Henry Moore: Shadows on the Wall

Uncovers the significance of walls in the drawings of Henry Spencer Moore after World War II.

Henry Spencer Moore (1898-1986) was one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth century. This book and exhibition offer a new reading of Moore’s celebrated Shelter series and the artist’s fascination with images of walls during and immediately after World War II. Henry Moore: Shadows on the Wall accompanies a focused exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery.

After the destruction of his London studio early in World War II, Henry Moore began drawing figures sheltering from bomb raids in the London Underground. The walls of these sheltered spaces came to absorb his attention in an altogether new way, becoming scene-setters and key components of his drawings. This fascination with the bricks and the presence of walls, their texture, mass, and volume, became especially important after his project to illustrate the wartime radio play The Rescue, based on Homer’s Odyssey. Henry Moore, a collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation, suggests for the first time that the walls in his drawings offer a new way to understand some of his most individual and monumental post-war sculpture projects.

Penelope Curtis is a freelance art historian and former director of the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, Tate Britain, and The Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. Alexandra Gerstein is a curator of sculpture and decorative arts at the Courtauld Gallery, London. Ketty Gottardo is the Martin Halusa Senior Curator of Drawings at the Courtauld Gallery, London.