Henry Moore

In a recent monograph on Henry Moore’s drawings, Andrew Causey points out that ‘There is a wealth of fantasy and imagination in Moore’s drawings that was never realised in sculpture. As a sculptor Moore was austere and quite cautious...As a draughtsman...[he] was able to work fast with ideas flooding onto the paper, ideas related to sculpture but which he established and embellished with detail that was essentially pictorial...Sculpture for Moore was a highly considered and perfected art, and he seems to have found, especially during the 1930s and 1940s, that pictorial art gave free range to his imagination more readily than sculpture did.’ Moore himself once stated that ‘My drawings are done mainly as a help towards making sculpture, as a means of generating ideas for sculpture, tapping oneself for the initial idea; and as a way of sorting out ideas and developing them.’

Drawn in 1942, the present sheet can be associated with a series of drawings of groups of seated or standing draped figures that derive from Moore’s shelter drawings made during the first years of the war, in 1940 and 1941. As Kenneth Clark noted of the drawings produced by Moore during this fertile period, ‘he showed not only insight and compassion, but marvellous graphic skill. Since circumstances kept him from his sculpture, he became in effect a painter…but, as was to be expected, his renderings of the human body are given weight and substance, and related to each other like great sculpture. Many of the poses and groups that he discovered were made into full-size drawings, but practically all of them occur in the two notebooks5that are, to my mind, amoing the most precious works of art of the present century…By 1941 he began to feel the need of turning his recorded experiences back into forms that seemed to him grander and more durable, and are certainly more in keeping with the general line of his development. The resulting drawings are perhaps the finest things in all his graphic work.’

Among the most significant of Henry Moore’s wartime drawings, this very large sheet has remained relatively little-known, having been kept in two private collections in Switzerland since at least the 1980s, and has been exhibited just once, in Martigny in 1989. While not a shelter drawing itself, it was almost certainly inspired by the groups of figures that the artist had studied in the Underground stations and at Tilbury, a vast shelter in Whitechapel in the East End that was the single largest air-raid shelter in London. Drawn in a rich combination of media, including wax crayons, stumped charcoal and watercolour washes, it may be compared with a small number of similarly large and highly finished drawings completed the previous year, such as Tilbury Shelter: Group of Draped Figures, in the Hiroshima Prefectural Art Museum in Japan, Group of Shelterers During an Air Raid in the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and Group of Draped Figures in a Shelter in the collection of the Henry Moore Foundation.

As Moore once stated, in a note to Kenneth Clark written in the early 1970s, ‘the experience and struggle in the exploring of form that one has continually tried to make in sculpture, as well as the way of thinking three-dimensionally…has usually been the aim in most of my drawings…If for any reason I’m unable to go on doing sculpture – then I know that drawing could satisfy me for the rest of my days.’