The Guastalla Centro Arte Gallery presents a selection of original graphic works by Henry Moore, considered the most famous English sculptor of the 20th century, born in 1898 and passed away in 1986.

In times of Brexit, it is significant to underline the close cultural bond that this great English artist had with Italy since before the war and with Tuscany in particular, especially since the 1960s; Henry Moore lived for a long time in Versilia, where, after various stays, he settled in 1965, the year in which he bought a house in Forte dei Marmi to better follow the processing of his sculptures in marble, stone and bronze in the workshops of Querceta and Pietrasanta. In Versilia at that time, one could still meet Carrà, Longhi and Marino Marini. With the latter in particular Moore had formed a friendship united by the search for those primitive elements of art in Tuscan culture that led him to study the Etruscans, the Romanesque and the Renaissance. Henry Moore himself wrote: “In the course of my life I believe I have gone through few worse periods than the one that followed my trip to Italy in 1925-26. Six months under the barrage of European art masterpieces had unleashed a violent conflict with my previous ideals, I was dejected and unable to work, but little by little I managed to get out of my perplexities and the direction was that of my primitive interests. I returned to ancient Mexican art, in the British Museum. I believe today that in this conflict between the great influence exercised on me by Mexican sculpture and my love and sympathy for Italian art, two contrasting aspects of my nature are reflected, hardness and gentleness…”

His strong bond with Tuscany had its natural consecration with the great exhibition that the city of Florence dedicated to him at the Forte di Belvedere in 1972: it was a huge success and this exhibition remains one of the most important ever made by Henry Moore.

This exhibition displays 25 original graphic works, divided between etchings, aquatints and lithographs, created between 1967 and 1979: the theme of the reclining and seated figure is recurrent, which sometimes takes on more figurative connotations and other times decidedly more abstract forms, the studies of a mother with a child and the scenes of young students doing their homework. Graphic production is of particular importance in the work of Henry Moore, as Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti wrote in 1971: "Henry Moore's graphic works are not an episodic moment of an activity that finds its entire expansion and supreme meaning in large works of sculpture but, paradoxically, I would even say that it is precisely in the works of drawing and graphics that the most vitally profound core of Moore's feeling for reality is delivered". With this exhibition we want to pay a small tribute to this important artist with whom we had the good fortune to collaborate and who we were able to visit thanks also to our common friendship with another great sculptor such as Marino Marini.

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