Published by the Henry Moore Foundation is association with Lund Humphries.The third volume to appear in the six-volume catalogue raisonné of Moore's drawings 1916-1983.
Sketchbooks featured include: History of Sculpture: notes (See 0010603) and Sketchbook 1928: The West Wind Relief (See also 0001543).
Title as printed: Henry Moore. Volume 1: Complete Drawings 1916-29.
Introduction by Ann Garrould pp.ix-x:
The publication of Volume 1 of the catalogue raisonne of Henry Moore's drawings anticipates the centenary of his birth by two years. In the space of those hundred years, the arts of painting and sculpture have experienced a wide variety of innovations - Cubism to Conceptual Art, Bourdelle to the bricks in the Tate, Matisse's Snail to Damien Hirst's Sheep. Drawing, on the other hand, does not lend itself to innovations. Rather, it is a measure of an individual's skill in conveying the sense of volume of a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional surface. Sculptures today can be made of marble, fibreglass, scrap metals or animals preserved in formaldehyde. Paintings can be in tempera, oils or acrylic paints. Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Durer drew in pen and.ink, sepia, charcoal: little has changed over the centuries, although Moore did use ballpoint pens when they were invented in the 1950s. Moore believed passionately that good draughtsmanship was the basis of painting and sculpture. He would frequently quote lngres's dictum about drawing being the probity of art, and claimed that it was possible to discern the quality of a sculptor from his drawings.

Moore's earliest extant work on paper was done in a friend's autograph book, a copy in pencil and watercolour of Turner's Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus signed H. S. Moore 19/2/16. Would that Moore had always been so precise in signing and dating his work. Drawings with neither signature nor date are a minefield for the would-be cataloguer. Add to this the fact that in later life Moore adopted a somewhat cavalier approach to dating his earlier drawings, simply hazarding a guess at their date (something he did on more than one occasion in my presence) and the cataloguer's problems are considerably increased. Having had access to the letters Moore wrote to Alice Gostick from 1917 onwards, and to other letters written to members of his family, I have been able to make a close study of his handwriting as it changed over the years. As a consequence I believe it is possible to determine in the majority of cases whether a signature and date are contemporaneous with the drawing or whether Moore added one or both later - sometimes many years - later. Assigning an undated drawing to a particular year on stylistic grounds alone can in Moore's case be rather risky, since he was in the habit of reviewing and occasionally reworking earlier drawings. For example, in the 1950s he reworked drawings he had made in 1937-38, and in 1980 and 1981 he reviewed works of the 1920s and 1930s, producing new drawings based upon them.

In the early 1970s Moore had occasion to review all his drawings with Alan Wilkinson, who had made them the subject of his doctoral thesis. At that time Moore signed many of his early drawings and added dates, partly by guesswork and partly by comparing the drawings with other dated works. Where such dates proved incorrect the drawings concerned have been assigned to the year in which I believe they were actually executed. Where drawings appear to have been misdated when judged on stylistic grounds alone, such drawings (with very few exceptions) have been catalogued under the year to which Moore assigned them.

During the decade 1920-29 Moore was evolving his own approach to drawing. Initially, as a student at the Royal College of Art, he had to attend life classes and draw as instructed by his tutor. Out of college hours he would visit the British Museum and fill small notebooks with rapid pencil sketches of primitive sculptures. In the evenings he and other students paid for tuition in drawing; their tutor was Leon Underwood, to whom Moore was later to pay tribute. Other evenings at home were spent drawing his own ideas for sculptures. Volume 1 of the catalogue raisonne includes eight notebooks. The earliest, dating from 1920, contains mostly Moore's notes and ideas on sculpture, with some sketches. David Mitchinson has had the opportunity of working on the extant pages of this notebook, and has as far as possible reconstructed it.

The last notebook in this volume is Sketchbook 1928:West Wind relief, in which Moore recorded ideas for his first public commission, a carving on the London Under­ ground headquarters at 55 Broadway, St James's.

At about this time, when Paul Klee was, as he put it, ‘Taking a line for a walk’, Moore began to develop a new way of representing three-dimensional forms on a flat surface. He called this ‘sectional-line drawing’ and continued to use it, on and off, for the next half century. He explained this method of drawing ‘line both down the form as well as around it, without using light and shade’. The earliest use of such a line may be seen in HMF 199a where it describes the curve of the torso. Here Moore used only single lines to describe the swelling form. It was not until 1928 that he returned to the idea, combining sectional-line drawing with the conventional use of chiaroscuro as in HMF 575 and 603.

As the 1920s drew to a close, Moore could look back on an eventful decade. At the end of his three years as a student at the Royal College of Art he had been awarded a travelling scholarship to Italy, to study the Old Masters. He had also been given a seven-year contract as a sculpture assistant at the Royal College so he was able to enjoy the security afforded by a regular income. In 1926 and 1927 he had sent works to group exhibitions in London galleries, and in 1928 he had had his first one-man show at the Warren Gallery in Maddox Street, London. Amongst those who bought drawings included in this exhibition were Jacob Epstein, Augustus John and Henry Lamb. In the autumn term of 1928 Moore met a young Russian girl who was studying painting at the Royal College of Art. In July 1929 he married her. The new decade beckoned.