Henry Moore Quote

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..

Quote in 'The Listener', 13 November 1941, pp. 657-9; as quoted in Henry Moore writings and Conversations, ed. Alan Wilkinson, University of California Press, California 2002, p. 126