Art: Maker of Images

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David Smith, 53, is the best of the living "ironmongers." His raw, openwork constructions of iron, silver and stainless steel stem from Spanish ironwork by way of Gonzalez, but they have a peculiarly American urgency and, so to speak, a questioning emptiness. Smith is the idol of young American sculptor-welders, who find that they can follow his lead on a large scale without too great expense (a big cast-bronze monument may cost $50,000 to erect; a welded steel one as little as $500). Smith stays more inventive than any of his imitators.

Solitary Man. Moore himself has blazed a trail without raising an army of followers; he has created a style without founding a school. He stands alone, as solitary as his bronze image (see color) rising above a lonely Scottish moor, as unique as one of his strong and sweepingly molded figures of wood or stone, recognizable yet unfamiliar, warm yet discomfiting, partly abstract and groping for answers to the mystery: What is man?

Moore pauses when talking about sculpture, searching for words as if for chisels. "If an artist tries consciously to do something to others," he says, "it is to stretch their eyes, their thoughts, to something they would not see or feel if the artist had not done it."To do this, he has to stretch his own first. When he succeeds, an artist enriches that side of life that makes us different from animals. You don't know how it's done, yet it's not an accident."

From Sooted Shadows. Coal Miner Raymond Moore was 50 and his wife Mary was 40 when their son Henry was born on July 30, 1898, in Castleford. There is something in the Yorkshire country, with its brooding hills and its sooted shadows, that brings out the digger and molder in a man, and by the age of ten Moore knew he would be a sculptor. Their miner's home was poor and crowded—Henry was the seventh of eight children. Father Moore was a fair but stern man. Says son Henry: "He was the complete Victorian father, aloof, spoiled like all of them in those days. No one could sit in his particular chair. But though he was not outwardly soft, he had a real concern and love and ambition for us. Particularly for his sons." He wanted Henry to become a schoolteacher, like his older brother Raymond and sister Mary.

But it was Moore's mother who dominated his boyhood. "She was absolutely feminine, womanly, motherly. She had eight children and lost only two. She was an absolutely indefatigable mother. Her day would sometimes begin at 4:30 in the morning, when father was on early shift at the mine, and it would end in the night some time. Never can I remember her resting, except that once in a while she would be bothered by a sort of rheumatism. 'Oh, Henry lad. This shoulder is giving me gyp today,' she'd say, and ask me to rub the aching place with some oils she'd evolved herself."