British Sculptor, draughtsman and commercial designer, Moore is considered the most important British sculptor of the 20th century. Although he kept up, over his artistic career, with the various stylistic changes and the emergence of new sculptural materials, Moore appropriated diverse cultural and artistic traditions to give his work a strong resonance of the art of the past. In 1919, in attending a two year course at the Leeds School of Art, he discovered Roger Fry's, Vision and Design, which introduced him to what would be his major influence: non-western sculpture. In 1921, he received a grant to study at the Royal College of Art in London, but his constant visits to the British Museum, when studying, proved to be more important for his artistic development. A conflict swiftly arose between his academic studies and his interests in non-European sculptural traditions. He visited Paris for the first time in 1923 and felt completely oppressed by the work of Cézanne. From 1926 to 1939, he taught sculpture at the Royal College. In 1928, he held his first one-man show at the Warren Gallery in London. His work in the 30s was strongly marked by the influence of Picasso, Hans Arp and Alberto Giacometti and, in 1933, Moore joined a group of vanguard painters, sculptors and architects called Unit One. In 1946, he had a major retrospective exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). In 1948, he received a prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale and again, in 1953, at the Sao Paulo Biennale. Between 1955 and 1977, he took part in documenta 1, 3 and 6, in Kassel. After the 50s, the main sources of inspiration for his sculptures became bones, shells, pebbles and other stones. In contrast to his early works, in which the human figure would appear in the form of mountains or valleys, in the 60s and 70s, rocky outcrops formed by the sea, grottoes and boulders transformed into the human body appear. In the last fifteen years of his life, Moore essentially concentrated on drawing as a leisure activity independent of his sculptural production. Moore's sculptures developed from a post-Picasso style to finish in pure Abstraction. During the 70s, numerous retrospective exhibitions of his work were held and, in 1974, the Henry Moore Sculpture Center at the Ontario Art Gallery Toronto was inaugurated, where the major collection of the artist's work is to be found. In 1977, the Henry Moore Foundation in Much Hadham was created and, in 1978, Moore gave 36 sculptures to the Tate Gallery in London.
