Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture Volume 4 1964-73

Limited availability. Second 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 1991. This is reflected in the price, no refunds or replacements will issued.

This is a reprint of the fourth volume of the definitive catalogue of Henry Moore’s sculpture which in sequence documents and illustrates the complete span of his sculptural work. Volume 4 gives a complete record of all sculptures made from 1964 to 1973, and documents well over one hundred works, including twenty very large bronzes and many important carvings. Every work is illustrated in the catalogue section, and almost two hundred large plates, made from photographs chosen personally by the artist, and showing several views of every major piece, give us a real insight into the artist’s work of this period. To have produced so many important pieces at that stage in his career demonstrates that there had been no diminution in Henry Moore’s creative energies. But it is the quality and character of these late works, rather than their quantity, to which Alan Bowness draws attention in his introduction. In his view, these sculptures represent the culmination of Moore’s achievement, and add up to the most original and challenging sculpture being produced anywhere in the world in the 1960s. The artist had achieved a genuine late style such as is vouchsafed to only a few truly great artists – Titian, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Cézanne, for example. In Moore’s work great technical skill is matched with complexity of meaning, so that each piece is subject to manifold and inexhaustible interpretations. Alan Bowness backs up his bold claim by a careful analysis of the artist’s career and preoccupations, derived from numerous conversations with Moore at Much Hadham. He has also provided the usual apparatus – up-to-date biographical and bibliographical summaries, a list of exhibitions and public collections, a catalogue of sculpture of the period and an addendum of twenty-eight sculptures of the 1955–64 period which had only recently been cast. 

This volume is thus both an essential tool for scholars and collectors, and a stimulating and provocative contribution to the literature of modern art.