In recent years there’s been a resurgence of scholarly interest in the British sculptor Henry Moore (1898–1986), offering new insights and fresh interpretations. First came Tate Britain’s 2010 retrospective, which for the first time probed some of the deeper currents flowing through his art. (The catalogue spoke of work “redolent with morbid and sexual energy.”) The latest example is “Becoming Henry Moore,” devoted to the artist’s formative years.1 This was the period when Moore embraced the modernist aesthetic of direct carving and “truth to materials”; studied and assimilated non-Western sculpture in the British Museum and other public collections as an alternative to the exhausted tradition of academic classicism; discovered African art in Roger Fry’s Vision and Design and the pioneering work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska in Ezra Pound’s memoir of his friendship with the French modernist sculpture whose life was cut short in World War I; traveled through Italy, where, in positively responding to Michelangelo, Masaccio, and Giotto, he reconnected with the Western tradition at, or near, its source; and finally took three steps that defined his work for the remainder of his career: he incorporated space into his sculpture for the first time and took up the reclining figure and mother-and-child themes.

Moore reconnected with the Western tradition at its source.

For anyone familiar with Moore’s work, the exhibition offers the chance to see, once again, the key efforts of his youth—though to describe them as such sells short a body of work impressive for