Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

Acquired directly from the artist by the artist’s sister, Mrs Mary Spencer Garrould, Norfolk, c.1951, thence by descent; lent from a private collection in 1994.

This sculpture comprises three standing figures in draped clothing arranged in a semi-circular formation on a rectangular base. It is made of plaster and was probably cast from an original clay model (fig.1). It is likely that the plaster figures were cast separately before being inserted into the base. This is supported by the existence of two clay slip figures held at the Henry Moore Foundation which have plugs at their feet. Marks on the base suggest that the plaster was smoothed with a spatula, possibly after the figures were inserted.

The surface of the sculpture does not appear to have been worked on after casting but some repairs and alterations are visible. For example, all three figures appear to have been broken at the ankle at some point, the repairs for which were made with new plaster (fig.2). Other repairs are particularly visible on the rear of the central and left-hand figures below the knees. Fine cracks can be seen in the necks of all three figures. Casting seams can be detected on the sides and heads of the figures but these have been removed with a fine file. Casting bubbles can also be seen in some areas (fig.3). Later applications of plaster on the front of the skirt and left hip are visible on the right-hand figure, but it is not known when these repairs and alterations were carried out.

After casting the plaster surface was coloured with thin layers of pinkish-brown pigment. This suggests that Moore intended the work to be regarded as a sculpture in its own right, rather than as a working model. There is no signature on this sculpture.

Three Standing Figures 1945 is a plaster cast of a maquette for a larger version of the sculpture carved in stone, which is on permanent display in Battersea Park, London. The plaster cast, like the full-size sculpture, comprises three female figures in draped clothing standing in a semi-circular formation. The central and right-hand figures stand closer to each other forming a pair while the figure on the left faces them at a slight distance (fig.1). Each figure has been modelled individually and is positioned on a shallow rectangular plaster base.1

The left-hand figure has lightly defined facial features and a bun of hair is positioned at the nape of her neck. She wears a long sleeveless tunic which is gathered in front of her navel and thighs. Her left arm is held against the side of her body, while a gap is discernable between her body and her right arm. She stands in a seemingly unnatural position with both knees bent, in contrast to the central figure, who appears to stand contrapposto with her left knee bent and the right leg straight. This figure appears to be wearing a long-sleeved cloak, open at the chest and the right shoulder. A large bundle of fabric wraps the circumference of her body around the hips. Her right elbow is bent and her forearm is positioned on her chest, holding the drapery across her breasts. Three vertical lines suggest drapery on the rear of the figure’s legs, while the only feature on the face is a single circular impression, which may represent an eye. The figure on the right shares this same single physiognomic feature, which suggests that although her body is facing inwards, she is looking out to her left. This figure’s right arm hangs by her side while her left arm, which appears to be in a sling, is positioned horizontally across her waist. A swathe of fabric wraps around her body on a diagonal, from the left hip down to the right thigh.

In 1948 the art critic David Sylvester identified specific differences between the figure on the left and the two figures standing closer together on the right. For Sylvester, the figure on the left was ‘the naturalistic member of the Three Standing Figures [who] expresses a simple, though subtle, womanly emotion, whereas the two other figures, whose style is anti-naturalistic and multi-evocative, are hermaphroditic in form and in content a mysterious, ambiguous, complex of conflicting emotions’.2 Similarly, in 1960, the art historian Will Grohmann described the full-size stone version, for which this work was a maquette, as follows:

In 1965, discussing the large stone version of Three Standing Figures, the critic Herbert Read identified ‘a strongly emphasised rhythmical treatment of the human figure, and a convincing solution of the problem of relating three upright figures to each other and to an overriding plastic unity’.4 Of particular interest to Read was Moore’s stylisation of the heads of the two figures on the right: ‘they become periscopic organs, total eyes that range the infinite space around them’.5

Three Standing Figures was Moore’s first attempt at presenting a group of standing women in sculptural form. Moore’s plans for the sculpture can be traced to his earlier Shelter Drawings, made in 1941–2, which depict women and children taking refuge in the London Underground during the Blitz. Swathed and draped in blankets, these figures – depicted standing, sitting and reclining – expressed the collective anxiety felt by those who lived through the Second World War.6 In 1955 Moore confirmed the link between the drawings and the sculpture, stating that in making Three Standing Figures he sought to convey ‘the group feeling that I was concerned with in the shelter drawings’.7

In 1974 the art historian Kenneth Clark identified a series of drawings made between 1942 and 1946 in which the composition of Three Standing Figures was seemingly developed. He argued that although they clearly developed from the Shelter Drawings, in this new body of work Moore chose to isolate the figures from any specific context. While Clark acknowledged that he ‘did not know the exact sequence of these drawings’, he nonetheless proposed that Group of Draped Standing Figures 1942 (fig.2) was the ‘crucial drawing’, noting that the cluster of three women in the centre of the page not only anticipated Moore’s sculpture, but that ‘the two figures to the left [of the page] are almost exactly as they were to be used, five years later’.8

It is evident from drawings such as Draped Standing Figures in Red 1944 (fig.3) that as well as considering the individual poses of each woman, Moore also grappled with the arrangement of his three figures. Indeed, the way in which the pair of women interacted with the third was clearly still under consideration in 1944. As Moore noted in 1955, ‘although the problem of relating separate sculptural units was not new to me, my previous experience of the problem had involved more abstract forms; the bringing together of these three figures involved the creation of a unified human mood’.9 Clark suggested that in his two-dimensional sketches, Moore ‘never quite arrives at the final solution, in which the left-hand figure is passive and motherly, without the nervous tension of her companions’.10

According to Clark, Moore was only able to solve the problem of how to relate each figure to the other by making three-dimensional terracotta models. It was at this point, Clark argued, that the role of the left-hand figure became clear: ‘she is the shock-absorber and the potential comforter, who gives the group, when realised in stone, its monumental character’.11 Clark claimed that the terracotta was made in 1947, which served to legitimise his argument that the model evolved from the sequence of drawings he identified, which he proposed culminated in a sheet of sketches presenting seven arrangements of three standing figures that is signed by the artist and dated 1946 (fig.4).12 The drawing on the bottom left of this page is closest to the final configuration, although the two women on the right do not possess the same stylised forms or periscopic faces of the figures in the final sculpture. However, Moore’s catalogue raisonné published in 1957 dated the terracotta to 1945 and two photographs of the sculpture were published in the journal Horizon in November 1945 (fig.5). This indicates that Studies of Three Standing Figures was made after the terracotta, demonstrating that Moore continued to experiment with the configuration of the figures in two dimensions even after working in three.

In 1948 David Sylvester noted that the terracotta original ‘has been cast most suitably, not in metal but in plaster’.13 Although it is possible that Moore cast multiple copies of the sculpture in plaster, only two versions are known to exist: one is held at Tate and the other at the Henry Moore Foundation. This other version presents the three figures on an oval base and has a cream-brown colour. Significantly, this plaster also has pencil markings on its surface which suggest that it was used as the template when Moore enlarged the sculpture in stone in 1947–9.

Air bubbles and casting seams on Tate’s plaster indicate that it was cast from a mould, rather than built up over an armature (fig.6). Each figure appears to have been cast separately before being mounted onto the rectangular cuboid base. After casting the figures were finished with files to remove unwanted spurs or seam ridges. The plaster was also coloured with a thin layer of pink-brown pigment suggesting that this version of the sculpture was regarded as an artwork in its own right rather than as a preliminary model. A photograph dated c.1951 shows Tate’s plaster on a shelf in Moore’s studio surrounded by other maquettes, which indicates that it was cast some time between 1945 and c.1951 (fig.7).

The whereabouts of the original terracotta model are unknown. However, two figures made in clay slip are held in the collection of the Henry Moore Foundation. Clay slip is liquid clay that is poured into a mould to create a sculpture. It seems likely that a mould was made from the terracotta original in order to cast the clay slip versions, although it is not known when this took place.

Three Standing Figures also exists in a bronze edition of four plus one artist’s copy, cast between 1948 and 1949. Having made the decision to cast the sculpture in bronze, it would have been important to keep plaster or clay casts of the design in case the mould was damaged or the original destroyed at the foundry. Moore used two different foundries to cast the bronze edition: Fiorini in London made the first cast and Alexis Rudier Fondeur in Paris made the four additional casts. Examples of these sculptures are held in the Smith College Museum of Art, Massachusetts and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. An additional artist’s cast was made in 1985 by Maurice Singer foundry, London, and is held in the collection of the Henry Moore Foundation. The bronze figures are mounted on a rectangular base, as opposed to an oval one, which suggests that they were either cast from Tate’s plaster, or that Tate’s plaster cast was taken from the same mould used to create the bronze edition.

In 1947 Moore started the process of enlarging his small model for Three Standing Figures to a scale over life-size. This work was undertaken outside Moore’s studio at his home, Hoglands, in Hertfordshire, with the help of his assistants Bernard Meadows, Shelly Fausset, Leslie Lawley and Reg Butler. The sculpture was one of Moore’s last carvings made in an English stone – Darley Dale sandstone – and was carved between August 1947 and May 1948. The finished full-size sculpture was first exhibited in the 1948 Open Air Exhibition of Sculpture at Battersea Park, London, organised by London County Council in association with the Arts Council of Great Britain, after which it was bought by the Contemporary Art Society and sited permanently in the park.

Noting the origins of Three Standing Figures in Moore’s wartime drawings, the art historian Roger Cardinal remarked in 2000, ‘broadly speaking, wartime compelled him [Moore] to define his role as a public figure responsive to public needs: like many contemporary artists, he found himself turning to themes of a humanistic and traditional type’.14 In line with his public responsibility as a war artist, which required him to make work that would be comprehensible to a broad population, Moore made a pronounced return to figuration in the immediate post-war period. The first sculptures he made after the war thus represented a departure from his more abstract, surrealist inspired experiments of the 1930s, exemplified by Stringed Figure 1938, cast 1960 (Tate T00386). In 1955 Moore expanded on the relationship between his wartime drawings and Three Standing Figures, noting that,

Three Standing Figures may also be related to another set of drawings made by Moore in the mid-1940s. In 1944 he created a series of drawings to accompany Edward Sackville-West’s play The Rescue, based on Homer’s Odyssey. In this series Moore utilised what the art historian Christa Lichtenstern has described as a ‘new sculpturally haptic drawing style, together with an intensified consideration of drapery’.16 Moore’s engagement with classical mythology seeped into other areas of his work, and in 1948 he made a drawing titled The Three Fates (fig.8), depicting three standing women dressed in draped clothing, linked by a taut thread that stretches across their bodies. It was perhaps with this drawing in mind that the art historian Will Grohmann suggested in 1960 that Three Standing Figures depicted the Fates.17

Moore’s turn to classical subjects and forms in the post-war period was not unique, and it is significant that photographs of his terracotta maquette were published in the journal Horizon in 1945 in conjunction with an essay by Thierry Maulnier titled ‘Towards a New Classicism’.18 Maulnier suggested that ‘classicism can provide the noble satisfactions arising from a union between the tragedy of human destiny and its perfect expression in words, whereby the tragedy is fully realised – and splendidly surpassed’.19 While Maulnier’s concern was with French literature, Moore’s terracotta Three Standing Figures presented a visual example of this modern classical idiom.

Most interpretations of Three Standing Figures have focused on the large-scale stone version. Although the Battersea Park sculpture is smoother and more stylised than the smaller plaster versions, responses to it remain useful for understanding Tate’s plaster cast. In his 1948 essay published in the Burlington Magazine Sylvester gave an idiosyncratic interpretation of the sculpture, suggesting that it may be read as a family group: the protective mother, the stern father, and the child on the far right, who looks out into the future. For Sylvester, the success of the sculpture was the way in which ‘we are left in doubt whether it [the right-hand figure] is anxious to break away from the group or whether seeking refuge within the family from outside terror’.20 This sense of uncertainty was also identified by the critic George Wingfield Digby in his 1955 book Meaning and Symbol in Three Modern Artists. He stated that:

In contrast, in 1959 the psychologist Erich Neumann identified the sculpture as an exemplary manifestation of Moore’s preoccupation with the archetype of the ‘Earth Mother’, arguing that:

In 1968 the critic John Russell identified Moore’s standing figures as ‘watchers’, noting that the subject of witnessing had been a preoccupation of the poet W.H. Auden in the 1930s, and was further explored in the post-war period by the sculptors Reg Butler and Lynn Chadwick (see Tate N05942 and T01226 respectively). Russell suggested that, ‘the man or woman who watches the skies has a particular emotional meaning for anyone who, from the Spanish Civil War onwards, has looked on the skies primarily as a potential source of catastrophe, and in carving this group Moore drew, whether consciously or not, on the stored memories of millions. This gives the group a distinct historical importance’.23 Concurrently in 1968, Moore acknowledged that ‘it is as though the three women are standing there, expecting something to happen from the sky ... Maybe this wasn’t done consciously. You don’t always do things consciously. I don’t anyhow’.24 By the 1970s, commentators including the critic Robert Melville regarded the work in terms of its post-war context. Melville argued that the sculpture ‘pays tribute to the women of the deep shelters by celebrating their return from the underworld ... They stand in a rough semi-circle, gazing at the sky. They drink in the light and air, but they are watchful, as if they have not yet lost the habit of scanning the sky for hostile aircraft’.25

Despite the small size of the plaster Three Standing Figures, Sylvester argued that ‘the expression of monumental feeling in a physically tiny form is manifest in the maquette ... Dramatically, it is not a whit less impressive than the stone group ... the immediate emotional impact of these miniature totems which are the maquette is, if anything, more powerful than that of the carved group’.26 Similarly, in 1960, Grohmann asserted that ‘in spite of its smallness, the terracotta model looks both monumental and mobile; the modelling is sketchy, but completely to the point, and the casualness of the detail bears the stamp of genius’.27

Three Standing Figures was acquired by Moore’s sister Mary Spencer Garrould, who lived in Norfolk, probably shortly after its creation. It remains in a private collection and has been on loan to Tate since 1994.