Artists & Works

STYLE: HOMAGE TO PICASSO

Henry Moore is considered the premier sculptor of late Modernism. Born to a working class family in Yorkshire, Moore was determined to become an artist from the age of eleven, when he heard about Michaelangelo. After being gassed in WWI, Moore was able to attend the Leeds School of Art on a serviceman's study grant. He then received a scholarship to the Royal College of art in London, where he spent productive time studying the collections of African, Pre-Columbian, Egyptian, and other forms of non-Western art in the British Museum. He was also greatly influenced by the work of Picasso. Moore had his first one-person show in 1928 and executed a controversial public commission the same year. In 1931, the artist accepted a teaching post at the Royal College of Art, which for many years allowed him the financial freedom to create artwork and travel. In 1936, His work was shown in America by Alfred Barr, the Director of the Museum of Modern Art. Soon after this, Moore's international reputation flourished. Honors, honorary degrees, prizes, commissions and awards were showered upon him. There was a great demand for Moore exhibitions, and there were many monumental public art commissions. Moore's sculptures have been placed in more public places throughout the world than any other sculptor in history.

Moore viewed nonwestern traditions not as "primitive" but as belonging to the world tradition of sculpture. The artist was not interested in forcing bronze and stone to look like flesh--rather, he sought magical, ritual content in art, a timeless archetypal quality. His mature work features a free, abstract image that is the result of the interaction between mass and void. Moore always freely admitted his debt to Picasso; his print from the Homage to Picasso portfolio depicts the reclining figure, one of Moore's favorite subjects and one he returned to again and again. These forms are most like Moore's sculpture of the thirties, when he was most influenced by Picasso. The swelling shapes, undulating extensions, and rounded indentations are typical of Picasso's figurative work of the twenties and thirties and are also reflective of Moore's adherence to the forms of nature.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Henry Moore Foundation, works chronology 1920s, text on Mother and Child (1924-25), [a seminal work for understanding Moore's reclining figures]
"In this Reclining Figure, the culmination of his early period, Moore seems to have successfully combined the two streams of his sculptural training--the 'primitive' and the 'classical'. This figure demonstrates both his debt to 'primitive' sculpture--most particularly the figure of the Mayan Rain-God, the Chacmool, but also his acknowledgment of the Renaissance reclining figures of Michelangelo, seen on his visit to Italy in 1925. This sculpture demonstrates Moore's incredibly astute sense of volume and monumentality. His often-repeated doctrine of 'truth to material' appears to be embodied here in this piece. The posture of the reclining woman pays homage to the shape of the original stone block, her raised left arm, massive right shoulder and forearm keep the figure restrained in a rectangular formation, which imbues the figure with a kind of 'squat dignity' (Sylvester 1948, p159). The extremities of the figure are so clearly associated with the original block shape that it seems Moore has merely uncovered the woman beneath the stone rather than physically sculpting her form. This more primitive expression of womanhood is fused with the typically reclining posture of renaissance figures, such as Michelangelo's Dawn. This figure also intimately reflects Moore's fascination with the landscape and caves of the natural world through the figure's mountainous thighs and the deep space carved between them. The three key elements of woman as primitive, earth-goddess, woman as classical beauty and woman as landscape are all clearly reflected here in this one composition. Moore's figure stands on her own as a singular masterpiece, but she can also be seen as the prototype for all Moore's later reclining figures."