Henry Moore Drawing Techniques

[Kahlil Algya]

Throughoutthe course, educators of different subjects and grade levels planned, practiced and implemented arts-integrated lessons in their classrooms. To dive deeper into a particular subject area, the educators engaged in several art techniques, including stop motion animation, blackout poetry, and contour line drawings. They learned techniques for integrating the arts into the curriculum while reaching students with multiple learning styles.

As the culminating project for the course, the educators designed and facilitated arts-integrated lessons in their classrooms using the Prism.K12 strategies and artwork from The Phillips Collection. Many of them collaborated with other teachers at their schools to integrate multiple subject areas. Discover the results in this digital exhibition of the exhibition Energizing Education: Teaching through a PRISM of Arts Integration.

This exhibition showcased arts-integrated projects created by students throughout Maryland and DC. Their teachers had developed arts-integrated curricula as they progressed through a continuing education course.

Students studied African textiles and videos provided by the Fowler Museum (Los Angeles, CA) from their exhibition African Print Fashion Now! EMPATHIZING with the personal stories African fashion designers told through their prints, students became fashion designers EXPRESSING their own stories through lines, shapes, and patterns as they created African print-inspired drawings. Students IDENTIFIED various geometric forms and terms used in African textiles, and then calculated the area and perimeter of specific shapes, such as triangles, quadrilaterals, and circles, in their prints.

Students continued their history-centered examination of art as primary source material by considering why it was created and how it could be interpreted. Through questioning, close looking, and comparison techniques, students integrated art into their studies and formed a greater appreciation of art for its own sake. Students were first asked to IDENTIFY what aspects of various artworks, both from their World History materials and The Phillips Collection, could be used as positive propaganda. Next, students were tasked with venturing into their communities and creating a piece of art (photograph, drawing, or painting) that showcased their communities in a positive way. Students CONNECTED to their communities and compared the success of their artwork as positive propaganda to works of art within The Phillips Collection.

Students prepared spoken word poetry projects on racism, gender, self-love, and more. This video shows the original development of the theme, practicing and staging the production, and then the final presentation of their efforts.

Henry Moore (1898-1986) was one of the twentieth century's great sculptors. First emerging from the relative obscurity of the radical modernist movement in England in the 1920s, Moore quickly established himself as one of Britain's leading young artists. In 1946 his sculpture was presented in a one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Two years later, he won the prestigious International Prize at the Venice Biennale. After 1950, with the sponsorship of the British Council (an organization promoting British cultural values), Moore executed large-scale public projects throughout the Western world. At the time of his death, Moore was a formidable cultural presence whose work had become synonymous with modern sculpture.

This exhibition is the first U.S. retrospective in twenty years to assess Moore's contributions to the art of the last century. At once an homage and a voyage of rediscovery, the show traces the crucial stages of the artist's development: from his groundbreaking work following World War I and his experimentation with abstraction and surrealism in the 1930s, to his patriotic engagement as an official war artist during World War II, his postwar humanism, and his interest in large-scale public sculpture during the last four decades of his life. Presenting both sculpture and drawings, the exhibition examines the development of Moore's formal and thematic repertoire, his enduring preoccupation with the reclining figure, and his radical exploration of sculptural form.

Henry Moore was born and raised in Yorkshire, a rugged mining region in northern England. After serving in the trenches of World War I, he studied and then taught at the Royal College of Art in London--a stronghold of academic formalism that afforded students few opportunities to explore nontraditional sources for their art. His chance discovery of Roger Fry's seminal book Vision and Design in 1921, with essays on African and pre-Columbian art, led Moore to the British Museum, where he found inspiration in its vast collections of non-European art. The art of ancient Mexico particularly appealed to him: "Its 'stoniness,' by which I mean its truth to material,...its approach to a full-dimensional conception of form, make it unsurpassed in my opinion by any other period of stone sculpture."

The encounter with the bold forms of non-Western art liberated the young artist from the constraints of the neoclassical tradition. His sculpture from the 1920s was, for the most part, intimately scaled work created in response to the sensuous colors and textures of wood and stone. He favored native British materials, such as Hornton stone and English elm, over traditional Italian marbles. During a visit to Paris in 1923 he saw the work of contemporary sculptors, including Constantin Brancusi, whose radical reduction of the human figure and understanding of sculpture in the round defined the path of his art. At home in London, Moore was most deeply affected by the works of the French expatriate Henri Gaudier-Brzeska and by the American sculptor Jacob Epstein, who fostered the young man's penchant for tribal art and bold formal expression.

Both Epstein and Gaudier-Brzeska passionately advocated the art of "direct carving." Deeply convinced of the sculptor's symbiotic relationship with his or her craft, they shunned preliminary techniques such as pointing-up (which translated the proportions of a small model to a larger scale), seeking instead to release their forms directly from within their materials. "A sculptor," Moore noted, "gets the solid shape, as it were, inside his head--he thinks of it, whatever its size, as if he were holding it completely enclosed in the hollow of his hand. He mentally visualizes a complex form all around itself; he identifies himself with its center of gravity, its mass, its weight; he realizes its volume, as the space that the shape displaces in air."

In 1928 Moore's first solo exhibition in London won him favorable reviews and a lifelong friend, the influential critic Herbert Read. That same year, Moore created his first masterpiece, a reclining figure, touching upon a theme he would revisit many times. The work was inspired by a photograph of a pre-Columbian carving of the rain spirit Chacmool that Moore had discovered in a 1922 book on Mexican art. The horizontal, earthbound pose of both the Chacmool and of Moore's Reclining Woman powerfully suggests connections with landscape, an idea that would preoccupy him throughout his creative life.

The 1930s represent Moore's most radical and inventive phase. Building on his interest in non-European art and the avant-garde sculpture of Brancusi and Epstein, Moore pushed his art into new territory. During regular trips to Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he met Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, Andr Breton, and others working in the surrealist vein. Their interest in the workings of the unconscious, in what lay beyond the constraints of logic and reason, opened up new avenues of formal expression for Moore. He now exhibited in surrealist circles in London, Paris, and New York. "Beauty, in the later Greek or Roman sense," he noted, "is not the aim of my sculpture."

Figurative work increasingly gave way to more abstract forms. The sculpture that moved Moore most was strong, self-supporting, and fully realized in three dimensions, "giving off something of the energy of great mountains," he observed. In formal and thematic terms Moore's work remained a synthesis--the product of keen observation and intellect wound around a core of personal experience and private obsession. His creative process was driven by the assimilation of disparate visual ideas. He collected stones, twigs, bones, and shells, using them as creative points of departure. He pierced volumes with holes, tunneling out heavy masses to explore form within form. As seen in Reclining Figure, Moore was also interested in the creative tensions between figuration and abstraction, working in a style the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson in 1935 called "biomorphism." Good art, Moore asserted, contains elements both abstract and surrealist, classical and romantic: "Order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist's personality must play their part."

In the late 1930s, geometric elements entered his work. Sculptures such as Stringed Figure were inspired by mathematical models Moore had seen at the Science Museum in London. Indebted to surrealism's play with ambiguity and transformation, his stringed sculptures allowed Moore to play linearity against mass, color against material. Such play was key to another recurrent theme: the interactions of internal and external forms.

During the war years, when materials were scarce and opportunities rare, Moore found it impossible to execute major sculptural projects. Increasingly conscious of the war's devastating effect, he began to sketch Londoners seeking shelter in the Underground Railway during the German air raids of 1940. His drawings, powerful evocations of human suffering in gouache and ink, proved exceptionally popular with British audiences, boosting Moore's reputation.

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