Henry Moore: Complete Drawings Volume 3 1940-49

Limited availability. First Edition hardcover.

Please note there is some discolouration to the pages and there is some warping in the dust jackets because these copies have been stored since 2001. This is reflected in the price, no refunds or replacements will issued.

Volume 3 of the Complete Drawings of Henry Moore deals with the years of the Second World War, the only period of Moore's working life when he was not actively involved in making sculpture. This decade includes the birth if Moore's daughter Mary in 1946, his one-man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in the same year and his long association with Curt Valentin and the Buchholz Gallery, New York.

In 1940 Moore began making drawings of wartime subjects. He received a commission from the War Artists' Advisory Committee for drawings of figures sheltering in London Underground during the Blitz, which brought his work before the general public for the first time. At the end of 1941 he visited Wheldale Colliery in Yorkshire, where his father had been a miner thirty years earlier, to record miners working at the coalface. After these official commissions, other drawings such as mother and child studies and family groups were made for sculpture projects, while the birth of his daughter led to an outpouring of drawings of his wife Irina and Mary. In addition to sculptural themes, Moore experimented with textile designs, and in response to literary commissions he illustrated Edward Sackville-West's The Rescue, 1946, and Andre Gide's Prométhée, 1949-50.

This was a rich period for Moore's drawings in both techniques and subject matter, introducing new ideas that were later to find expression in sculptural form and to bring him worldwide recognition.