Exhibitions - Previous Exhibitions - Henry Moore

Henry Moore is of course known as the pre-eminent English sculptor of the 20th century but these brief notes are concerned with his career as a printmaker.

Moore was born at Castleford, Yorkshire, served in France in the Great War [where he was gassed] before commencing a two year course at Leeds School of Art in 1919.  In 1921 he won a scholarship to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London where he also developed his skills as a draughtsman and the start of a lifelong appreciation of non-Western art, for example African, Oceanic and South American art, which was later regularly reflected in his sculpture and graphic works.

He made his first prints in 1931 and altogether made something over 700 prints during his career.  His early prints included wood engravings but later, in 1949, he experimented with what he called collographs.  These were a variation of the traditional collotype process where Moore produced several hand-drawn monochrome separations on a transparent film which were then transferred to a collotype plate.  Perhaps one of his better known collographs was '' Woman Holding a Cat ''.

Also in the post-war period Moore, together with several other notable artists, was commissioned to produce a lithograph for the School Prints scheme.  Succinctly put the basic idea of the scheme was to produce original prints in large editions which could then be sold cheaply to schools and thereby introduce children to high quality contemporary art.  Moore's masterly contribution, '' Sculptural Objects '', was again innovative in that the image was drawn directly on to plastic plates which at the time was a technique newly developed by Cowells of Ipswich.

From the late 1960s printmaking became an increasingly important part of Moore's artistic output and as with his sculpture and drawings two abiding themes were reclining female forms and mother and child.  He often produced his prints in series, some of the better known ones being '' Elephant Skull '' [1969], '' Stonehenge '' [1973] and the '' Sheep Portfolio '' [1972-74].