cover image Life of Henry Moore

Life of Henry Moore

Roger Berthoud. Dutton Books, $29.95 (560pp) ISBN 978-0-525-24563-6

How do we reconcile Moore, the creator of universal icons, with Moore, the down-to-earth Yorkshire rustic who summed up his WW I experience as a soldier in these superficial words: ""For me the war passed in a romantic haze of hoping to be a hero''? In tracing the sculptor's evolution from protected, mother-bound child to hewer of archetypal forms who learned from surrealism even as he was forging his own abstract style, Berthoud never fully explains the incongruity. Written with Moore's approval and cooperation before his death in 1985, this first full biography offers a balanced, engrossing appraisal of the sculptor's work, even though it sometimes verges on becoming a career recitation. Praising Moore's sculpture became a form of evangelism for the cause of modern art and for postwar Britain. Berthoud (Graham Sutherland) cuts through the hype to explain how Moore became receiver and transmitter of signals from suffering humanity, in an art at once tribal and individual. (November)