Henry Moore (1898-1986)

For a full sixty years, from the mid-1920s through Moore's death in 1984, the reclining figure represented the sculptor's dominant subject, offering him an ideal vehicle for formal invention and thematic variation. "From the very beginning," Moore reflected in 1968, "the reclining figure has been my main theme. The first one I made was around 1924, and probably more than half of my sculptures since then have been reclining figures" (quoted in A.G. Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore, Writings and Conversations, Los Angeles, 2002, p. 212). Christa Lichtenstern has written, "The reclining figure formed a kind of vessel into which Moore poured his most important poetic, compositional, formal, and spatial discoveries. The farthest-reaching developments in his art are thus reflected in such figures" (Henry Moore, Work, Theory, Impact, London, 2008, p. 95). Moore's preference for the recumbent human form was founded on the myriad formal and expressive possibilities that it afforded him. A standing figure is structurally weak at the ankles, and a seated figure is inseparable from its pedestal; in contrast, Moore claimed, a reclining figure "gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially...A reclining figure can recline on any surface. It is free and stable at the same time" (quoted in D. Mitchinson, ed., Henry Moore Sculpture, London, 1981, p. 86). Moreover, the tensions and oppositions inherent in the asymmetrical reclining figure were ideally suited to Moore's seemingly inexhaustible capacity for plastic experimentation. He declared, "The vital thing is for an artist to have a subject that allows [him] to try out all kinds of formal ideas...In my case the reclining figure provides chances of that sort. The subject matter is given. It's settled for you, and you know it and like it, so that within the subject that you've done a dozen times before, you are free to invent a completely new form-idea" (quoted in A.G. Wilkinson, Henry Moore, Writings and Conversations, Berkeley, 2002, p. 95).