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In 1936, Alfred Barr, then the director of the Museum of Modern art in New York, borrowed Moore's Two Forms 1934 in Pynkado wood (LH 153), for his Cubism and Abstract Art Exhibition. Barr later purchased the work, making it the first Moore sculpture in an American public collection. Moore had been a regular visitor to Paris almost every year from the early 1920s, but from 1930 onwards he went more frequently and was directly influenced by the vanguard in Paris, most notably Picasso, Arp and Giacometti. His fruitful contacts with these artists found their logical conclusion in his work. 

In 1937 he became a member of the English Surrealist group. In 1938 he took part in the International Exhibition of Abstract Art at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Moore's one-man shows, and his contributions to several of the major group exhibitions and major international exhibitions in the 1930s helped to confirm his growing reputation. Not all the response was favourable: the art critic of the London Morning Post (11 April 1931) led the opposition with: The cult of ugliness triumphs at the hands of Mr. Moore. He shows an utter contempt for the natural beauty of women and children, and in doing so, deprives even stone of its value as a means of aesthetic and emotional expression.

In 1936 Moore signed the manifesto urging the end of a policy of non-intervention in Spain. He attempted to go to Republican Spain as part of a delegation of English artists and writers including Auden and Spender, but their request for permission to travel was rejected by the British Government.

In 1939, when war broke out, the Moore's were staying in their cottage at Kingston in Kent. They had been spending a lot of their time here, but decided to return to London. Moore's teaching at Chelsea School of Art came to an end when the college was evacuated to Northampton, and Moore resigned his post. The outbreak of war disrupted the inventive continuity of this supremely productive period.

The Blitz also had a direct impact on the Moores when their Hampstead home was damaged by a nearby bomb in October 1940 and they decided to move out of London, renting half of an old farmhouse named Hoglands in the small hamlet of Perry Green in Hertfordshire, forty kilometres north of the capital. In 1941 the owner of the building, who occupied the other half, decided to sell, and the unexpected arrival of a cheque for £300 from Gordon Onslow-Ford for the Elmwood Reclining Figure 1939 (LH 210) - enabled the couple to buy the whole building.

By the 1940s Moore’s international reputation had began to flourish: the years of the Second World War gave Moore’s status at home a much broader base and also helped establish his name among American collectors. Ironically, the recognition he deserved came not for his sculpture but his Shelter Drawings that depicted the British huddled in the London underground for protection against the aerial bombings of the Blitz. Now the public at large became aware of his work, and he won for the first time a positive and sympathetic response to his work. The agent of this change was the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, and particularly its chairman, the then director of the National Gallery, Sir Kenneth Clark, who appointed Moore an Official War Artist in 1941. These drawings, together with those he made subsequently in the coalmines of Yorkshire, are considered among his greatest achievements.

The 1940s were an eventful decade; Moore’s first retrospective exhibition was held at Temple Newsam, Leeds in 1941, with Graham Sutherland and John Piper. In between repairing Hoglands and working on his Shelter drawings, Moore still found time to sculpt. In 1943 Canon Walter Hussey, an Anglican Clergyman with a remarkably modern taste for contemporary art, asked Moore for a Madonna and Child 1944 in Horton stone (LH 226) for his church, St Matthew’s in Northampton. Hussey wanted to place a strong painting on the wall opposite the Madonna and Child.

Moore recommended that Sutherland was the most suitable for the commission and his anguished Crucifixion was indeed the perfect complement. Stylistically the Northampton Madonna linked Moore’s past and future. The theme of mother and child went back to his beginnings as a direct carver, and a primitive influence is still there, but there is more warmth and humanity triggered by the birth of his daughter and the experience of the Shelter drawings, also the long suppressed admiration felt for Giotto, Masaccio, Titian, El Greco, and others on his trips to Italy, Paris and Spain had finally been allowed to find its way into his work.

Now the critical abuse that Moore had received in the thirties turned into praise in the late forties, fifties and sixties. Honours, honorary degrees, prizes, commissions and awards were showered upon him. In 1942 Moore was appointed to the Art Panel of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (later the Art Council of Great Britain). In 1943 he had his first one-man exhibition abroad, at Buchholz Gallery, New York. In 1945 came his first honorary doctorate, from the University of Leeds.