Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

Acquired directly from the artist by Gustav and Elly Kahnweiler in 1956, by whom presented to Tate in 1974, accessioned 1994.

This small bronze sculpture developed from a model made of plasticine built up over an internal wire armature, which provided support for the delicate thin forms (fig.1). This model would have been used to create a mould from which the sculpture could be cast in bronze. It is likely that the sculpture was cast using the lost wax technique because the surface of the bronze, which is mostly smooth, features some light modelling marks that were clearly reproduced from the original model (fig.2). The surface has been chased to remove seam lines created during the casting process but otherwise does not bear many marks of post-cast finishing. There are no foundry marks or inscriptions visible.

The bronze has been chemically patinated with an opaque green colour, while a dark transparent brown colour can be seen on the high points (fig.3). The brown patina was applied first, probably using a solution of potassium polysulphide and water (otherwise known as ‘liver of sulphur’). This was then followed by the application of a different chemical solution to produce the green patina. There are many recipes for green patinas but they usually contain a mixture of copper and ammonium salts, particularly chorides, in water. These are stippled on with a brush and react with the bronze surface to create colourful green copper compounds. Patinas like these are usually applied in a number of layers until the desired colour is achieved. In the case of this sculpture the green patina was rubbed back using a light abrasive to reveal the underlying brown patina on the high points. After patination a layer of wax was applied to protect the surface.

The sculpture has its own integral bronze base secured onto a 12 mm thick rectangular pine base by means of a single countersunk screw inserted from the underside. The pine base is stained dark grey but the wood grain is clearly visible and has not been sealed with a varnish.

Maquette for Standing Figure is a small bronze sculpture that served as a preparatory model for a much larger sculpture titled Standing Figure 1950. In both sculptures the human form is represented by a thin, skeletal structure comprising rod-like limbs and differently shaped planes. At the top, two elongated necks rise up to rounded globules featuring a single circular impression. Despite the work’s title these two protrusions appear to represent two individual heads, implying the presence of two individual figures, although they could also be seen to denote two antenna-like eyes (fig.1).

At the base of the necks two flat, triangular forms protrude from the front and the back of the figure respectively and may represent a chest and a shoulder blade. Although they are roughly the same size and shape, these two forms are positioned at different angles so that the planes appear to overlap from certain positions. The empty space of the torso below is outlined by two wiry forms, which may also connote arms. They extend downwards, meeting at the hip or pelvis area, which is denoted by a disk tilted at an angle. From this intersection extend two thin legs, bridged at the mid-point by a horizontal bar. The legs terminate at a single, oval-shaped disk, which is attached to the wooden base.

Although the psychologist Erich Neumann argued in 1959 that this sculpture had ‘only a very distant resemblance to the human form’, in 1965 the art critic Herbert Read described it as definitively human.1 For Read, Moore had split ‘the human frame along the lines of force indicated by arms and legs with a nodular joint at the shoulders, hips and knees. The shoulder-blades are extruded as triangular wedges, which the neck is again split to end in two antennae-like heads’.2

According to Read and the art critic Robert Melville, this sculpture is a three-dimensional expression of a figurative scheme originally developed in an undated drawing by Moore called Ideas for Metal Standing Figures (fig.2).3 The central figure in the lower half of the page has two heads, triangles placed at shoulder height, and a torso and legs defined by thin, wiry vertical tubes. This drawing, which Read and Melville proposed was made in 1948, was one a series of sketches in which Moore developed ideas for metal figurative sculptures. Although Moore later identified the Family Group series of 1944–9 (see Family Group 1949, Tate N06004) as his last important body of sculpture to originate from drawings, it would seem that this sketch also provided a starting point for later work in three dimensions.4

To make Maquette for Standing Figure Moore first had to create a model from which a mould could be taken to cast the sculpture in bronze. This model was made of plasticine built over a wire armature. Although the model has survived, over time the plasticine has become brittle and only fragments of the material exist (fig.3). However, the tool marks on the surface of the two bronze triangles were reproduced from the original model and thus reveal how Moore shaped the plasticine. This level of detail suggests that the bronze was cast using the lost wax technique.5 Moore did not cast this sculpture himself but employed the Fiorini Art Bronze Foundry in London to undertake the work in 1956, six years after the original model was made.6

After casting the bronze sculpture Fiorini would have returned it to Moore so that he could check the quality of the cast and make decisions about the patina. A patina is the surface colour of a sculpture and is usually achieved by applying chemical solutions to the pre-heated bronze. Maquette for Standing Figure has been patinated an opaque green colour, which has been stippled onto the bronze (fig.4). The chemicals required to create the green colour would have been applied in a number of layers over a darker brown solution. The green was then rubbed back at certain points, such as along the edges of the triangle, to reveal the brown colour beneath. A coat of wax has since been applied to protect and maintain the patina.

In 1965 Herbert Read noted that the diffusion of Moore’s small bronzes ‘to collectors and museums throughout the world helped to establish the fame of the sculptor’.7 By the mid-1950s Moore’s work was also in much greater demand by collectors and patrons and producing smaller works in editions of eight or nine would have been a practical way of catering to this popularity. During the 1950s Moore worked with a number of different London-based commercial galleries including Roland Browse and Delbanco, Gimpel Fils and the Leicester Galleries, all of which sold small sculptures by Moore that could be placed on table tops within the home. Depending on the demand for particular works Moore would either cast the full edition in one batch or cast more examples as others were sold, known as casting on demand. By the time Moore cast Maquette for Standing Figure the full-size version of the sculpture had become well known, having been included in a number of important exhibitions, and it seems that demand for the maquette was strong. According to records held at the Henry Moore Foundation Tate’s cast is number one of the edition, and the original owners, Gustav and Elly Kahnweiler, collected the work from Moore’s studio on 31 July 1956.8 The eighth and final bronze in the edition was acquired by Gimpel Fils in June 1957.9 It is believed that the other examples of this sculpture are held in private collections.

Maquette for Standing Figure was the preparatory model for a much larger sculpture, Standing Figure 1950 (fig.5), which was cast in bronze in an edition of four. By the time Moore had finished the maquette, he had already intended to create the work on a larger scale. In 1968 he explained to the photographer John Hedgecoe:

Maquette for Standing Figure marked a return to a mode of figurative representation that Moore had first developed in his sculptures of the late 1930s. In works such as Reclining Figure 1939 (Tate T00387; fig.6) the human body was rendered as a skeletal form comprising thin rods and wiry shapes. The opening out of the torso and rib-cage and the consequent creation of internal spaces was explored in Moore’s figurative sculpture throughout the 1930s and may have stimulated his later interest in the relationships between internal and external forms seen in his works of the 1950s (see Upright Internal/External Form 1952–3, Tate T02272). However, Moore’s ambition to open out the sculpture presented technical problems when working in stone and wood, which were only resolved by Moore’s turn to metal casting in 1937–8. Working in wax or plasticine enabled Moore to create much thinner forms than those that were possible in stone, and he observed in 1960 that working in this way allowed sculptors to make ‘spatial forms’.11 As Read explained in 1965:

The problem of establishing three-dimensional presence without creating massive solid forms preoccupied Moore in the early 1950s. A sketch showing the design of Standing Figure from two different angles (fig.7) is annotated with Moore’s thoughts about the relationship between the sculptural object and the space around it: ‘A full comprehension of form includes comprehending the understanding of space. To know completely the shape of a form means to know also the shape of the space the form displaces. To grasp form three dimensionally is a slow development (an emotional & intellectual development)’.13 This sketch is dated 1950–1 in the artist’s catalogue raisonné, and although its exact date is unknown, it was probably made in 1950.14 To the right of the two views of Standing Figure is another of Moore’s hand-written notes, stating: ‘Forms in the open air look smaller than in the enclosed space of indoors. The sky, the clouds, the landscape impinge on the sculpture & reduce its bulk & so thin linear sculpture gets lost – it seems necessary to have some bulk out of doors’.15

As his double drawing of Standing Figure suggests, Moore sought to overcome the problem of losing sight of his thin vertical figures within a landscape by doubling their bulk; he reasoned that ‘in theory, the double figure with its greater bulk should be more effective in an open setting than the single figure’.16 In 1955 Moore recalled that when the full-size sculpture was returned to his studio having been displayed at Battersea Park in 1951, ‘a second cast of it had already arrived from the bronze foundry, and having them both in the studio I was able to try out a double figure arrangement’.17 Double Standing Figure 1950 presents two casts of the large sculpture positioned in relation to each other and was exhibited outside the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1952 (fig.8).18

Stylistically, the open and linear figurative forms found in Maquette for Standing Figure may have been made in response to Pablo Picasso’s fragmentation of the body. Moore had been aware of Picasso’s work since his student days at Leeds School of Art, and in 1973 reflected that ‘really all my practicing life was as a student, and as a sculptor I have been very conscious of Picasso because he dominated sculpture and painting – even sculpture as well as painting – since Cubism’.19 According to the art historian Christopher Green, Moore was able to respond to Picasso’s drawings and paintings because both artists rooted their art ‘in their knowledge of the human body, however far they moved from straight representation’.20

As Ideas for Metal Standing Figures demonstrates, throughout the late 1940s Moore explored various compositional possibilities of breaking down the body of a standing figure into component parts. This method of fragmenting and reconstructing the figure bears an affinity with drawings published by Picasso under the title An Anatomy 1933 (fig.9). These works were originally reproduced in the first issue of the periodical Minotaure, published in Paris in June 1933, and it is probable that Moore saw or bought a copy upon its publication.21 In An Anatomy Picasso presented the human body as an assemblage of precariously balanced shapes and objects. Arches, prisms and cuboids are stacked into towers along with shapes recalling ladders, chairs and cogs, reconfiguring the body as a series of interconnected forms in space in a comparable way to Maquette for Standing Figure.

While Picasso’s drawings utilise apparently man-made forms, in his analysis of the full-size Standing Figure the art historian Will Grohmann described Moore’s sculpture as ‘organic’, and suggested that he was probably thinking about ‘how something may grow out of a pair of supports’.22 Noting the way in which the pair of legs is replicated by a pair of thin forms at the torso, Grohmann suggested that ‘the head must [also] ... be double, according to the rules of the figure’.23 Following this interpretation the presence of two heads or eyes was not a contrivance to render the body more abstract, but the consequence of cohering to the rhythms and structures of the lower sections of the sculpture. As Erich Neumann suggested the year before in his analysis of Standing Figure and Double Standing Figure, ‘no doubt the formal motif of duplication and correspondence plays its part in the structure of these beings, who look like a cross between the organic and the supernatural’.24

Neumann’s analysis of Standing Figure extended from his interpretation of the drawing from which it originated. According to Neumann, the sketches in Ideas for Metal Standing Figures represented a ‘death goddess’:

Although Read concurred with much of Neumann’s analysis, he reported in 1965 that ‘Moore once told me that the preliminary idea had come from a photograph he had seen of some tall African tribesmen who stand perfectly still in the marshes of a river delta intent on spearing fishes’.26 But, like Neumann, Read also asserted that none of Moore’s sculptures made between 1945 and 1948 ‘prepares us for the radical innovation of the Standing Figures of 1950’.27 Although Read had discussed earlier works such as Reclining Figure 1939 in his book, he suggested that in light of the benevolent Madonna and Child series of 1943 (see Tate N05600–N05603), Standing Figure and its associated drawings and sculptural variations seemed to mark a significant shift in Moore’s sculptural style and subject matter. Read asserted that ‘the sculptor has endowed the form with overtones of watchfulness, of expectancy, of menace’.28

In 2010 the curator Richard Calvocoressi also addressed the sense of apprehension detected in Standing Figure by discussing the sculpture within the context of the Second World War. Calvocoressi argued that in the immediate post-war period ‘the impact of the Holocaust can be sensed in Moore’s own work’, especially in his drawings, wherein ‘his ideas for sculpture show him developing a more troubling conception of the figure as skeletal and transparent’. ²⁹ The decimated and fragmented body had emerged as an evocative subject for many artists working at this time. Seen through the context of war, Moore’s ‘lean, skeletonic’ sculpture can be considered alongside the wiry standing figures of Robert Adams and Reg Butler. Positioned outside the British Pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale, Moore’s Double Standing Figure 1950 stood as the introduction to an exhibition comprising sculptures expressive of a pervasive post-war anxiety. Works by Adams, Butler, Lynn Chadwick and others expressed the ‘geometry of fear’ with their spiky, linear, metal forms, and according to Herbert Read writing in the exhibition’s catalogue, Moore was ‘in some sense no doubt the parent of them all’.30

Despite these considerations, the relationship between Standing Figure and the landscape remains the dominant mode of interpretation for both the maquette and the full-size version. In 1951 the full-size sculpture was displayed outside in Battersea Park (fig.10). In 1970 the critic Robert Melville reflected on seeing Standing Figure ‘in a Battersea Park exhibition during a dull wet summer’, arguing that:

In his catalogue for the Tate’s 1951 exhibition, Moore stated that, ‘Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight is necessary to it, and for me it is the best setting and complement to nature. I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on, the most beautiful building I know’.32

The first cast of Standing Figure originally displayed in Battersea Park was bought by W.J. Keswick and was positioned on his estate, Glenkiln, in Shawhead, Scotland, from 1951 until its theft in 2013 (see fig.5). Moore’s appreciation for the display of sculpture in a landscape was cemented when he visited Glenkiln. Although he initially thought that a double figure would be more successful in an open-air setting, in 1955 he acknowledged that:

Such was Moore’s satisfaction with the position of the sculpture, the maquette was also known as ‘Keswick small version’ in his sales log book.34

In 1954 the critic Robert Melville wrote that in Glenkiln, Standing Figure ‘leads a less restricted life than if it were in a museum: it is not an exhibit but a queer landmark which can be closely examined and still retain the unexaminable look of an apparition’.35 Similarly, in 1959 Neumann wrote that ‘when we see the wonderful figure standing alone in the Scottish landscape, the unique quality of these strange bronzes strikes us at once. For all its bizarre shape, no one can deny that it combines grace with monumentality ... this supernatural being stands there keeping watch over the moors’.36 Both these interpretations of the sculpture as somehow mystical and intrinsically related to the landscape were supported by atmospheric black and white photographs taken by Moore showing the sculpture at Glenkiln (fig.11).

Maquette for Standing Figure was presented to the Tate by Gustav and Elly Kahnweiler (fig.12).37 In the 1950s and 1960s the Kahnweilers were among the few art collectors in the United Kingdom who actively supported the work of European modern artists and they amassed a large collection of paintings and sculptures by artists including Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger. Partly as a result of their friendship with the Tate director Sir John Rothenstein and with his successor Sir Norman Reid they decided to leave their entire art collection to the gallery after their deaths. A Trust Deed was signed in 1974, immediately after which a group of works were passed over to Tate. Gustav died in 1989 and the remaining works, including Maquette for Standing Figure, were accessioned into the Tate’s collection in 1994 following Elly’s death in 1991.

It is not known how or when the Kahnweilers first met Henry Moore, but they may have become familiar with his work in the late 1930s when Moore exhibited at the Mayor Gallery in London, one of the few commercial galleries that actively exhibited and supported the work of modern artists working in Britain and continental Europe. Nonetheless, by the 1950s the Kahnweilers, Moore and Moore’s wife Irina shared a warm friendship. As well as purchasing works by Moore for their own collection, Gustav acted occasionally as an agent in the sale of Moore’s sculptures. For example, in 1952 he negotiated the sale of Moore’s sculpture to the Kunstmuseum in Basel. The Kahnweilers acquired Maquette for Standing Figure directly from Moore shortly after it was cast, and it remained in their apartment at Alderbourne Manor, Buckinghamshire, where the couple had lived since 1956, until it entered the Tate’s collection.

When he died Gustav left detailed instructions regarding the Tate’s gift, and following Elly’s death a total of fifty-five artworks entered the Tate’s collection, including works by Georges Braque, Paul Klee, Henri Laurens, André Masson and Picasso. Along with Maquette for Standing Figure, four other sculptures by Henry Moore were included in the Kahnweiler Gift: Maquette for Fallen Warrior 1956 (Tate T06824), Maquette for Figure on Steps 1956 (Tate T06828), Draped Reclining Woman 1957–8 (Tate T06825), and Reclining Figure: Bunched 1961 (Tate T06826).