Henry Moore in America

First edition (1973) copy of Henry Moore in America by Henry J. Seldis. 

Henry Moore traces the advent of his international reputation to the 1946-47 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, the contacts that led up to it, and the events that stemmed from it. 

More than two-thirds of Moore's sculptures and drawings were in American and Canadian collections, both public and private, when he celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday this year.

Through lengthy conversations with the artist, his long-time American friends, and more recent admirers among curators, collectors, critics, and architects, Henry Moore in America attempts to reconstruct the highlights of Moore's transatlantic connections while sharing observations about the artist and his work culled from private correspondence and published evaluations.

From his earliest American visitors in the late twenties to the planners of the Moore Centre now rising at the Art Gallery of Toronto, the foremost sculptor of our time has received constant support and encouragement on the North American continent. A figure central in fostering early recognition of Moore's genius among American curators and collectors was the late Curt Valentin, the artist's dealer and close friend from 1943 until his untimely death in 1954.

We see Moore through the eyes of museum notables such as James Johnson Sweeney, Alfred Barr, Andrew Ritchie, and Perry Rathbone. His collaborations with architects Gordon Bunshaft and I. M. Pei shed light on the sculptor's strong views about the relationship between architecture and sculpture. Collectors including Joseph H. Hirshhorn, R. Sturgis Ingersoll, Taft Schreiber, and Norton Simon express their enthusiasm for the man and his work.

Moore's workaday routine at his studio home in Hertfordshire and his summer activities near the Carrara quarries are vividly described, as are the thoughts central to his art.
Pertinent criticism of Moore's work, culled from over thirty years of reviews printed in America, allows us to follow both the appreciation and the resistance this artist's creative activities met as his transatlantic reputation slowly but steadily grew.
Illustrated in color are key monumental works shown on their permanent sites, while numerous black-and-white photographs, many from the artist's own archives, allow the reader to follow the evolution of Moore's highly personal, metaphoric idiom.

His importance as a draftsman and printmaker is emphasized along with Moore's very recent realization of bronze and marble pieces on a truly architectonic scale.
Published in conjunction with a major Moore exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Henry Moore in America discloses the admiration the artist and key Hollywood personalities have long had for each other.

For the first time we are given a detailed account of the negotiations about to culminate in the opening of the Moore Centre of the Art Gallery of Toronto. To that institution the artist has made a gift of plasters and sculptures second only to his gift to his native England through London's Tate Gallery.

By collaborating actively with the author of this book, one of the world's greatest artists here acknowledges his appreciation of, and affection for, countless friends and admirers in North America.

Hardcover with dust jacket

Authors: Henry J. Seldis

Year/Edition: first edition, 1973, Praeger Publishers, Inc. 

Condition: good vintage condition 

Dimensions: 11" x 9"