Henry Moore Quotes about Art

Art is the expression of imagination, not the reproduction of reality.

If I set out to sculpt a standing man and it becomes a lying woman, I know I am making art.

The soul cannot thrive in the absence of art.

All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know.

I find in all the artists that I admire most a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle . . . . In great art, this conflict is hidden, it is unresolved. All that is bursting with energy is disturbing - not perfect.

Art is not to do with the practical side of making a living. It's to live a fuller human life.

Art is a continuous activity with no separation between past and present.

To know one thing, you must know the opposite.

Sculpture is an art of the open air... I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know.

I don't know of any good work of art that doesn't have a mystery.

All good art has contained both abstract and surrealist elements, just as it has contained both classical and romantic elements - order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. BOTH SIDES of the artist's personality must play their part.

Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.

The first hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation.

Art is to make our lives richer and fuller.

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things, a poet in words, a musician by sounds.

A sculptor is a person obsessed with the form and the shape of things, and it's not just Ihe shape of any one thing, but the shape of any thing and everything.

All the arts are based on the senses. What they do for the person who practices them, and also the persons interested in them, is make that particular sense more active and more acute.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

All art is an abstraction to some degree.

I'm very grateful that I was too poor to get to art school until I was 21. . . I was old enough when I got there to know how to get something out of it.

Discipline in art is a fundamental struggle to understand oneself, as much as to understand what one is drawing.