ArtistBritishb.1898–d.1986
Henry Moore
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Growing up in Castleford, a mining town in Yorkshire, Henry Moore spent weekends on the moors and on school trips to local churches where medieval carvings made an early impression. His father worked in the collieries; the landscape above and the idea of subterranean space below both found their way, eventually, into the hollowed forms and underground shelters that define his work. He was born in 1898, served in the First World War - surviving a gas attack at the Battle of Cambrai - and returned to study at the Leeds School of Art, then at the Royal College of Art in London on scholarship.
At the British Museum in the mid-1920s, Moore encountered pre-Columbian Mexican chacmool sculptures - reclining figures with bent knees, turned heads, and ritualistic postures - and the encounter shifted everything. The reclining human form became the spine of his career: a subject he would return to for six decades, each time finding new angles, new voids, new tensions between mass and space. He also absorbed Cézanne, Picasso, Brancusi, Modigliani and Archipenko, but the pre-Columbian work gave him something more structural.
During the Second World War, Moore drew Londoners sleeping in Underground stations during the Blitz. These Shelter Drawings, completed between 1940 and 1941, reached an audience that his sculpture had not yet found, and they cemented his reputation as more than an avant-garde formalist. The drawings are among the most affecting documents of civilian wartime experience in British art. In 1948 he won the International Sculpture Prize at the Venice Biennale, and from that point his career operated at a global scale.
Public commissions followed on every continent: a Reclining Figure for UNESCO's Paris headquarters, works for Lincoln Center in New York, installations across Europe, Asia and North America. He was appointed Companion of Honour in 1955 and received the Order of Merit in 1963, the Erasmus Prize in 1968 and the Goslar Prize in 1975 - more than 70 honors from a dozen countries across his career. He turned down a knighthood in 1951, concerned it would distance him from other artists.
On the Nordic auction market, Moore's 23 recorded lots skew heavily toward works on paper and prints, with Grev Wedels Plass Auksjoner in Oslo accounting for the majority. Phillips handles his more significant bronzes internationally. The top Nordic result in the database is a Maquette for Standing Figure at 640,000 NOK, with prints and works on paper - including a seven-plate set - trading in the 9,000-10,320 range across NOK and GBP. His auction record globally is "Reclining Figure: Festival" (1951), which sold for over £26 million at Sotheby's.