cover image Henry Moore: From Bones and Stones to Sketches and Sculptures

Henry Moore: From Bones and Stones to Sketches and Sculptures

Jane Mylum Gardner. Four Winds, $15.95 (32pp) ISBN 978-0-02-735812-4

Combining photographs, drawings and a simple but eloquent text, Gardner's introduction to the sculptor's life and work is itself a small marvel of artistic sensibility. Penetrating and sensuous black-and-white photographs (many by the subject's longtime friend David Finn) show an elfin Henry Moore (1898-1986) intently at work amid the rocks, stones and other natural objects that inspired him; the spare and elegant narrative, describing the sculptor's happy personal life and deliberate creative process, approaches the poetic: ``The shapes of objects gathered from nature slept in his mind.'' An inventive photographic journey through Moore's oeuvre--the layout often echoes the sculptor's formal playfulness--allows ample room for the reader's own imagination to stretch, as the children's drawings included here attest. This lovingly produced book on art appreciation teaches by example rather than by preaching; the result is a finely tuned meditation that recreates the magical aura of a subtle artist's work with remarkable success. Ages 5-7. (Apr.)