Henry Moore Archive - Books collection

Monographs

The first monograph on Moore, Henry Moore, Sculptor: An Appreciation by Herbert Read, was published in 1934. In total, more than sixty books on the artist were written during his lifetime. The Archive also holds translations of monographs in other languages.

Our collection includes books on Moore’s life and art by Roger Berthoud, Robert Melville, Donald Hall, Will Grohmann and John Russell; photographic studies by David Finn, John Hedgecoe and Gemma Levine; and books on Moore’s drawings by Geoffrey Grigson, Kenneth Clark, Alan Wilkinson and Sebastiano Barassi. There is also a psychoanalytic study by Erich Neumann.

Among the monographs are publications of Moore’s writings, including those by Alan Wilkinson and Philip James, and facsimiles of the artist’s sketchbooks, such as the Sheep Sketchbook and First Shelter Sketchbook.

Catalogues Raisonnés

The first Catalogue Raisonné of Moore’s sculpture and drawings was published in 1944. By the late 1980s, six further volumes of Moore’s complete sculpture had been published by Lund Humphries.

Between 1973 and 1986, the four-volume Henry Moore: The Graphic Work was published by Gerald and Patrick Cramer in Geneva. Moore’s drawings were published in seven volumes between 1994 and 2003. Details of Moore’s tapestries, textiles, prints and portfolios have also been explored in depth through publications.

Further studies of themes in Moore’s work include Henry Moore: Animals (London, 1983), Henry Moore: Plasters (London, 2011), Henry Moore: The Helmet Heads (London, 2019) and Drawing in the Dark – Henry Moore’s Coalmining Commission (London, 2022).

Celebrating Moore: Works from the Collection of the Henry Moore Foundation (London, 1998) marked the centenary of Moore’s birth and celebrated the Foundation’s collection. A detailed account of Henry and Irina’s creative and domestic life at Perry Green was published in 2007 in Hoglands: The Home of Henry and Irina Moore.

General books and art reference

We have many books with illustrations of Moore’s work or references to the artist. These range from technical books on sculpture, drawing and printmaking, to books about artists Moore was associated with over the years.

However brief, references to Moore are often of documentary value. They appear in biographies of film stars and politicians, and in publications about towns and cities that own his works.

Moore’s work appears on the covers of many books for their subject value, such as images of family groups in social studies, sheep in books on the countryside, and war drawings in history books. There are poems about Moore’s work as well as books of poetry illustrated by him, and a number of novelists have written Moore into their stories.

Art reference books include the British Sculptors and Sculpture Series, published by the Henry Moore Foundation in association with Lund Humphries. We have numerous books from museums that have a collection of Moore’s work, including Tate, the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Hakone Open-Air Museum. Books on subjects that inspired Moore can also be found in our collection.