“It is a mistake for a sculptor or painter to speak or write very often about his job,” cautioned Henry Moore in 1937, relatively early in his career. “It releases tension needed for his work.” Strange, then, that over the next fifty years (he died in 1986 at eighty-eight) Moore was to prove one of the most voluble of artists. When not carving one of his familiar reclining female figures, most of them bearing his signature sculptural idiom, the hole, Moore accepted invitations to set down his reminiscences and his thoughts on art—his own work and that of other artists and periods. And in the decades after World War II, he made himself available for interviews on a scale more in keeping with a politician than a practicing artist.

In 1966, the English curator and critic Philip James published “Henry Moore on Sculpture,” an anthology culled from over sixty published sources. Ten years ago, the Henry Moore Fo ...

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