Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

Acquired directly from the artist by the artist’s sister Mary Spencer Moore, Wighton, Norfolk, in the early 1920s and no later than 1957; thence by descent.

Moore made this work by carving a human face in low relief into a 30 mm thick slate slab, roughly fashioned into a square. Slate is formed from sedimentary rock that has been subjected to heat and pressure. Its characteristic feature is that it cleaves cleanly into flat sheets and so it has long been used in this form for tiles, blackboards and tombstones. Moore would have found this stone easy to obtain at an economical price from stonemasons but it would have lent itself to a relief carving rather than a sculpture in the round because of its propensity to split along cleavage planes.

Both the right and bottom edges are cleanly sawn at right angles but rough planes of slate protrude on the top and left, and here Moore has marked out the square with deeply chiselled incised borders (fig.1). The hair is executed as a single carved line with a v-shaped cross-section, and the perimeter of the face has been deeply carved with vertical incisions of the chisel. The hollows of the cheeks are roughly marked out using a 4 mm wide chisel, whereas much finer chisel marks are visible on the eyelids (fig.2). The surfaces of the chin, lips, nose and forehead are sanded to a smooth finish.

Close examination of the surface reveals traces of a pale brown, slightly fibrous deposit, especially in the crevices around the edges of the relief (fig.3). It is not clear what this might be. Traces of gold and red pigment are also clearly visible on two of the edges (fig.4) and to a lesser extent on the front surface. When the work was loaned to Tate in 1994, Judith Collins, then Assistant Keeper of the Modern Collection, annotated a reproduction of this work with the text: ‘Ptd edge by mother: removed by AG’..1 ‘AG’ can be identified as Anne Garrould, Moore’s niece and the daughter of the work’s original owner, Moore’s sister Mary. The note thus indicates that the paint had been added by Moore’s sister, but was later removed.

The relief is intended for vertical display, although there are no fixings. When exhibited in Henry Moore: Stone and Wood Carvings at Marlborough Fine Art in London in 1961 it was secured to a wall using brackets on the top and bottom edges. The sculpture now has a custom made wooden stand into which it is slotted (fig.5).

Relief Head 1923 is one of Henry Moore’s earliest surviving sculptures. It was made while he was a student at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in London, where he studied from September 1921 to June 1924. The relief sculpture depicts a male face surrounded by an oval line delineating hair, a hood, or possibly a halo. The outline of the face is not symmetrical; an irregular peak above the right eyebrow suggests an uneven hairline. The features of the face have been incised into the surface of the shallow, almost square slate stone. Both eyes are open, and appear to be looking straight ahead. The man’s right eye is slightly larger and is positioned slightly higher on the face than his left eye. Although his mouth is not wide, he has thick lips, which correspond to his heavy eyelids and brow. The identity of the man represented in Relief Head is unknown, and Moore probably constructed the image from his imagination.

On entering Tate’s collection in 1994 the adjective ‘relief’ was dropped from the title of this sculpture because it was then a gallery convention not to use words that identified the object type – painting, sculpture, relief – in the titles of artworks. The word ‘relief’ was restored to the title in 2013 in line with the sculpture’s listing in Moore’s catalogue raisonné, published in 1957. This sculpture is one of only two known works by Moore made in slate. The other, Head 1930 (private collection), is a three-dimensional, albeit narrow sculpture of a head and neck mounted onto a freestanding wooden square base.1 Slate is a sedimentary rock that is found globally, but in the UK is quarried in north Wales, Cumbria and Cornwall. The stone has a propensity to split into thin sheets, rendering it generally unsuitable for carving in three dimensions. Instead, slate is more commonly known as a building material, and is used for roof and floor tiles; its flat character has meant that it has also been used historically for tombstones. In a conversation with the curator and critic David Sylvester in 1963 Moore recalled that early in his career, owing to the expense of the stones and marbles conventionally used for sculpture, he would ‘buy odd random pieces of stone from any stonemason’, and this may help explain the use of slate for Relief Head 1923.2

In this sculpture the properties of the stone determined the carving techniques Moore was able to use. The facial features of the male face have been rendered through a series of inscribed lines and shallow incisions. In this instance, Moore used a combination of thin and wide chisels working directly into the stone. Most notable are the heavy chisel marks on the cheeks used to create texture, either to suggest facial hair or to convey the man’s gaunt features. Moore finished the work by sanding and smoothing the chin, lips, nose and forehead. Seen from the side it is clear that the facial features exist within a recessed, concave oval. As such, the shallow relief bears little resemblance to Moore’s other works from the period, such as Standing Woman 1922 (Tate L01765), which was carved in the round and emphasises three-dimensionality. Owing to the nature of the flat slate and the techniques used, the sculpture seems more akin to a woodblock used for printing than a carving.

When Moore carved Relief Head it is likely that it was a personal project rather than a required piece of coursework for the RCA. Moore had arrived at the college as a mature student, aged twenty-three, having served in the British army during the First World War. When Moore began the course academic 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 art. 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 stone copy.3 Students were required to copy historical sculptures, working from plaster casts from the college’s collection, or from originals housed in London’s museums. In this way they would gain training not only in traditional sculpting techniques but also in the styles and subjects of the art of the past.4 For example, Moore made Head of the Virgin after Rosselli 1922–3 (fig.1), a copy of the fifteenth-century Italian artist’s Virgin and Child, housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum, as a piece of coursework.5 Here he attempted to make the stone look like skin; the figure’s cheeks appear to be soft, her lips are plump and flesh-like while the folds of her delicate headscarf look as though they could move in a breeze. Of central importance to this approach was that evidence of the artist’s working processes should be rendered invisible, so as to enhance the illusion of reality. Although Head of the Virgin after Rosselli looks as if it was made using a traditional pointing machine, Moore, in fact, carved the work freehand, making fake ‘point’ marks on the surface of the marble so as to deceive his tutor.6 This serves to emphasise the conventions of the RCA, where, as Moore recalled in 1968, ‘no original carving was permitted’.7

In 1947 Moore discussed his early career with the American critic John James Sweeny, recalling that:

Moore found a solution through compromise; he led a double life, drawing and modelling classical forms according to the curriculum during term-time, and directly carving his own sculptures in the holidays.9 From 1922 to 1925 Moore often stayed with his sister Mary Spencer Moore (later Garrould) in Wighton near the Norfolk coast during college vacations. A number of his early non-academic sculptures, including Dog 1922 (The Henry Moore Foundation) and Mother and Child 1922 (private collection), were carved in her garden in these years.10 Although it is not known where Moore made Relief Head, it is probable that he made it during one of his Norfolk holidays. Moore’s sister Mary was identified as its owner in the artist’s catalogue raisonné in 1957, and she may well have owned it from the time Moore made it.

The 1957 catalogue raisonné identifies the sculpture as ‘painted slate’ and traces of red and gold pigment on the front surface and on two of the edges are still visible (fig.2). When displayed in 1961 at Marlborough Fine Art in London, the sculpture was described again as ‘painted slate’ indicating that the work did at one time have surface decoration.11 According to Ann Garrould, the daughter of Moore’s sister Mary, her mother had painted the sculpture a deep-red terracotta colour, and had painted the outer incised line gold to create a halo. Garrould also noted that the face was always regarded by her family as that of Jesus Christ. She recalled that Moore was aware of his sister’s additions to the sculpture and had never objected to them. At some point, probably prior to the exhibition at Marlborough Fine Art, however, Garrould decided to remove the paint because it had not been part of Moore’s original schema.12

Moore made only two known statements about this work. In 1984 the art historian Alan Wilkinson recounted how, in the early 1970s, Moore described Relief Head as ‘Gauguinesque’.13 Wilkinson supplemented this reference to the French artist Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) with an account from Ann Garrould that in 1983 Moore had stated that, ‘I did not realise how much I’d been influenced by Gauguin in this work’.14 Relief Head was exhibited only twice in Moore’s lifetime and due to its limited exposure it has received almost no critical attention to date. However, Moore’s late acknowledgement of the previously unrecognised influence of Gauguin is significant. Moore had been introduced to the work of Gauguin sometime between 1919 and 1921 when he attended Leeds School of Art, where he came into contact with Sir Michael Sadler (1861–1943), the Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, who encouraged students to study his personal art collection.15 As Moore recalled in 1973, ‘Sadler had a Gauguin, a wonderful Gauguin, and a few other things. It was the Gauguin and a few ones like that which impressed me most. It opened up a world that was other than the Victorian, academic, art-school world’.16

In 1984 Wilkinson suggested that the most likely source for Relief Head was Gauguin’s painted plaster relief Oviri (Self-Portrait) 1894, illustrated in Charles Morice’s book Paul Gauguin, published in Paris in 1911 (fig.3).17 However, the retrospective surprise Moore expressed in 1983 when he noted Gauguin’s influence on Relief Head suggests that Moore had not attempted to emulate a specific work by Gauguin while he was carving the sculpture. Moreover, the obvious compositional differences between Relief Head and Oviri (Self Portrait) render Wilkinson’s proposal unconvincing: Gauguin’s self-portrait is in profile and was carved in plaster, a far more malleable medium than slate. Instead, Gauguin’s influence on Moore was more generally stylistic, offering an alternative to the representational accuracy of classical Greek, Roman, and Renaissance art. Indeed, for many artists working in the first decade of the twentieth century, Gauguin’s art provided an example of how to break free from the narrow confines of the academic artistic conventions promoted by institutions such as the RCA.18 Gauguin’s art was admired by Moore and others for the ways in which figures are distorted, for the use of non-naturalistic colour and for the prioritisation of styles and forms derived from archaic and non-Western art. In his paintings Gauguin rejected traditional techniques of modelling and shading used to render space and forms illusionistically in favour of areas of pure colour that flattened space and drew attention to the two-dimensionality of the picture plane. Forms are often demarcated by bold outlines reminiscent of stained glass windows. This simplified style was also used by Gauguin in his carvings and woodcuts where the evidence of the artist’s working processes are clearly discernable.

Such was the influence of Gauguin’s work on early twentieth-century European art that it is possible that Moore came to absorb his formal and stylistic innovations vicariously through the work of other artists. For example, although Moore never directly drew links between his work and that of the German expressionist group Die Brücke, Relief Head is reminiscent of works created by artists such as Emil Nolde (1867–1956) from the 1900s and 1910s. Although they were created in different mediums, Moore’s Relief Head and Nolde’s woodcut Prophet 1912 (fig.4) share a number of characteristics with Gauguin’s self portrait. All three works present a man’s face tightly framed within a demarcated space, executed using bold lines and shapes. In each work the man’s brow is furrowed and the face is elongated, with a prominent chin. Beyond immediate formal similarities, Nolde and Moore appear to have followed Gauguin’s example of rejecting the naturalism and crisp finesse of academic art. In that it shares Gauguin’s legacy with works by other European artists, Moore’s Relief Head can be positioned within a broader narrative of European modernism and specifically within the tendency known as primitivism, which inflected much of the art produced in western Europe during the first half of the twentieth-century.19

Primitivism is an over-arching term used by art historians to describe an aesthetic tendency of early twentieth-century European art that sought to emulate the forms and values of non-Western art, which were deemed to be more authentic than the sophisticated classicism of the European fine art tradition. This included tribal art from Africa, Asia and the Pacific Islands, as well as prehistoric and medieval European art. By looking to non-Western artistic sources or historical European examples, artists found ways to challenge the predominance of classical artistic conventions at the turn of the century. Moore’s interest in primitivism dates from his time as a student at Leeds School of Art, where in 1920 he read Roger Fry’s influential book Vision and Design (1920). Fry was a founding member of the Bloomsbury Group of artists and writers and a highly regarded art critic. His book included chapters on African, Islamic and ancient American arts and proposed that the aesthetic experiences generated by these non-Western, ‘primitive’ art forms were more authentic than those of European classicism, with its focus on anatomical accuracy and technical virtuosity. As the art historian Christopher Green has suggested, for Fry, the turn to primitive art ‘offered a stimulus for rebuilding the broader terms of the European tradition’.20 Moore later recalled that ‘Fry opened the way to other books and to the realisation of the British Museum. That was the beginning really’.21 It is likely that Moore’s interest in Fry’s ideas were supported by Michael Sadler in Leeds. In January 1911 Sadler had attended Fry’s lecture on modern art that accompanied his major exhibition Manet and the Post Impressionists, held at the Grafton Galleries in London. Soon after visiting the exhibition Sadler acquired his painting by Gauguin.22

Significantly, under Fry’s editorial leadership, the Burlington Magazine, a leading arts periodical, regularly featured articles on modern and primitive arts throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Importantly, as well as articles on, for example, Peruvian pottery or Indian sculpture, Fry and the magazine classified early Christian, Byzantine and medieval European art as ‘primitive’.23 In an article published in the magazine in 1920, the French critic André Salmon linked the expressive qualities of African art with those of European medieval sculpture.24 As such, by the time Moore was working on Relief Head, the sculpture and stained glass of European cathedrals such as Chartres in France or Chichester in England, would have been understood under the rubric of primitive art. On his arrival in London in 1921 Moore made a point of ensuring that he read the leading art magazines and periodicals of the day, and would certainly have been aware of the discussions taking place within the pages of the Burlington Magazine.25

In his art criticism Fry championed artists who he regarded as working in a primitivist aesthetic, including the English sculptor Eric Gill (1882–1940). Gill had become well-known before the First World War and when Moore arrived in London in 1921 he was one of the contemporary sculptors whose work Moore sought out. Although Moore recognised the influence of Gauguin in Relief Head, Gill’s etchings of religious subjects may also have provided a reference point for the sculpture. In 1923, the year he made Relief Head, Moore saw a large number of Gill’s carvings and woodcuts in the collection of Charles Rutherston (1866–1927).26 Rutherston was the brother of Sir William Rothenstein, the principal at the RCA and the first collector of Moore’s sculpture.27 Rothenstein had introduced Moore to his brother and in 1923 Moore visited Rutherston’s home in Bradford to view his large collection of primitive and modern art, which included examples of African and Egyptian art and carvings by contemporary British sculptors such as Jacob Epstein (1880–1959) and Frank Dobson (1886–1963). In a letter dated August 1923 addressed to his old school teacher Jocelyn Horner, and written from his sister’s home in Norfolk, Moore recounted his visit to Rutherston’s home noting that his host owned most of Gill’s woodcuts, concluding that ‘you can guess how much I enjoyed & saw in those four days’.28

Gill’s primitivism was heavily informed by medieval Christian art. He had been raised a Calvinist Methodist and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1913 and the depiction of religious subjects in his sculpture after this date stemmed in large part from his religious beliefs.29 However, Gill also looked towards modern art for inspiration and a number of his sculptures, prints and drawings were influenced by Gauguin’s flat, linear style and the religious themes found in the French artist’s paintings made in Pont Aven in the 1880s. In particular, the composition of Gill’s Crucifixion 1909–10 (Tate N03563) depicting Christ on the cross was directly informed by Gauguin’s The Yellow Christ 1889 (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo).30 Gill’s carved relief echoes the overall composition of Gauguin’s painting, including the bearded, tilted face of Christ. It is possible that Gill’s own references to Gauguin reinforced the ‘Gauguinesque’ qualities found in Moore’s work.

During his visit to Charles Rutherston’s home Moore may have seen Gill’s fourteen prints of The Stations of the Cross 1917 and other works, including The Holy Face 1917 (fig.5). Moore’s incised slate Relief Head bears a resemblance to Gill’s The Holy Face, not only in its subject matter but also in its composition and stylistic presentation. Although the face in Gill’s work has closed eyes, a much more heavily furrowed brow and is identified explicitly as that of Christ, it is possible to discern similarities been this print and Moore’s Relief Head. Both works present a bearded man within a tightly cropped frame. A thin, straight nose with a rounded tip leading up to heavy eyebrows features in both depictions. Moore’s linear incisions into the grey slate, especially on the cheeks, replicate the white lines against the dark background in Gill’s print, serving in both instances to outline and highlight key areas of the face. It is possible that Moore chose to use slate for Relief Head so as to replicate the monochromatic contrast of Gill’s woodcuts. Developing in tandem with his interest in modern artists such as Gauguin, Moore’s knowledge of Gill’s work provided him with an example of how medieval art and primitivism more generally might inform contemporary sculpture. Indeed, Gill’s work exemplifies what might be identified as a modern medievalism, a term that may also be applied to works by Moore’s near-contemporaries Alan Durst (1883–1970) and Vernon Hill (1886–1972) who were working in the 1920s and 1930s.31

Although Gill’s art almost certainly provided a reference point for Moore’s Relief Head, of equal importance was Moore’s own personal interest in medieval art, which can be traced back to his childhood visits to St Oswald’s Church in Methley, West Yorkshire. Although Moore was baptised, he was not a practising Christian, but he recalled in 1968 that it was in this church that he saw ‘the first real sculpture that I can remember’.32 In June 1922, the year before he created Relief Head, Moore visited Paris and made a trip to Chartres Cathedral (1145–1220), comparing the experience to looking at paintings by Paul Cézanne.33 By 1931 Moore and Gill were in correspondence, and discussed their shared interest in the relief carvings at Chartres.34 Moore’s interest in medieval culture continued throughout his career, and in 1975 he wrote a short essay identifying the Romanesque period as ‘the single period in past art which I love the most’.35 In his essay Moore went on to recall a visit to Chichester Cathedral made in the early 1920s, the period in which Relief Head was created. He identified the twelfth-century sculptural reliefs Raising of Lazarus (fig.6) and Christ Arriving in the House of Mary and Martha as being particularly influential:

Although the exact date of Moore’s visit to Chichester is uncertain, it is possible that Relief Head was made partly in response to his experience of seeing the Raising of Lazarus, whether that be from observing the original in situ, or from studying the plaster cast of the sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum on one of his many student visits. The sunken cheeks and long gaunt faces of the figures in the Raising of Lazarus are echoed in the elongated facial features of Relief Head, while the slightly protruding conjoined brow and recessed eyes paraphrase the twelfth-century faces. The man’s piercing stare also emulates the focused looks of the various figures in the Lazarus scene. These similarities suggest that Moore was seeking to emulate what he regarded as the sorrowful, emotional content of the medieval relief. While in later work Moore moved away from representing individual facial expressions in favour of more universal emotions, here the man’s returned gaze invests the sculpture with a personalised sensibility.

Relief Head is the property of a private collection and has been on loan to Tate since 1994.