Henry Moore (1898-1986)

Moore came relatively late in his career to the idea of the standing figure, but when he took up this subject in 1950, he quickly made up for lost time in a series of works that occupied him through the middle of the decade and thereafter. The presence of such emphatically vertical forms–in Standing Figures and Upright Motives–when viewed amid the many reclining and seated figures Moore typically created during his lifetime, indicates a strikingly assertive, even confrontational attitude in the artist’s intentions. Maquette for Three Standing Figures is among the most stridently surrealist in aspect of Moore’s sculptures since the end of the Second World War. These women, goddesses who appear to step forth from the deepest regions of a primal collective consciousness, are mysterious and haunting in their joint presence, especially in the bold and unexpected forms that Moore devised to render them.