“It is a mistake for a sculptor or painter to speak or write very often about his job,” cautioned Henry Moore in 1937, relatively early in his career. “It releases tension needed for his work.” Strange, then, that over the next fifty years (he died in 1986 at eighty-eight) Moore was to prove one of the most voluble of artists. When not carving one of his familiar reclining female figures, most of them bearing his signature sculptural idiom, the hole, Moore accepted invitations to set down his reminiscences and his thoughts on art—his own work and that of other artists and periods. And in the decades after World War II, he made himself available for interviews on a scale more in keeping with a politician than a practicing artist.
In 1966, the English curator and critic Philip James published “Henry Moore on Sculpture,” an anthology culled from over sixty published sources. Ten years ago, the Henry Moore Foundation issued a five-volume comprehensive bibliography that listed over six hundred utterances. Even allowing for reprints and foreign language versions, that is an extraordinary amount. Now Alan Wilkinson, author of the definitive study of the artist’s drawings, has published Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations.[1]
The new book contains most of the material that appeared in the first anthology. This includes such seminal texts as “The Nature of Sculpture” (1930), “Mesopotamian Art” (1935), “The Sculptor Speaks” (1937), “Primitive Art” (1941), “The Hidden Struggle” (1957), and “The Michelangelo Vision” (1964).
