Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

Acquired by Mr Henry Bergen probably before 1944 by whom presented to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1949; transferred to the Tate Gallery 1983.

This is a small, wall-hung sculpture of a human face cast from cement mixed with an aggregate. The cement is a very dark grey colour and it is possible that Moore may have added pigments to the mix to colour it. The surface of the cast is smooth and shiny. Texture is provided by the numerous shallow pockmarks caused by scattered bubbles and air pockets during the casting process. The fine surface finish has been produced by direct casting in a mould taken from an original model made by Moore, probably from clay or plaster, which was then carefully sanded using fine abrasives. The only evidence of any tool marks made after casting is on the lower lip where it may have been necessary for Moore to correct a small flaw (fig.1). It is likely that the surface has been further enhanced by the application of a little wax. There is no inscription on the cast.

There is a sharp edge around the chin, and behind this the form has been narrowed to a square edged ‘neck’ shape. The back of the mask is flat but a wide shallow depression has been hollowed out, perhaps with a chisel, underneath the fixing at the top. The fixing itself is a U-shaped steel rod that has been embedded to form a loop (fig.2). Initially, this may have been embedded a little too deeply and the area around it has subsequently been hollowed out to ensure that it can provide a secure fixing.

Mask is a small, wall-mounted sculpture of a schematic human face. Although its title declares it to be a mask, this sculpture was not designed to be worn. The sculpture is oval in shape, with the chin only slightly narrower than the forehead. The sides of the face are quite deep so that the sculpture projects away from the wall. The face has a very prominent brow, which overhangs the eyes and nose of the sculpture and when seen from the side seems to project upwards. The two eyes are equally spaced and are represented by two depressions. The upturned nose creates a ridgeline down the centre of the face and takes the form of a tetrahedron. Two triangulated nostrils indent the base of the nose. Like the rounded forehead, curved cheekbones contrast with the angular shape of the nose. The mouth is narrow and downturned. The upper lip has been denoted by an indentation while the lower lip is a slightly bulbous protrusion. There are no incised lines to indicate the outline of eyebrows, eyes or lips and when seen from the front the face is dominated by the smooth empty spaces of the cheeks. Ears have not been demarcated. Although seemingly balanced, on closer inspection the facial features of Mask have been presented asymmetrically; the right eye is slightly higher than the left, while the left eyebrow is slightly peaked. The right side of the mouth is turned down slightly.

Moore chose to cast Mask using concrete, a new material at the time which was generally reserved for use as a building material. Although he first used concrete as a material for sculpture in 1926, the majority of his concrete works, including Mask, date from 1929. Concrete, which is a mixture of cement, water and an aggregate of usually sand or fine grit, enabled Moore to create sculptures with a very particular surface texture. Small air bubbles trapped when the concrete is poured into a mould during the casting process create a smooth but pitted surface, and in the case of Mask, fine fragments of sand or grit provide flecks of white and yellow. In 1968 Moore recounted how he had first experimented with concrete by trying to build it up ‘on an armature ... then rubbing it down after it had set. This I had to do very quickly because the cement and the gritty aggregate mixed with it set so hard that all my tools used to wear out’.1 He then tried pouring his concrete into plaster or clay moulds to be cast, which proved more successful, and which may account for the depth of Mask. Writing in 1988 in the Tate’s illustrated catalogue of acquisitions, curator Judith Collins asserted that the original mould for Mask was probably made in clay based on an examination of the eye sockets ‘which look as though they were formed by pressing the thumb into soft clay’.2 She went on to note that ‘it would be difficult to produce this sort of complete yet spontaneous form by scraping it out in a plaster original’.3

The sculpture was exhibited at Moore’s second solo exhibition in April 1931 at the Leicester Galleries in London under the title Mask (Concrete) No.3. Collins accounted for this title by noting that by 1931 Moore had made four masks in cast concrete, and that this work may have been the third to have been executed.4 The first concrete mask was made in 1927 (fig.1), while the three subsequent sculptures, including Tate’s example, all date from 1929. Although the exact sequence in which the three 1929 sculptures were made is not known, they share certain characteristics: the colour of the concrete, the grained texture of the surface, and the sharp, triangulated nose of Mask (fig.2) are similar to those of Mask, while the pressed eye sockets and down-turned mouth can also be found in Mask (fig.3).

Although Moore’s early published statements on sculpture such as ‘A View on Sculpture’ (1930) and ‘Statement for Unit One’ (1933) prioritised the practice of direct carving and championed the use of stone and wood in sculpture, his use of concrete demonstrates that Moore was not averse to experimenting with unconventional materials early in his career.5 The curator Terry Friedman has highlighted Moore’s innovative use of pigment in his concrete sculptures.6 For Mask Moore used a dark grey pigment which, in combination with the surface texture, gives it the appearance of basalt. Friedman has suggested that by adding pigment to the wet concrete mixture Moore was able to produce sculptures with ‘a decisively unclassical look’, which helped to distinguish his work ‘from the unblemished whiteness of marble so beloved by his hidebound contemporaries’.7 Moore was also concerned about the resilience of his concrete sculptures. In a letter to the collector Michael Sadler, who had acquired a concrete reclining figure which he displayed outside, Moore suggested applying a protective ‘preparation’ – a chemical solution – to the work; from their correspondence it is evident that Moore and Sadler were concerned about weathering, and Moore acknowledged that ‘nobody yet knows enough about the durability of concrete’.8

Moore’s experimentation with concrete at this time may have been prompted by his commission in 1928 to create The West Wind, a relief sculpture for the new London Underground building in St James’s. Reflecting on his concrete mask sculptures in 1968, Moore noted that at the time ‘reinforced concrete was the new material for architecture’ and that he had thought he ‘ought to learn about the use of concrete for sculpture in case I ever wanted to connect a piece of sculpture with a concrete building’.9 Having completed his first architectural commission in late 1928, Moore would have been conscious of the types of commercial and public commissions available to sculptors. His experiments with concrete in 1929 may therefore have been devised as a way to demonstrate to prospective clients his ability to work with architectural materials.

Early on in his artistic career Moore had rejected the traditions of classical art, characterised by anatomical accuracy and technical virtuosity, which had dominated his academic training. When Moore began his course at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1921 the teaching of sculpture focused almost entirely on figuration, and was concerned above all with the styles and techniques of ancient Greek and Roman statuary and Italian Renaissance sculpture. Under the leadership of Professor Francis Derwent Wood (1871–1926), a member of the Royal Academy, students in the RCA Sculpture Department were taught how to copy classical sculptures by accurately modelling replicas in clay or plaster before using a pointing machine to create a white marble copy.10 In this way they would gain training not only in traditional sculpting techniques and materials, but also in the styles and subjects of European art of the past.11 By experimenting with coloured or pigmented materials, which also produced different textures, Moore chose to move away from academic sculptural conventions, positioning himself against naturalistic sculpture using traditional materials and techniques.

There are no recorded statements by Moore specifically about Mask and it has received very little critical attention to date. However, it has been considered in relation to general discussions about Moore’s masks from the late 1920s. Scholars agree that the impetus behind the production of masks in this period came from Moore’s interest in pre-Columbian art from Central and South America, particularly ancient Aztec sculpture.12 Pre-Columbian art provided inspiration for a number of Moore’s sculptures during the 1920s, such as Head of Serpent 1927 (Tate L01766), which relates to Moore’s study of Aztec snakes.13 The art historian Barbara Braun has noted that throughout the 1920s there was a growth in exhibitions, publications and public interest in ancient Mexican and pre-Columbian, South American art, fuelled by numerous archaeological discoveries.14 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 British 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.15

This concentration on the arts of ancient Mexico can be understood within the broader artistic tendency known as ‘primitivism’. This is an over-arching term used by art historians to describe a propensity of early twentieth-century European art to emulate the forms and perceived values of non-Western art. The art of so-called primitive cultures – which included tribal art from Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, as well as prehistoric and medieval European art – was admired for its apparently direct expression and ability to convey emotion through the schematic use of shape. Moore’s interest in ancient non-Western art dates from his time as a student at Leeds School of Art, where, in 1920, he read the art critic Roger Fry’s influential book Vision and Design (1920), which included chapters on African, Islamic and ancient American arts. Fry highlighted that ‘more recently we have come to recognise the beauty of Aztec and Mayan sculpture, and some of our modern artists have even gone to them for inspiration’.16 By looking to non-Western artistic sources, artists found ways to challenge the predominance of classical artistic conventions at the turn of the century. As the art historian Christopher Green has suggested, for Fry and many others, the turn to primitive art ‘offered a stimulus for rebuilding the broader terms of the European tradition’.17

In 1947 Moore recalled that ‘Fry opened the way to other books and to the realisation of the British Museum. That was the beginning really ... 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’.18 The British Museum had a particularly large collection of ancient Mexican sculpture having acquired its first piece in the 1820s and Moore may have also visited the museum’s 1923 exhibition of Mayan sculpture from the Maudlay Collection.19 In an essay held in the Henry Moore Foundation archive written in 1925–6, Moore recorded his thoughts on pre-Columbian sculpture: ‘it reflects the character of the Aztecs in its vigorous simplicity, power, almost fierceness. I prefer Mexican to Mayan sculpture. Mexican stone sculptures have largeness of scale & a grim, sublime, austerity, a real stoniness’.20

The curator Alan Wilkinson has recorded that Moore’s handwritten essay is accompanied by ‘a note to an unidentified student or colleague about several books on Mexican sculpture which Moore plans to send, one of which [is] “No III Mexico”’.21 This book has been identified as Ernst Fuhrmann’s Mexiko III (1922), a copy of which Moore bought in 1923. In addition to this book, Moore is known to have studied a variety of recent publications on primitive art, including Herbert Kühn’s Die Kunst Der Primitiven (1923). Both of these publications provided source material for a series of sketches made in 1926. For example the pencil drawings outlining two open mouthed, upward thrusting heads from Notebook No.6 (fig.4) are direct copies of two views of the same sculpture illustrated in Fuhrmann’s Mexiko III (figs.5 and 6). Moore’s close examination of the images in this particular publication suggests that specific reproductions may have informed his own work. For example, parallels can be drawn between the distinctive protruding forehead of Mask and the excessively bulbous cranium of an undated sculpture illustrated in Fuhrmann’s book (fig.7).

Moore made his first mask sculpture in 1924, and then another two sculptures in 1927 before making a further nine mask sculptures between 1928 and 1930. According to Wilkinson, the acceleration in production of masks in this period ‘may well have been stimulated’ by his acquisition in 1928 of Adolphe Basler and Ernest Brummer’s book L’Art précolombien (1928).22 As well as containing an essay (written in French) outlining the different characteristics of pre-Columbian sculpture from across the Americas and highlighting key architectural sites, the book was also heavily illustrated. In addition to photographs depicting Mayan figure sculptures and Peruvian pottery, for example, the book also contained over thirty plates of ancient Aztec masks then held in the British Museum in London and the Musée de Trocadéro in Paris.23 In 1929 Moore covered three pages with sketches of masks and faces (fig.8) and it is probable that these designs helped Moore to clarify the composition of his masks carved that year. For example the oval face with its pointed nose in the top right of the page recalls the narrow concrete mask (fig.2), while the top central image in which the face has been divided into two segments relates to the divided asymmetrical composition of Mask (fig.3).

Although Mask shares a number of common features with the other masks Moore created during the 1920s, its profile makes it distinctive. Viewed from the side, Mask has a dramatic projecting forehead, deeply recessed eyes, a sharply angled nose and pronounced lips and chin, creating a zig-zag effect that differs from the flatter profile of, for example, Mask 1928 (Tate T06696; fig.9), which has no significant protrusions. Although the sculpture’s projecting forehead may have been influenced by the Mexican deformed head seen in Fuhrmann’s Mexiko III, the idiosyncratic profile of Mask also bears a striking resemblance to that of a kneeling woman presented in a carved wooden stool from Zaire from c.1900, housed in the British Museum (fig.10). Moore made a drawing of the woman’s face some time between 1922–4 (fig.11), and may have worked from direct observation in the museum, or from a reproduction seen in Ernst Furhrmann’s book Afrika (1922). Moore’s attitude towards African art followed that of Roger Fry, who celebrated the way in which African sculpture was composed of exaggerated shapes in order to assert its three dimensionality, resulting not in the naturalism of classical European art, but in a ‘disconcerting vitality’ with carved figures ‘possessing an inner life of their own’.24 In 1933 Moore echoed Fry’s argument stating that African carving ‘helped the artist to realise the intrinsic emotional significance of shapes as distinct from their representational values’.25

In 1981 the Zaire stool was included in the publication Henry Moore at the British Museum (1981), for which Moore was invited to select artworks from the British Museum’s collection that had influenced him during his career. In the book Moore stated that the kneeling woman ‘has more vitality and expression than a realistic figure would have. Look especially at the marvellous face, what an impression of stoicism and endurance it gives’.26 While in later work Moore moved away from representing individual facial expressions in favour of more universal archetypes, it is clear that at this moment in the late 1920s he was interested in the face as the locus of identity. Indeed, in 1967 Moore accounted for the asymmetry in his masks, stating:

Moore’s emphasis on how shape and composition rather than naturalistic representation can convey emotion may serve to explain why the facial features of Moore’s masks are at once schematic yet individually distinctive.

Given how many books Moore studied and reproductions he saw, in addition to his numerous visits to museums with collections of ancient non-Western artifacts, Moore most likely amalgamated the features of different primitive examples in his own sculptures, rather than consciously emulating one particular object or style. For example, along with pre-Columbian art, Moore’s masks from the late 1920s bring to mind other possible sources of influence. For example, the art historian John Russell suggested in 1968 that ‘there lingers something of the grand frontal approach of Easter Island’ statuary in Moore’s concrete sculptures.28 Indeed the direct forward stare and jutting chin of Mask are loosely comparable to the facial features of Hoa Hakananai’a (fig.12), which he knew from the British Museum, while the smooth but pitted texture of the concrete, as well as its colour, recalls the basalt rock from which the standing Easter Island figure was carved.

Mask was included in Moore’s second solo exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in London in April 1931. Most reviews were mixed, with some, such as the unnamed critic for the Sheffield Independent, noting that Moore’s sculpture had ‘already aroused some criticism as ultra modern’.29 The unnamed critic for the Star noted the range of materials in which Moore worked, and suggested that ‘some of the concretes demonstrate that the sculptor would have made his fortune as an art faker, for they have that weather-beaten, slightly decayed, rakish look of ancient sculptures dug up from Egyptian tombs, or found in the caves of Central America’.30 While the reviewer for the Star saw Moore’s affinities with ancient sculpture with bemusement, the critic for the Morning Post argued that ‘the cult of ugliness triumphs at the hands of Mr. Moore’ and lamented the waning influence of the classical Greek Elgin Marbles in the British Museum.31 However, more important for Moore and his burgeoning career than these reviews was the fact that the prominent British sculptor Jacob Epstein (1880–1959) wrote a prefatory note for the exhibition catalogue. Epstein concluded that ‘for the future of sculpture in England Henry Moore is vitally important’.32

In Moore’s 1944 monograph edited by the critic Herbert Read, Mask is cited as belonging to a private collector. Although it is unclear when Mask entered his collection, in 1949, Henry Bergen (1873–1950), who lived at 66 Sutton Court in west London, donated the sculpture, along with a drawing by Moore titled Reclining Nude 1930, to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.33 Bergen was an American scholar who had moved to the UK to study early English literature under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution. During the 1920s he edited John Lydgate’s four volume poem Fall of Princes for the Early English Text Society.34 Bergen was also an amateur potter and an enthusiastic collector of Japanese and Chinese ceramics and was noted as owning an important collection of pottery used in Japanese tea ceremonies. He was particularly close friends with the British studio ceramists William Staite Murray (1881–1962) and Bernard Leach (1887–1979), both of whom were known to Moore. Correspondence held in the Bernard Leach Archive reveals that Bergen was also acquainted with Henry Moore and his wife; in a letter dated 26 January 1936 Bergen informs Leach that he has ‘been to the Chinese [ceramics] exhibition [at the Victoria and Albert Museum] 6 or 7 times and am going again next Wednesday with Henry and Irina Moore’.35 In fact it would seem that Bergen and Moore belonged to the same circle of friends; in a letter sent to Moore in 1975 Leach recounts a discussion with Moore at Bergen’s flat in Hammersmith ‘not so long after the war’.36

Also among the correspondence held in the Bernard Leach Archive is a letter tentatively dated 1948 stating that Bergen had suffered a slight stroke and had decided to bequeath his collection of artworks and ceramics to various public collections.37 In 1949, the year before his death, Bergen donated not only Henry Moore’s Mask and drawing, but also a selection of eighteenth-century American furniture and Turkish rugs to the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).

On entering the V&A the sculpture was placed in the Department of Circulation, which was responsible for organising touring exhibitions of selected works in the collection. Curators in the Department of Circulation were responsible for selecting groups of works which could not only form a coherent exhibition but which could be easily packed and transported together. Complete exhibitions of paintings, graphic art and modern sculpture were available on year-long loan to art schools and colleges of education, and in some instances the V&A provided publicity material to the borrowing institution. Mask was included in a number of these travelling exhibitions and was most likely included in the 1953 Twentieth-Century Sculpture exhibition, which consisted of ‘original examples of small sculpture’ by artists such as Eric Gill, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, John Skeaping, Frank Dobson and Dora Gordine, as well as Moore.38

When it was held in the V&A this sculpture was known as Head 1928, but research undertaken during the 1950s for the revised and expanded fourth edition of Moore’s catalogue raisonné published in 1957 identified it as Mask 1929, as it is now known. In 1983 Mask was one of seventy twentieth-century sculptures transferred from the V&A to the Tate Gallery. The transfer was made in order to rationalise the collections of both institutions, and was reciprocated by the Tate, which transferred to the V&A six of the earliest sculptures in its collection. When Mask entered the Tate collection its acquisition inscription from the V&A, ‘CIRC. | 11–1950’, which was written in white ink on the outer right edge of the sculpture (fig.13), was noted and then erased.