Henry Moore is considered one of the most renowned British artists of the 20th century, whose contributions to plastic and sculpture in their organic formal language influenced by natural influences are groundbreaking for the development of contemporary sculpture. His graphic works repeatedly show his special sculptural eye, but are highly independent works of art. Particularly touching examples of this are the drawings of people seeking protection in the “Shelter Drawings” created during the Second World War under the impression of the suffering the civilian population experienced themselves . Henry Moore was born in 1898 in Castleford, West Yorkshire, England, into a mining family, the seventh of eight children . Even at a young age, Moore showed a great interest in art and sculpture, which was encouraged by his parents despite all the financial hardship. In 1917, during World War I, Moore served in the British Army and was wounded during fighting in France. This war experience, as well as that of the Second World War that followed, had a strong influence on his life and his artistic development. After the war ended in 1918, Moore studied at Leeds College of Art and later at the Royal College of Art in London. Here he was taught by important sculptors such as Jacob Epstein, but early on he developed his own style, which was characterized by organic forms. His early work showed his strong interest in abstract forms and the formally free representation of the human body. The art of the indigenous peoples of Africa and the South Seas, but also the work of contemporary artists such as Brancusi, Archipenko and Picasso, had a significant influence on Moore's work. During the 1930s, Moore gained international recognition for his unique stone and wood sculptures. He created abstract, highly stylized figures whose formal language is nevertheless associatively reminiscent of the human figure. At the same time, Moore was concerned about the effect of different materials and therefore experimented with different techniques and surfaces. After the outbreak of the Second World War, Henry Moore worked as an “official war artist” from 1940 to 1942 at the initiative of the National Gallery . During this time he documented the people of his homeland during the war with an artistic eye, for example in the series of “Shelter Drawings” or the depictions of miners who, as Moore described it, extracted ore for the war economy under, as Moore described it, “hellish conditions”. brought earth. After the Second World War, Moore's international fame grew; in the coming decades he created his most famous sculptures, often abstract representations of the human body, the formal language of which he had developed in the countless drawings of his previous work. The “Reclining Figure” series of works from the 1950s, a series of reclining figures in various positions, is certainly one of the most outstanding examples. Moore was a regular participant at the Documenta in Kassel with his drawings, sculptures and sculptures . He also repeatedly accepted public commissions for large sculptures, including the "Knife Edge Two Piece" in London's Battersea Park and the "Three Piece No. 3: Vertebrae" in the University College Hospital in London. In Germany in 1979 he created the sculpture “Large Two Forms” for the new Federal Chancellery in Bonn. Henry Moore died on August 31, 1986. His home and the sculpture park in Perry Green are now a museum and a center for the study of his work. On the day the war broke out, gas-stricken veteran Moore was on a trip to Dover with friends and family when the news hit him. In response, he made the drawing “September 3rd, 1939”, in which the bathing party is stuck immobile in the sand of the beach, while in the background the snow-white chalk cliffs rise blood-red above them. Moore is probably referring to the ironically titled “We are Making a New World” by the war painter Paul Nash, who showed the sky over Flanders in the same color in 1918. Moore knew what was coming. When Moore was asked to document work in a bomb factory on behalf of the War Artists' Advisory Committee, he refused. However , his position on the official war documentary art he expected changed as a result of a drastic experience: during an attack, while traveling on the subway at night, he saw from the windows of the train in the dark on the platforms countless people, crammed together and sleeping in rows. During the “Blitz”, the systematic bombing of London by the German Luftwaffe, they used the tunnels as protection from the bombs falling above and the devastating fires. Huddled between hundreds of strangers and their belongings, women , children and men, alone or in families, often only barely provided with blankets, tried to somehow make themselves comfortable on the hard floors of the platforms. Moore described the conditions he observed as "the most deplorable, miserable and disheartening sight." His interest in these forced inhabitants of the tunnels was also aesthetic in nature - they also reminded him of the reclining figures that had become a regular motif in his most recent sculptures, the "Reclining Figures". Out of respect for people, Moore did not make any sketches still took photographs in the tunnels - pictures showing him drawing in the subway were later recreated - but immediately after his return home he filled sketchbook after sketchbook, sometimes detailed, sometimes rough, often with more than one idea on each page . Moore tried to capture the claustrophobia and fear that so horrified and fascinated him through complicated, intense, overlapping layers of lines as if scratched into the drawing ground. The impressive, sometimes carefully colored drawings develop a deep emotionality, that of Moore gradual turning away from surrealism in favor of a compassionate , naturalistic realism. The time gap between the experience and the documentation suited him - the memory was still fresh enough to retain its emotionality, but placed in such a way that his own artistic imagination could expand it. Since his studio in north London had already been bombed out in 1939, Moore was forced to temporarily give up sculpture and concentrate primarily on painterly and graphic means. Certainly the watercolor, crayon and colored pencil sketches of Londoners huddled, unconscious or sitting upright, as Moore depicts them, have a very clear three-dimensional quality. In the drawing “Tube Shelter Perspective,” for example, the people appear ghostly, skeletal, without flesh and blood. Perhaps the viewer is reminded of the casts of victims of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Pompeii by the simplification of the forms and the reduction of individualizing features . And yet Moore shows the people portrayed a deep sympathy and preserves their humanity by depicting their fear, their interdependence and their harrowing situation in a tangible, almost tangible way. Perhaps this is why the drawings are often misunderstood today as simple propaganda of perseverance , even though they are actually Moore's very personal response to a hardship that he experienced and endured together. After the war, he made a comparison between the situation in the tunnels during the world wars: while they had been a real place of refuge in the First World War, they had become graves in the Second. Moore was not wrong in this assessment, as a bomb hit Balham Station in 1941, flooding Balham Station and drowning 57 people there. The drawing of Liverpool Street Station seems more like a mausoleum with corpses lying close together, rather than a place of camaraderie and solidarity, which was later often exaggerated. Moore wasn't interested in creating positive propaganda, but rather claustrophobic propaganda To convey a feeling of confinement and confinement. At exhibitions in the United Kingdom and overseas during the war, but also afterwards, the “Shelter Drawings” were often perceived as images of collective suffering and collective resilience and therefore proved to be quite successful in the long term for Moore himself, even if they were not perceived by the public were received as positively as is generally claimed. At this point we should also briefly mention the series on miners in the English north , which began in 1941 and was also commissioned by the War Artists' Advisory Committee. Moore didn't actually want to make this series of drawings and later had little interest in these works. Nevertheless, he later noted that since he had no experience with drawing dynamic figures and his sculptural works were static, the archaic, raw dynamism of men underground had a significant influence on the development of his perception. The drawing “Four Gray Sleepers” differs from numerous other works in the “Shelter Drawings”, just like the “Pink and Green Sleepers”, which was created shortly before and is comparable in subject and composition. The scenes often show groups of people, lying close together, crowded, overlapping, therefore anonymous, de-individualized in the mass of bodies, often without a clearly recognizable physiognomy. Here, however, the viewer gets very close to the people, sees their individual faces and - at least in part - their individual characteristics. We look down from above at four people apparently sleeping on the floor in front of us - genders cannot be clearly identified - each in a different position on their backs, on their sides, turned away from the viewer. The look suggests our presence in the scene, perhaps looking through Moore's eyes at the scene of the sleeping people presented to him, or perhaps even throwing ourselves into the midst of the people in the tunnels, just woken from sleep, our gaze still unsteady and rather aimlessly, as if randomly wandering over the people around us. So we don't see any of the figures completely, only their upper bodies are placed in the format. What is remarkable is how Moore places the figures at the edge of the scene, arranging them around an empty center of the picture, from which the lines of the floor condense in a circle outwards towards the darkness of the tunnel surrounding the sleeping people. In conjunction with the perspective, this also anchors the viewer firmly in the narrative of the drawing. “Four Gray Sleepers” is dominated, first of all, by the figure on the bottom left, who stands in front of us with a blanket over his chest, his arms over his head and partly over his face , and his mouth open as if in a groan, a scream Floor is sleeping. The posture, together with the facial expressions, suggests a restless sleep, perhaps plagued by dreams and anxious. The position taken does not seem very stable, like an intermediate position, as if the person would soon move or lie down differently in order to perhaps find some peace. The ceiling that lies over them like the waves of a moving sea once again supports this unsteady impression. The figure above her has turned away, turned away, her back acts like a wall as a defense against the unrest behind her, only the back of her head and her left ear are visible above the blanket that has been pulled up and wrapped tightly around her body. Immediately in front of her, we can only see in the section, that there is another person lying who also has his back turned to us. At the top right edge of the picture we can also see another body, the details of which, however, cannot be seen. The two figures in the right half of the picture allow us to see their faces. The superior has placed her left hand on her own face in an almost tender gesture, perhaps to cover her eyes, which are only vaguely visible as shadows. Here the viewer cannot completely avoid the impression that the figure's right eye is open, peering into the darkness of the room while half asleep, perhaps disturbed by the restless twilight of the figure in front of her. The figure at the bottom right of the picture appears completely different, apparently a child: she lies there as if dead, certainly just as asleep as the others. However, when lying on her back, with her arms stretched out to the side of her body, she almost appears to be carefully laid down there. The blanket lying smoothly on her and ending just below the chin is reminiscent of a shroud that only needs to be pulled over the peaceful face with the slightly open mouth . The almost square format chosen by Moore, which subtly emphasizes the horizontal, initially contributes to the impression of a superficial calm of the scene. But this remains deceptive. The sleep of the four people shown appears more like a cemetery rest due to the lack of color. Perhaps because of the experiences of the “Pink and Green Sleepers,” Moore chose not to use bright colors in order to increase the emotional impact on the viewer. The drawing, like the others in the series, is created using mixed media using pencil, pen and watercolor paint. However, the “wax resist” technique used by Moore is central to the effect. In this technique, which is based on the fact that wax repels water, lines are made on the paper with colored wax crayons or white wax candles and then painted over with watercolor paint. The ink only sticks to the paper where there is no wax. This can create a range of grainy effects that use the surface structures of the paper to create texture. In this way it is possible to achieve the effect of "lichens on gray rock, the colored texture of weathered stone, the fiery black and red of igneous rocks made of glowing coal" , described by a contemporary critic as a natural phenomenon . With this technique, Moore condenses the volume-creating, often raw and coarse-looking, repeatedly overlapping lines that give bodies and materials alike a diffuse, only slightly differentiated materiality. The concentration of the strokes, repeatedly supported by splashes of ink and the extensive use of black-gray glazes, creates strong light-dark contrasts that make the figures stand out even more strongly from the darkness of the floor. Together with the three-dimensional, sculptural effect of the drawing, the memory of the plaster casts of the dead from Pompeii and Herculaneum comes to life, who were apparently caught in the limbo between life and death in the midst of the catastrophe that had befallen them - just like the thousands upon thousands of London women, men and children , who on the nights of bombing could not be sure whether the dark depths of the subway shafts would become their personal Hades or whether they would be able to climb out of them again, at least for a day.