Bowdoin College Museum of Art presents Henry Moore's Drawings

Written by Arthur Carpenter Friday, 23 July 2010 22:07

BRUNSWICK, ME.- The Bowdoin College Museum of Art presents Henry Moore – The Drawings: Works on Paper from the Henry Moore Family Collection, an international exhibition organized by Hauser & Wirth New York, London, Zürich in collaboration with the Moore Family. This exhibition also features two significant drawings on loan from the Yale University Art Gallery, and one sculpture from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art collection. Henry Moore – The Drawings will be on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art from July 22 through October 3, 2010.

By the 1930s, British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986) had achieved international recognition for his monumental figures, organic forms imbued with classical references that would become his lifelong subjects. But drawing was always central for Moore, a way of “tapping himself for the initial idea.” From his days as an art student, he remained committed to drawing from life. While Moore frequently drew what he called “ideas for sculpture,” these were rarely direct studies for three-dimensional work. Henry Moore – The Drawings highlights Moore’s prodigious talent as a draftsman, featuring works on paper from six decades primarily from the Henry Moore Family Collection. As these demonstrate, the artist pushed figuration to its limits without ever completely relinquishing the human form.

Henry Moore – The Drawings offers Museum visitors the rare opportunity to see an outstanding selection of forty-eight works on paper by one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated artists.

History of the Bowdoin Museum of Art

The original collection of European paintings, Old Master drawings, and family portraits given by James Bowdoin III and his family in 1811 and 1826 was housed in a sequence of different campus locations until the Walker Art Building was completed in 1894. Included on the National Register of Historic Places, the handsome structure was given to the College by Harriet and Sophia Walker in honor of their uncle Theophilus Walker, a Boston entrepreneur and businessman. The Walker sisters were encyclopedic collectors and supporters of art education. They selected the renowned architect Charles Follen McKim, whose firm McKim, Mead and White also designed the Boston Public Library, The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, and the Brooklyn Museum, among many other important commissions.

A landmark building in the history of museum architecture in the United States, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art is one of the few remaining structures in which the architectural and decorative ideals of the late nineteenth century are so fully realized. McKim chose warm brick and limestone with a cooler granite to give life to the “balanced and symmetrical” design he intended to fulfill the Walker sisters’ insistence on a “ building which shall be entirely devoted to art” and, unlike many other museums of the time, “will also show the purpose for which it is to be used.” Visit : http://www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum/

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