Words matter. These are the best Henry Moore Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Since the Gothic, European sculpture has become overgrown with moss, weeds – all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been Brancusi’s special mission to get rid of this overgrowth and to make us once more shape-conscious.
I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the years’.
There are three fundamental poses of the human figure. One is standing. The other is seated, and the third is lying down… Of the three poses, the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially.
It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.
So with the young African artists. What they have to learn from tribal art is not how to copy the traditional forms, but the confidence that comes from knowing that somewhere inside them there should be the vitality which enabled their fathers to produce these extraordinary and exciting forms.
Everything I do is intended to be big.
In my opinion, long and intense study of the human figure is the necessary foundation for a sculptor.
The hole connects one side to the other, making it immediately more three-dimensional. A hole can itself have as much shape-meaning as a solid mass.
Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.
In Giacometti’s work, the armature has once again become the life-line of the sculpture, and also, he’s brought back to sculpture a nervous sensitivity which the ‘pure carving’ side of sculpture can lose sight of altogether.
Cezanne had an enormous influence on everyone in that period; there was a change in attitudes to art. People found him disturbing because they didn’t like their existing ideas being challenged and overturned. Cezanne was probably the key figure in my lifetime.
Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.
The most striking quality common to all primitive art is its intense vitality. It is something made by a people with a direct and immediate response to life.
I was the seventh in the family. By the time I came along, one brother and two sisters had already become teachers, and this was the sort of path carved out for the rest of the family.
The violent quarrel between the abstractionists and the surrealists seems to me quite unnecessary. All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements – order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious.
