Henry Moore Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

Actually Rogers Fry's Vision and Design [1920] was the most lucky discovery for me. I came on it by chance while looking for another book in the Leeds Reference Library. Fry in his essay on 'Negro Sculpture' stressed the 'three-dimensional realization' that characterized African art and its 'truth to material'. More, Fry opened the way to other books and to the realization of the British museum. That was really the beginning.

Henry Moore
Sculpture in stone should look honestly like stone…to make it look like flesh and blood, hair and dimples is coming down to the level of the stage conjuror.

Henry Moore
Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me its best setting and complement is nature.

Henry Moore
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

Henry Moore
The subconscious plays a great part in art, that is to say that in conceiving & realizing a work a great deal happens which cannot be logically explained – the mind jumps from one stage to another much further on without there being traceable steps shown between – sudden solutions which cannot be followed step by step – in a word – inspiration.

Henry Moore
To be obsessed with some vision and to have the continuous opportunity of working to realize that vision could be looked upon as God's greatest gift to anyone.

Henry Moore
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.

Henry Moore
Mexican sculpture, as soon as I found it, seemed to me true and right, perhaps because I at once hit on similarities in it with some eleventh-century carvings I had seen as a boy on Yorkshire churches. Its 'stoniness', by which I mean its truth to material, its tremendous power without loss of sensitiveness, its astonishing variety and fertility of form-invention and its approach to a full three-dimensional conception of form, makes it unsurpassed in my opinion by any other period of stone sculpture.

Henry Moore
When I was offered the site near the House of Lords... I liked the place so much that I didn't bother to go and see an alternative site in Hyde Park — one lonely sculpture can be lost in a large park. The House of Lords site is quite different. It is next to a path where people walk and it has a few seats where they can sit and contemplate it.

Henry Moore
Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi's special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and make us once more shape-conscious. To do this he has had to concentrate on very simple direct shapes, to keep his sculpture, as it were, one-cylindered, to refine and polish a single shape to a degree almost too precious... it may now be no longer necessary to close down and restrict sculpture to the single form unit. We can now begin to open out. To relate and combine together several forms of varied sizes, sections, and directions into one organic whole.

Henry Moore
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.

Henry Moore
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.

Henry Moore
I was in the trenches in the last war [1914 – 1918], & so all the more don't want to shoot or be shot at, again... Although no one can say there's democracy in England in the real sense of the word, & although British Imperialism has a pretty bloody record, I hate Fascism & Nazism & all its aims & ideology so intensively, that I don't think I could refuse to help in trying to prevent it from being victorious. However, when the time comes that I'm asked, or have got to do something in this war, I hope it will be something less destructive than taking part in the actual fighting and killing.

Henry Moore
Between beauty of expression and power of expression there is a difference of function. The first aims at pleasing the senses, the second has a spiritual vitality which for me is more moving and goes deeper than the senses.

Henry Moore
Because a work does not aim at reproducing natural appearances it is not, therefore, an escape from life — but may be a penetration into reality...as expression of the significance of life, a stimulation to greater effort in living.

Henry Moore
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…

Henry Moore
I myself in my work tend to humanize everything, to relate mountains to people, tree trunks to the human body, pebbles to heads & figures, etc.... To cut out & make a taboo any organic representational element or human reference & then say the artist has gained freedom, seems as silly as locking yourself up in a small cell & saying 'now I know where I am – this is freedom – freedom from the outside world'

Henry Moore
Yes, Wordsworth often personified objects in nature and gave them the human aspect, and personally I have done rather the reverse process in sculpture. I've often found that by taking formal ideas from landscape, and putting them into my sculpture I have, as it were, related a human figure to a mountain, and so got the same effect as a metaphor in painting.

Henry Moore
In Yorkshire in Adel Woods, just outside Leeds [five miles north of Leeds, England], there was a big rock among many that I've called Adel Rock. That influenced me quite a bit [for instance in making 'Two Piece Reclining Figure, No. 1', 1959]. For me, it was the first big, bleak lump of stone set in the landscape and surrounded by marvelous gnarled prehistoric trees. It had no feature of recognition, no element of copying of naturalism, just a bleak, powerful form, very impressive. It was the local beauty spot, so to speak, and I knew it from a child. And much later, when I was a student, I would visit it with friends. We would picnic and draw and play around. It was an exciting place for me, Adel Woods...

Henry Moore