91Èȱ¬

Edwin Mullins talks to Henry Moore about how his drawings of sleeping figures in underground stations during World War Two air raids influenced his later work. He tries to draw the artist out on the subjects of having lived through two world wars and being gassed during World War One, but Moore insists it was the uniquely quiet sense of drama and doom that impressed him about the shelters.

Henry Moore generally played down the effects of his experiences in World War One, but in a letter to a friend written around 1919 or 1920 and subsequently sold at Sotheby's, he did describe the horrors of war. "If God were 'Almighty', the things I saw and experienced, the great bloodshed and the pain, the insufferable agony and depravity, the tears and the inhuman devilishness of the war, would, could never have been."

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