in a field, orchard, or garden, immediately looks right and inspiring.

Henry Moore
The work of the sculptors of my age and somewhat older – Brancusi – Arp – Lipschitz – Laurens – Giacometti – has gradually approached a freedom & moved into space, compared with the sculptors of earlier period – Rodin – Maillol and the young sculptors of today all have the tendency to work with space – to model rather than carve – but it is very necessary in my opinion to have been able to get the refinement and completeness of a single form before going on to space form with no body.

Henry Moore
Yes. There was a period when I tried to avoid looking at Greek – and Renaissance – sculpture of any kind; when I thought that the Greek and Renaissance were the enemy and that one had to throw all that over and start again from the beginning of primitive art. It's only in the last ten or fifteen years that I've begun to know how wonderful the elgin Marbles are.

Henry Moore
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.

Henry Moore
One knows that later Giacometti broke this domination the surrealist influence of Breton, and he became completely interested again in the figure, he became figurative – he did nothing in the end but portraits of his brother and so on, and all very... not realistic, but interested in life, in nature, and not so much in the dream or in the fantasy.

Henry Moore
The disturbing quality of life goes hand in hand with the disturbing quality of our time. The temporal emphasizes the perpetual...

Henry Moore
What is a cave? A cave is a shape. It's not the lump of mountain over it.

Henry Moore
My sculpture is becoming less representational, less an outward visual copy, and so what some people would call more abstract; but only because I believe in that in this way I can present the human psychological content of my work with the greatest directness and intensity.

Henry Moore
This is what the sculptor must do. He must strive continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness. He gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head - he thinks of it, whatsoever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complete form..

Henry Moore
The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation. The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass. Sculpture in air is possible, where the stone contains only the hole, which is the intended and considered form. The mystery of the hole – the mysterious fascination of caves in hill sides and cliffs.

Henry Moore
My work may be balanced on the second side [the Romantic tendency]....- but I believe it has some elements of order & unity, some design, even balance & abstract qualities, some tenseness. When its all classical, its too obvious & cold & deadly perfect - when its all romantic, its too loose uncontrolled wildly chaotic & shapeless – But in my opinion – Gothic sculpture – Mexican, all primitive sculpture, Shakespeare, Beethoven, Tintoretto, El Greco, Rubens, Michelangelo, Masaccio, are all more romantic than classic [Moore is reacting here on Stanley Casson's critic in 'The Listener' 25 Aug. 1937

Henry Moore
In my opinion, everything, every shape, every bit of natural form, animals, people, pebbles, shells, anything you like are all things that can help you to make a sculpture.

Henry Moore
Our knowledge of shape and form remains, in general, a mixture of visual and of tactile experiences... A child learns about roundness from handling a ball far more than from looking at it.

Henry Moore
The whole of nature is an endless demonstration of shape and form. It always surprises me when artists try to escape from this.

Henry Moore
I would like my work to be thought of as a celebration of life and nature..

Henry Moore
The artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organized memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.

Henry Moore
When the Surrealist exhibition [in London, 1936] was held Barbara [Hepworth] was by then married to [the sculptor] Ben Nicholson, they were strongly against it [against Surrealism], though I felt, and feel, that there needn't be the sort of division in art that sprang up then. And Ben had also been much influenced by Mondrian. He was devoted to abstract art and she became much more interested in the abstract form. But for me, the essence of sculpture has always been the human figure. Still, of course, one kept in touch and one met and one's paths crossed.

Henry Moore
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.

Henry Moore
A work can have in it a pent-up energy, an intense life of its own, independent of the subject it may represent.

Henry Moore
The conflict between the theories of Surrealism & pure abstraction leads many to look upon one as black & bad & the other as white & good. Yet it seems to me that a good work of art has always contained both abstract & surrealist elements – just as it has both classical & romantic elements (order & surprise?)... Surrealism is widening the field of contemporary art & is giving more freedom to the artist (& perhaps what is not unimportant, – stretching the appreciation of the public). Abstraction is re-establishing fundamental laws; bringing back form to painting & sculpture. There are many products of surrealism which I personally dislike,.... but equally Unimportant to me are the empty decorations produced in the name of abstraction.

Henry Moore
No, I think Abstract art is valuable. It teaches people the language of painting. In my own work I have produced carvings which perhaps might see to most people purely abstract. This means that in those works I have been mainly concerned to try to solve problems of design and composition. But these carvings have not really satisfied me because I have not had the same sort of grip or hold over them that I have as soon as a thing takes on a kind of organic idea. And in almost all my carvings there has been an organic idea in my mind. I think of it as having a head, body, limbs..

Henry Moore