The Human Face of War; Henry Moore captures the anguish on the home front.

Byline: Ginanne Brownell

Throughout the centuries war-related art has juxtaposed beauty and grace with destruction and grief; the images compel and repel at the same time. Francisco Goya's painting "The Third of May" captures the serene resolve of soldiers during their execution, while John Singer Sargent's "Gassed" is a haunting exploration of soldiers dying from the effects of mustard gas during World War I.

British artist Henry Moore, once described as the "greatest sculptor since Rodin," also captured battle through his works. He focused on those who suffered on the home front. "The air raids began--and the war from being an awful worry became a real experience," he wrote to a friend in 1939. "Tube Shelter Perspective 1941," a pencil and crayon drawing, shows a horizontal hole swallowing up desperate Londoners trying to escape the nightly ravages of the Blitz. The anonymous faces are disturbing, yet the work itself evokes an inspiring sense that everyone is in this awful experience together.

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Moore's death, London's Imperial War Museum is hosting the exhibition "Henry Moore: War and Utility" (through February 2007). The works in this retrospective, all done between 1938 and 1954, focus on the human face of war. Moore, who fought in the trenches during World War I, loathed the violence. Yet he was so opposed to fascism that on the eve of World War II, he contemplated volunteering for service. "Without war, which directed one's direction to life itself, I think I would have been a far less sensitive and responsible person," he once said, according to the exhibition's catalogue. "The war brought out and encouraged the humanist side of one's work."

During the fighting, when the area around his cottage in the country became a restricted military zone and he could no longer carve in the open air, Moore temporarily shifted from sculpture to drawing. Between 1940 and 1942 he produced no three-dimensional work. But his love for the form did not disappear; in "Crashed Aeroplane and Urban Skyline," a pencil, crayon and ink drawing, sculpted images occupy the foreground, while incongruous sketches of sheep, a skyline wrapped in barbed wire and a crashed plane create a clockwise flow to the pink and yellow work. Moore's sketches are also littered with notes, giving the viewer a ...