HENRY MOORE (1898-1986)

The 'Mother and Child' is one of my two or three obsessions, one of my inexhaustible subjects,” Henry Moore wrote in 1979. “This may have something to do with the fact that the 'Madonna and Child' was so important in the art of the past and that one loves the old masters and has learned so much from them. But the subject itself is eternal and unending, with so many sculptural possibilities in it–a small form in relation to a big form, the big form protecting the small one, and so on. It is such a rich subject, both humanly and compositionally, that I will always go on using it" (quoted in A. Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Berkeley, 2002, p. 213).

Having already done more than twenty sculptures on the Mother and Child theme, Moore received a commission in 1943 to carve a Madonna and Child for St. Matthew’s Church in Northampton, England (Lund Humphries, no. 226). This project gave Moore cause to reflect upon the long tradition of western religious art, and to focus on the ways in which a Madonna and Child differs from a purely secular Mother and Child. “The Madonna and Child should have an austerity and a nobility,” Moore wrote, “and some touch of grandeur (even hieratic aloofness) which is missing in the everyday Mother and Child” (quoted in D. Mitchinson, ed., Henry Moore Sculpture, with comments by the artist, London, 1981, p. 90).

The universal and monumental aspect of this stone carving, completed in 1944, with the Madonna seated in serene repose as she supports the infant Christ in her lap, became the paradigm for many of the Mother and Child sculptures of later years, with the result that the religious aspect of the subject was largely subsumed within a secular context. It would be the case that during the years 1975-1985 Moore created more images of the Mother and Child than in any other period of his career, demonstrating its significance as an enduring motif, universalised as it was by his treatment of the subject. This transformation is especially apparent in the present Mother and Child: Upright; Moore's old master sources remain evident, even while having been radically restated in the syntax of modernist abstraction. One may interpret the significance of the subject in various ways, according it either a sacred or secular meaning, while recognizing that it exists in an eternal, mythic dimension with a comforting humanist message.