Henry Moore

Lullaby Henry Moore portrait black white drawing woman Auden poetry illustration

1973

Paper: 25.25 x 20.5 in. / 64.1 X 52 cm. Image: 10.75 x 11.5 in / 27.3 x 29.2 cm. One of a series of 18 lithographs drawn by the artist for the Auden Poems/Moore Lithographs 1974 bo...

One of a series of 18 lithographs drawn by the artist for the Auden Poems/Moore Lithographs 1974 book and portfolio. This work is from an edition of 25 printed on vellum aside from t...

This abstract, black and white drawing is one of a series of 18 lithographs drawn by the artist for the Auden Poems/Moore Lithographs 1974 book and portfolio. This work is from an ed...

This darkly-shaded portrait of two figures is one of a series of 18 lithographs drawn by the artist for the Auden Poems/Moore Lithographs 1974 book and portfolio. This work is from an edition of 25 printed on vellum aside from the portfolio (edition of 75) and the book. Signed by the artist lower right in pencil; numbered lower left in pencil. Printed in inky black, Thin-lipped Armourer features two figures subsumed in crosshatched shadow. The figure on the left can barely be seen, and the hollows of his eyes recall a skull. Numerous Moore prints from this series include two heads, perhaps relating to the first lines of Auden’s poem Lullaby. Lullaby was the first poem Moore read for this project, which begins: “Lay your sleeping head, my love / Human on my faithless arm; / Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from / Thoughtful children, and the grave / Proves the child ephemeral: / But in my arms till break of day / Let the living creature lie, / Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful.” This print evinces Moore’s fascination with light and dark – what he called a “…bias towards the blackness and mysterious depths.” Moore was inspired by the prints of Rembrandt and the drawings of Seurat, and even drew on his memories of viewing the Altamira cave paintings, recalling how some of the images used the shadow of candlelight on the rough surface of the rock to model light. Shortly before starting work on this series of lithographs, Moore had fallen ill, leaving him aware of his own mortality. His mood pervaded these prints with a sense of danger and foreboding. The Auden/Moore limited edition book and portfolio were exhibited on publication at the British Museum, London, with an accompanying catalogue. Thin-lipped Armourer I is one of a group of lithographs...

Henry Spencer Moore (1898 – 1986) Moore was born in Castleford, the son of a coal miner. He became well-known through his carved marble and larger-scale abstract cast bronze sculptures, and was instrumental in introducing a particular form of modernism to the United Kingdom later endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts. After the Great War, Moore received an ex-serviceman's grant to continue his education and in 1919 he became a student at the Leeds School of Art (now Leeds College of Art), which set up a sculpture studio especially for him. At the college, he met Barbara Hepworth, a fellow student who would also become a well-known British sculptor, and began a friendship and gentle professional rivalry that lasted for many years. In Leeds, Moore also had access to the modernist works in the collection of Sir Michael Sadler, the University Vice-Chancellor, which had a pronounced effect on his development. In 1921, Moore won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in London, along with Hepworth and other Yorkshire contemporaries. While in London, Moore extended his knowledge of primitive art and sculpture, studying the ethnographic collections at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. Moore's familiarity with primitivism and the influence of sculptors such as Constantin Brâncuși, Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and Frank Dobson led him to the method of direct carving, in which imperfections in the material and marks left by tools became part of the finished sculpture. After Moore married, the couple moved to a studio in Hampstead at 11a Parkhill Road NW3, joining a small colony of avant-garde artists who were taking root there. Shortly afterward, Hepworth and her second husband Ben Nicholson moved into a studio around the corner from Moore, while Naum Gabo, Roland Penrose, Cecil Stephenson and the art critic Herbert Read also lived in the area (Read referred to the area as "a nest of gentle artists"). This led to a rapid cross-fertilization of ideas that Read would publicise, helping to raise Moore's public profile. The area was also a stopping-off point for many refugee artists, architects and designers from continental Europe en route to America—some of whom would later commission works from Moore. In 1932, after six year's teaching at the Royal College, Moore took up a post as the Head of the Department of Sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art. Artistically, Moore, Hepworth and other members of The Seven and Five Society would develop steadily more abstract work, partly influenced by their frequent trips to Paris and their contact with leading progressive artists, notably Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti. Moore flirted with Surrealism, joining Paul Nash's modern art movement "Unit One", in 1933. In 1934, Moore visited Spain; he visited the cave of Altamira (which he described as the "Royal Academy of Cave Painting"), Madrid, Toledo and Pamplona. Moore made his first visit to America when a retrospective exhibition of his work opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.[28] Before the war, Moore had been approached by educator Henry Morris, who was trying to reform education with his concept of the Village College. Morris had engaged Walter Gropius as the architect for his second village college at Impington near Cambridge, and he wanted Moore to design a major public sculpture for the site. In the 1950s, Moore began to receive increasingly significant commissions. He exhibited Reclining Figure: Festival at the Festival of Britain in 1951, and in 1958 produced a large marble reclining figure for the UNESCO building in Paris. With many more public works of art, the scale of Moore's sculptures grew significantly and he started to employ an increasing number of assistants to work with him at Much Hadham, including Anthony Caro and Richard Wentworth. Moore produced at least three significant examples of architectural sculpture during his career. In 1928, despite his own self-described extreme reservations, he accepted his first public commission for West Wind for the London Underground Building at 55 Broadway in London, joining the company of Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill..At an introductory speech in New York City for an exhibition of one of the finest modernist sculptors, Alberto Giacometti, Sartre spoke of The beginning and the end of history...

Hand signed, numbered and dated. Edition of 65 prints.  Excellent condition.

Henry Moore (1831-1895) - Hommage à San Lazzaro Lithograph from 1975. Edition 371/575 (Photocopy of the colophone is included). Dimensions of work: 31 x 24 cm. Each copy of this ...

Etching on paper.
 Hand-signed and numbered by the artist.
 Paper size: 52 x 44 cm
 Framed 57.3 x 48.5 cm Edition of 65 Henry Moore’s Mother and Child...