Britain this spring is hosting two Henry Moore exhibitions. But those expecting a reprise of the shows full of familiar reclining figures in stone or bronze or those other sculptures marked by his signature perforations are in for a surprise. One show focuses on a group of heads that Moore, who was born in 1898 and died in 1986, began producing in the late 1930s. The other looks at his career as a draftsman. As good exhibitions will, each tells us something new about an artist who, at times, can seem all too familiar.

At the Wallace Collection in London, “Henry Moore: The Helmet Heads” juxtaposes a selection of those eponymous works with examples of medieval armor that inspired Moore beginning when he was an art student in London in the early 1920s.1Right there we have news. Accounts of Moore’s life and career emphasize how, once in London (he had grown up in Yorkshire and previously studied at the Leeds College of Art), he immersed himself in the collections of non-Western art in the British Museum, in an effort to formulate a modernist vocabulary in opposition to what he saw as the played-out Greco-Roman tradition of Western art. Yet here he was, responding to European material so alien to that taste and sensibility. This openness to all art despite a strong commitment to Modernism was a hallmark of Moore’s personality—though it could also cause problems, most famously in 1925. On a traveling scholarship to Italy,