Henry Moore

Sculptor

1898-07-30

Quotes by Henry Moore

• There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.

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• There's no retirement for an artist, it's your way of living so there's no end to it.

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• A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

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• Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight, is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.

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• I believe that nothing should be taboo - no theory or prejudice should close one's mind to a discovery.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• The secret of life is to have a task, something you devote your entire life to, something you bring everything to, every minute of the day for the rest of your life. And the most important thing is, it must be something you cannot possibly do.

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• I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the years'.

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• 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.

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• The creative habit is like a drug. The particular obsession changes, but the excitement, the thrill of your creation lasts.

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• There are universal shapes to which everybody is subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if their conscious control does not shut them off.

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• I admit clearly and frankly that early Mexican art formed my views of carving as much as anything I could do.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Comparing Oceanic art generally with Negro art, it has a livelier, thin flicker, but much of it is more two-dimensional and concerned with pattern making. Yet the carvings of New Ireland have, besides their vicious kind of vitality, a unique spatial sense, a bird-in-a-cage form.

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• 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.

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• Turner - whether on canvas or paper - can create almost measurable distances of space and air - air that you can draw, in which you can work out what the section through it would be. The space he creates is not emptiness; it is filled with 'solid' atmosphere.

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