Educational Media Reviews Online

This chronicle of the life and work of Henry Moore paints an extraordinarily human portrait of one of the icons of modern art. The breadth of Moore’s career, which spanned more than sixty years, is represented here in well-chosen words and images.

Born in 1898, the seventh child of a Yorkshire miner, Henry Moore is considered by many to be the most important British sculptor of the twentieth century. He aspired to become an artist from an early age, and his introduction to Pre-Columbian sculpture at the British Museum had a profound effect on his later work. By the 1930s he had begun to develop the abstract large-scale reclining figures for which he is best known, a theme he continued to revisit and refine until his death in 1986. While the film documents Moore’s work in all of its variety, it shows to best advantage his large sculptural pieces placed, as Moore preferred them, in natural surroundings and at one with the landscape.

The narrative text of the film is very effectively composed of the artist’s own observations and reflections drawn from letters, articles, and interviews collected in Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations (University of California Press, 2002). These, together with an abundance of new and archival visual materials, bring the man and his work very much to life.

The Art of Henry Moore is recommended for libraries and programs with collections in the visual arts.