Date: 04/11/06
Source: Yorkshire Evening Post
By Mark Lavery
HE is renowned the world over as one of the 20th century's greatest sculptors.
Collectors pay millions for Castleford-born Henry Moore's creations crafted in the main from marble and bronze.
The master sculptor is less well known for being a dab hand with a sketchbook.
However, he was a prolific draughtsman and the first of more than 7,000 drawings he completed in his lifetime won him popular acclaim long before his sculptures did.
A new exhibition - which opens in Wakefield next week - could alter the public's perception of Moore after art gallery chiefs unearthed 44 drawings which have never before been on display.
Antonino Vella, curator at Wakefield Art Gallery, selected the drawings for the Henry Moore: Unseen exhibition from hundreds carefully stored away at the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire.
Mr Vella said: "Although a large number of Moore's drawings, produced over a career spanning 60 years, included studies of people, they rarely depicted individuals. Unusual examples are included in the exhibition.
Ideas
"Portrait of Edna Ginesi, from 1925, depicts the woman Moore had hoped to marry before he met his future wife, Irina, and in turn, Irina can be seen in the anonymously titled Woman in a Deck Chair on the Beach at Frinton from 1950.
"Whilst the drawings were not chosen with a theme in mind, certain ideas and artistic concerns do nevertheless come to the fore.
"A drawing of the poet and fellow Yorkshireman W H Auden, along with cover designs for books, reveal Moore's literary connections which are yet to be fully researched."
Henry Moore, the son of a Castleford miner, was born in 1898 and died 20 years ago.
World War One interrupted his early ambitions as a sculptor but by 1919 he had enrolled as the first student of sculpture at Leeds School of Art.
Another sculptor who was soon to be world famous, Wakefield-born Barbara Hepworth, was a fellow student.
l Henry Moore: Unseen is at Wakefield Art Gallery from Friday, November 10, to Sunday, January 7.
