Blog: Discover Roger Mayne’s striking photographs of Henry Moore
This Summer, The Courtauld Gallery is hosting two extraordinary exhibitions by Henry Moore (1898 – 1986), one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century, and acclaimed British photographer Roger Mayne (1929 – 2014).
In 1955, both men met in person when Mayne visited Moore at his home and studios, Hoglands, in Perry Green, rural Hertfordshire.
Mayne was in the early stages of his career and had been commissioned to photograph Moore and some of his works. A diary entry in the Henry Moore archive dated 11 July 1955 noted: “Roger Mayne here to take photographs of studios for French magazine.”
One of the photographs features Moore’s sculpture, Head of a Woman (1926) with his drawing Four Figures in a Setting (1948) in the background. This drawing is the lead image for the current exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery and the accompanying catalogue.
Read on to see this series of striking black and white photographs from the Henry Moore Archive.
Henry Moore's Studio and Gardens
In 1940, after their home in London was damaged in the Blitz, Henry and his wife Irina Moore moved to Perry Green where they were able to rent half of a former farmhouse, by the name of Hoglands, in the centre of the hamlet.
Henry Moore loved to work out of doors and the couple set about adapting the gardens to this purpose. Over the years, Irina transformed adjacent rough farmland around their home into a series of outdoor galleries – open to the air, light, and subject to the shifting seasons. This network of studios scattered across seventy acres facilitated a lifetime of creativity. The outdoor space enabled Moore to work on a monumental scale and to test the siting of his sculpture.
Henry and Irina remained at Hoglands for the rest of their lives and it was very much the centre of both family life and Henry Moore’s business.
Today, visitors can experience Henry Moore’s iconic work with a visit to the artist’s former home and sculpture gardens.
Roger Mayne and Henry Moore at The Courtauld Gallery
Experience remarkable exhibitions by Roger Mayne and Henry Moore at The Courtauld Gallery this Summer.
Roger Mayne: Youth
Until 1 Sep 2024
Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries
Acclaimed British photographer Roger Mayne was famous for his evocative documentary images of young people growing-up in Britain in the mid-1950s and ‘60s.
This exhibition, of around 60 almost exclusively vintage photographs, includes many of his iconic street images of children and teenagers, alongside an almost entirely unknown selection of intimate and moving later images of his own family at home in Dorset, as well as those taken on his honeymoon in Spain in 1962.
Self-taught and influential in the acceptance of photography as an art form, Mayne was passionate about photographing human life as he found it. This is the first exhibition of his work since 2017.
Henry Moore: Shadows on the Wall
Until 22 Sep 2024
The Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery
During the Blitz, from September 1940 – May 1941, crowds of people sought refuge in London’s Underground stations to escape the nightly bombardments by the German Air Force. Moved by what he saw there and in other makeshift shelters, Henry Moore documented these scenes in hundreds of haunting sketches known as the Shelter Drawings.
Shadows on the Wall investigates the artist’s fascination with the curved brick walls and cavernous tunnels of those spaces, taking these drawings as a point of departure for interpreting some of his post-war drawings and sculpture.
In the drawings on display, we see that Moore’s attention was absorbed as much by the spatial drama of the shelters as by the human drama of strangers forced to huddle together. The artist’s interest in representing the confining spaces and brick walls of the shelters was further developed in the wartime sketches he made in the Yorkshire coalmines and in his illustrations for a play, The Rescue.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation.
