Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

Acquired directly from the artist by the artist’s sister, Mrs Mary Spencer Garrould, Norfolk, possibly c.1928 and by 1944; thence by descent.

This small, carved sculpture of the head and neck of a serpent is made in buff coloured limestone with intermittent sparkling bedding planes that run from front to back. Such banding is characteristic of travertine marble.

The sculpture is intended for wall mounting and is attached with fixing cement and a single screw to a circular mount which has a bevelled sloping surface to tilt the snake’s head down towards the viewer (fig.1). Moore has carved the snake with smooth planar surfaces that are finished to a matte texture. Narrow shapes are recessed into the surface of the head to represent the creature’s eyes, while inside the mouth are two triangular notches and two neatly drilled holes (the exact purpose or meaning of these is unclear) (fig.2).

Carving a stone object begins with the artist roughing out the shape and removing larger unwanted areas of stone using a hammer and chisels. Point chisels are often used first because the sharp point directs maximum force from the hammer to drive off chunks of stone or, alternatively, a pitching tool may be used. This is a large chisel with a very broad edge that can be used to split stone along its bedding planes.

The sculpture’s shape might then be refined using a claw chisel, which leaves characteristic parallel lines in the surface from its multiple small chisel heads and removes material quickly. The sculptor will further perfect the form using various sizes of chisels at a shallow angle to the surface before using more abrasive tools such as rasps and rifflers. In the case of this sculpture Moore has further worked the stone with files and fine abrasives to achieve a final smooth surface, leaving no traces of the original tool marks.

At this stage of his career Moore favoured what he called ‘direct carving’ where the sculptor works directly on the stone without reference to a model or maquette.

There are no inscriptions on this sculpture.

Head of Serpent is a small, wall-mounted stone sculpture of a snake-like head thrusting forward from a circular base. Sharply incised narrow ovals on either side of the smoothly rounded head indicate the serpent’s eyes. Its jaws are improbably thick, and seen from the side the snake seems to smile. Inside its mouth are two triangular notches and, mysteriously, two neatly drilled holes. The cream travertine marble used in this work has a slight graining, producing black-brown streaks that run along the serpent’s head, emphasising its length and narrow eyes.

The sculpture was made in 1927 when Moore was working as a tutor at the Royal College of Art in London. Moore had taken up a teaching post in the sculpture department in 1924 after gaining his diploma from the college and continued working there until 1931. Although nothing is known about the precise circumstances in which Head of Serpent was made, it was probably carved at Moore’s studio, 3 Grove Studio, Adie Road, Hammersmith, where Moore lived and worked between 1926 and 1929. The sculpture is numbered 45 in the artist’s catalogue raisonné of 1957, which notes that it was made in the autumn of 1927. If correct, this means that the sculpture was completed only a few months before it was exhibited in Moore’s first solo exhibition in January 1928 at the Warren Gallery, London. This exhibition contained sculptures and drawings made over a seven-year period, the earliest work dating from 1922. When it was exhibited at the Warren Gallery, Head of Serpent was listed in the exhibition pamphlet as Snake’s Head. It was re-titled Head of Serpent in 1944 when it was included in critic Herbert Read’s book Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings, which was later revised and reissued as the artist’s catalogue raisonné. Subsequent published literature has repeated the title Head of Serpent, but on entering the Tate collection its title was initially revised to Head of a Serpent in order to make the title read more easily. In 2014 the title was changed back to that listed in the artist’s 1957 catalogue raisonné.

The material of Head of Serpent was identified in 1928 simply as stone, and most subsequent publications repeated this unspecific information. In 1983, however, sculpture historian W.J. Strachan identified the stone as travertine marble, which has since been confirmed by Tate conservator Lyndsey Morgan (see Technique and condition).1 The serpent’s head and base has been carved from a single block of travertine marble, a sedimentary rock that is known for its fibrous veining. The marble is found globally, but is commonly associated with quarries in Italy; travertine marble derives its name from the Italian town of Tivoli, and was used in the construction of prestigious buildings in ancient Rome, including the Colosseum. In 1981 Moore explained why he liked working with this particular stone: ‘Travertine has a good quality – ruddy, powerful, strong. You feel you haven’t got to handle it with kid gloves’.2 The ancient Romans used travertine marble as a material for sculpture, a tradition that was continued by Michelangelo in the sixteenth century, and then by Moore, most notably in his commissioned Unesco Reclining Figure 1957–8.

Over the course of his career Moore created four snake sculptures, of which Head of Serpent was the second. The first, Snake 1924 (fig.1), in white marble, presents a snake with the length of its body tightly coiled around itself. This sculpture is directly linked to a series of preparatory drawings which also show a snake coiled around itself, seen from different angles (fig.2). The way in which the upward looking snake’s head rests on its own body in the sculpture replicates the designs seen in Moore’s sketches. Although none of Moore’s sketches from the 1920s correspond as explicitly to Head of Serpent, his sketchbooks reveal that he was interested in animal forms. In his book Henry Moore: Animals, published in 1983, W.J. Strachan suggested that Head of Serpent was a continuation of the 1924 Snake. However, although Snake and Head of Serpent have a shared subject matter, in the later work Moore chose only to prioritise and develop the primary features of the earlier sculpture, namely the head and the mouth, dispensing with the rest of the snake’s body. Moreover, while Snake was designed to be placed on a flat surface, Head of Serpent was fashioned to hang on a wall.

It is likely that the sculpture was originally displayed at or above eye level because the angle of the head tilts downwards, as seen in a photograph showing the sculpture installed at Moore’s 1961 exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, London. This wall-mounted schema is rare in Moore’s work, although another example in Tate’s collection is Animal Head 1956 (Tate T02277). The third and fourth snake sculptures made by Moore were made decades later and cast in bronze, Snake Head 1961 and Serpent 1973.3

Notebook No.2 is the earliest of six surviving notebooks and many of the drawings contained within it relate to Moore’s coursework for the Royal College of Art.4 Some of the drawings were annotated by Moore, or were subsequently labelled during Moore’s lifetime, as having been made after visits to the British Museum. Moore made regular trips to the museum following his arrival in London in 1921, and used its collection as a source of inspiration for subjects and sculptural ideas that were later developed in the studio. While it is unlikely that the sketches of snakes found in Notebook No.2 were exact copies of specific works in the British Museum, Moore was certainly aware of the various sculptures of snakes in the collection, particularly examples from ancient Mexico, suggesting that his sketches may well have evolved from his observation of these ancient artworks.5

Moore’s knowledge of the arts of ancient Latin and South America was informed by his reading of the art critic Roger Fry’s Vision and Design (1920) as a student at Leeds School of Art in 1920. Fry had included a chapter on ancient American arts in his book, and Moore later recalled that ‘Fry opened the way to other books and to the realisation of the British Museum. That was the beginning really’.6 In 1947 Moore recalled, ‘One room after another in the British Museum took my enthusiasm. The Royal College of Art meant nothing in comparison ... And after the first excitement it was the art of ancient Mexico that spoke to me most’.7 The British Museum had a particularly large collection of ancient Mexican sculpture having acquired its first piece in the 1820s and Moore may have visited the museum’s 1923 exhibition of Mayan sculpture from the Maudlay Collection.

Moore supplemented his studies in the British Museum by reading a variety of publications, including scholar Ernst Fuhrmann’s illustrated book Mexico III (1922), which he acquired in 1923. The art historian Barbara Braun has noted that the 1920s saw a growth in exhibitions, publications and public interest in the arts of ancient Mexico and South America, fuelled by numerous archaeological discoveries.8 These included the 1926 archaeological excavations of an ancient Mayan city in British Honduras (present-day Belize) led by the British Museum’s ethnographic curator T.A. Joyce. These excavations were widely reported in publications such as the Times and the London Illustrated News and Moore was one of a number of artists and writers, including Leon Underwood (1890–1975) and D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930), who were looking to the arts and culture of ancient Mexico for inspiration.9 In Paris the surrealist artists admired the more violent and sinister elements of so-called primitive art, which may explain why Strachan identified a ‘surrealist element’ in Head of Serpent.10

In 1980 Moore was invited to select artworks from the British Museum collection that influenced him during his career. These objects were collated for publication in the photographic book Henry Moore at the British Museum (1981).11 After Moore’s introduction, photographs of the fifty items selected by Moore are organised according to geographical region or type. The chapter on Aztec sculpture contains five works from the museum’s collection and includes an ancient Mexican stone rattlesnake (fig.3). Moore explained why he admired this particular work, stating, ‘Although the snake is coiled into a most solid form, it has a real air of menace, as if it could strike at any moment’.12

Although he singled out the coiled rattlesnake for inclusion in his 1981 publication, it is likely that Moore also looked at other examples of ancient Mexican snakes in the British Museum during the 1920s. Of the entwined snakes in his 1921–2 sketch, the example on the far left appears to have more in common with the stone serpent (fig.4) than with the coiled rattlesnake. In 1996 Moore’s niece, Ann Garrould, noted that the exact source of a sketch from 1925, annotated ‘snake – head of serpent’ (fig.5), had not yet been identified, but recounted how Moore had called it ‘a bit Mexican’.13 The sketch shows two snake heads that recall both the coiled rattlesnake showing its fangs and the reposed but menacing stone example. In his sketches Moore probably amalgamated shapes seen in a range of ancient Mexican examples. With the knowledge of form that these sketches provided, Moore went on to create his own interpretations of ancient snake forms. Indeed, in Herbert Read’s 1934 publication Henry Moore: Sculptor, Moore is quoted as saying, ‘in my sculpture I do not use my memory or observations of a particular object, but rather whatever comes up from my general fund of knowledge’.14 According to Read, Moore’s animal sculptures from the 1920s were reduced to certain basic shapes or features in an attempt to convey the animal’s life force or inner character.15 In so-called primitive art, including archaic Egyptian and ancient Mexican sculpture, Read explained:

Later Moore echoed this interpretation when he praised Mexican sculpture for ‘its tremendous power without loss of sensitiveness, its astonishing variety and fertility of form invention’.17 He also found in it parallels with medieval church carvings, noting: ‘Mexican sculpture, as soon as I found it, seemed to me true and right, perhaps because I at once hit on similarities in it with some eleventh-century carvings I had seen as a boy on Yorkshire churches.’18 In 2002 Moore scholar Alan Wilkinson claimed that in his statement Moore was ‘almost certainly referring to the carved corbels’ depicting grotesque human and animal forms, thought to date from the mid-fourteenth century, in St Oswald’s Church, Methley, West Yorkshire.19 Some years earlier, W.J. Strachan had offered a similar insight, writing that Head of Serpent was ‘angled like a gargoyle and as menacing as many of them are’.20

It is thus possible that in Head of Serpent Moore conjoined memories of medieval gargoyles (which are usually placed in elevated positions) with a subject he associated with ancient Mexican sculpture to create his own gargoyle or grotesque. According to Braun, Head of Serpent was based on ‘the ubiquitous tenoned serpent’ called Quetzalcoatl, a god that was represented as a plumed creature on Aztec architectural facades and which adorns one of the pyramids at the archaeological site of Teotihuacán, an ancient Mexican city (fig.6).21 Quetzalcoatl was believed to be both bird and snake, uniting the sky and the earth, and Braun suggests that Head of Serpent ‘seems to pick up the notion of menacing nature’ found in the Aztec god.22

Quetzalcoatl had been popularised by the publication, in 1926, of D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent, a story of spiritual rebirth set in Mexico.23 Lawrence had seen the plumed serpents of Teotihuacán during his visit to Mexico in 1923, and his essays and novel did much to promote Mexican culture in Britain. While it is not known whether Moore read The Plumed Serpent when it was first published, he had been aware of the author’s work since 1918.24 In 1928 he wrote to his friend, artist Cecila Sempill that his summer reading was ‘mostly ... D.H. Lawrence – There’s now a cheap edition of the novels (published at 3/6 volume) I’m buying all those I’ve not read. They’re good’.25 When Moore visited Mexico in 1953 he visited not only Teotihuacán but also the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent, Xochicalco (fig.7).26 During his visit he saw an ancient carved basalt version of Quetzalcoatl, which was later reproduced next to Snake 1924 in the catalogue of his 1982 exhibition in Mexico City.27

Inspired, perhaps, by the example of Quetzalcoatl and the ‘form invention’ of ancient Mexican sculpture, in 1927 Moore made a number of animal sculptures that only loosely resemble their subjects. Moore’s bronze Bird 1927 (fig.8) and concrete Duck 1927 (fig.9) share some similarities with Head of Serpent, in particular the angled, thrusting head.

Head of Serpent was included in Moore’s first solo exhibition held at the Warren Gallery, London, in 1928; the show included forty-two sculptures and fifty-one drawings. The Warren Gallery was run by Dorothy Warren who, in 1961, Moore remembered as ‘a remarkable person with tremendous energy and real verve, real flair’.28 Moore’s exhibition was one in a series that presented the work of artists whose fathers had been miners. The series started with a sell-out exhibition of paintings by Evan Walters (1893–1951) and concluded with a controversial display of paintings by D.H. Lawrence, which were seized by the police.29 Moore went on to recall that, although several sculptures were sold during the exhibition, it was his drawings that proved to be most successful commercially.30

Although he had exhibited in a number of group exhibitions during the 1920s, Moore’s 1928 solo exhibition put him in the public eye. Although some reviews were negative, most concurred that Moore was a young artist with potential. The unnamed reviewer for the Times claimed that although Moore’s abilities as a carver were not in question, ‘his actual sense of form is not yet highly developed’.31 One of the most positive reviews came from the Yorkshire Evening Post, although the reviewer approached the exhibition from a very particular perspective: under the title ‘Yorkshire Miner’s Artist-Son: Unconventional Work by Castleford Man’, the unnamed London correspondent for the Yorkshire Evening Post made Moore’s origins the key to understanding the exhibition. ‘Mr. Moore’s sculptures and drawings are full of primitive vitality which derives in some degree from the sturdy mining stock from which the artist springs.’32 Building on this notion that Moore’s art originated from his father’s occupation, the reviewer went on to suggest that his sculptures ‘radiate vitality and masculine strength’.33 While other reviewers focused attention on Moore’s female figures, the correspondent for the Yorkshire Evening Post highlighted Snake 1924 and Head of Serpent: ‘a snake in white marble is a striking piece of work, and the sculptor has achieved success in another study of a snake’s head in stone’.34

Perhaps the most important review of the exhibition, however, was written by P.G. Konody for the Observer.35 Konody’s review noted that there was nothing in Moore’s exhibition to suggest that he was the product of the Royal College of Art, or that he had studied under Professor Derwent Wood, whose teaching was based in the classical tradition. Positioning Moore alongside continental cubist sculptors Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) and Alexander Archipenko (1887–1964), Konody suggested that his work was ‘more concerned with abstract relations of plane to plane than with representation’.36 Although Head of Serpent was not specifically mentioned in his review, it is possible to argue that in light of Konody’s commentary the sculpture would have been understood as a particularly modern work by those sympathetic to contemporary developments in art because of its streamlined forms.

Head of Serpent was acquired by Moore’s sister Mrs Mary Spencer Garrould sometime prior to 1944, when her ownership of the sculpture was noted in Herbert Read’s book Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings. It remains in a private collection and has been on loan to Tate since 1994.