The English sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) brought about a renewed interest in direct carving and enriched the formal vocabulary of the medium by his continuous examination of figurative motifs and abstract shapes derived from natural phenomena.

Henry Moore was born in Castleford, Yorkshire, on July 30, 1898. He served in the British army (1916-1917). He studied at the Leeds School of Art (1919-1921), where he read Roger Fry's Vision and Design (1920), which emphasized the expressiveness and formal power of non-Western art.

In 1921 Moore won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London. He spent considerable time at the British Museum, where he admired the Sumerian, Egyptian, and pre-Columbian artifacts. He also became acquainted with the work of the sculptors Jacob Epstein, John Skeaping, Frank Dobson, and Eric Gill, who had also been inspired by non-Western sources. Moore's trips to Paris, beginning in 1923, enabled him to become familiar with...