Insufferable agony: Henry Moore and Reverberations of the First World War

Art and the First World War: Global to Local is a series of free public talks co-hosted by Leeds Art Gallery, Legacies of War and the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds, to be held at Leeds Art Gallery, The Headrow, Leeds City Centre.

In this talk, Alice Correia looks at how Henry Moore’s wartime experience as a young man penetrated his subsequent work, despite Moore’s own denial and his silence on the subject. Moore’s Underground ‘Shelter’ drawings of the Second World War brought him to national prominence, but do his haunting, chiselled ‘Masks’ of the late 1920s carry echoes of the horror of being gassed; do the carved female figures of the1930s reflect suppressed anxieties?

Dr Alice Correia was The Henry Moore Foundation Research Fellow at Tate, where she catalogued and researched Tate's collection of 74 Moore sculptures as part of a larger research project: "Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity", an on-line scholarly publication of commissioned essays addressing a range of issues concerning Moore's materials, working practices, critical reputation and public persona. Her doctorate in Art History is from the University of Sussex, and she is currently a Researcher in the School of Arts and Media at the University of Salford, examining the legacies of Indian Partition in contemporary art.

See here for details regarding future talks in this series.

For more information on Legacies of War, contact Dr Claudia Sternberg