Florence Hallett

Victory: 75

Florence Hallett
Henry Moore: The Artist in Wartime

#1 2020 (66)

Henry Moore (1898-1986) was one of Britain’s greatest sculptors, and yet it was his drawings of Londoners sheltering from the Blitz that made him famous. Between September 1940 and the summer of 1941, at the height of the German bombing raids on London, Moore made more than 300 drawings, mainly of women and children sheltering on the platforms of the London Underground and in its tunnels, as the city was subjected to nightly air raids that killed some 10,000 civilians. A selection of Moore’s Shelter Drawings was shown at the Hermitage in 2011 in an exhibition, “Blitz and Blockade”, which remembered the German aerial attacks on London in parallel with the beginning of the Siege of Leningrad in 1941. Drawings made by the young architect Alexander Nikolsky that he had sketched in the basements of the Hermitage during the Siege brought home an element of equivalence with Russia’s wartime experience.