Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

Presented by the artist to Tate in 1978 as part of the Henry Moore Gift.

Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe is a two-part abstract bronze sculpture mounted on a rectangular base. Moore would have made the original model for this sculpture in plaster (fig.1), which was built up in successive layers over a supportive armature that was probably made from wood and chicken wire. After the hardened plaster had been sanded smooth, moulds were taken of each part that were used to cast the sculpture in bronze.

The two elements were probably sand cast, although their finely polished surfaces hide traces of the casting technique. After casting the sculpture was artificially patinated a transparent chestnut brown colour, mainly in the recesses (fig.2). This colour is produced by stippling a chemical solution onto the bronze while the surface is heated using a blowtorch. Ferric nitrate is often used by foundries to produce this colour, but it can also be used to produce a range of other colours, from transparent orange to a deep opaque plum.

A brush was used to apply a lacquer over the surface of the bronze to protect it and prevent it from tarnishing. However, the lacquer has begun to break down in places, which has allowed the bronze to tarnish in patches and streaks (fig.3). The tarnish is particularly evident on the most prominent surfaces at the top, probably due to handling over the years.

The two parts of the sculpture are fixed close together on the base. Two bolts have been used to fix one part and three bolts for the other. The base is likely to have been sand cast and has a smooth surface patinated an even dark brown colour. The artist’s signature ‘Moore’ is inscribed on the top of the base in one of the corners accompanied by the edition number ‘0/9’ (fig.4). The foundry mark ‘H.NOACK BERLIN’ is stamped on the side of the base at the same corner (fig.5).

Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe comprises two highly polished abstract forms positioned on a bronze base (fig.1). These elements are evenly sized but differently shaped and are made up of both angular and rounded forms. Although they are placed at a short distance from each other, the gap between them is bridged by a beam that extends out horizontally from one element and touches the other at a single point (fig.2).

Seen from one side, the element with the extended beam is reminiscent of a smoking pipe – the arm may be understood as the long mouth-piece and the rounded form the tobacco barrel (fig.3) – which may explain the sculpture’s subtitle. This rounded element appears to have been constructed around a thin circular disk, from which bulbous forms extend on either side (fig.4).

The other piece of the sculpture comprises one side that is almost completely flat and smooth except for a single raised point or nipple, located just to the right of centre (fig.5). Like the bulbous forms of the accompanying piece, two protrusions extend out from the other side of this flat, disk-like surface (fig.6). The larger of the protrusions creates a diagonal arc from the lower left to the top right. Towards the lower part of this element is a large concave extension, which rests on the base.

This sculpture was developed from a small maquette made in plaster in 1966. By this time Moore had established a practice of testing out his designs for sculptures by making small three-dimensional models as opposed to drawing his ideas on a page. In 1978 he explained:

It is probable that Moore made the small model for this sculpture in his maquette studio in the grounds of his home, Hoglands, at Perry Green in Hertfordshire. This studio housed his ever growing collection of found objects, including bones, shells and flint stones, the shapes of which often served as starting points for Moore’s formal experiments in three dimensions. In 1963 Moore explained to critic David Sylvester how he worked with these objects:

It is likely that the two parts of the maquette for Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe were developed from plaster casts of the impression left by a stone or bone pressed into clay, for the flat edges around the bulbous protrusions conform to the top surface of a mould. Once these pieces of plaster had hardened, Moore could add and subtract forms, and smooth or sharpen edges and points to his preferred design, so that the final work was ‘not a copy of nature, but built on nature’s principles’.3 Moore would then have used the maquette as a model for Tate’s larger-scale work. By charting and measuring specific points on the surface of the maquette it was possible to make an exact enlargement of the sculpture. Much, if not all of this work would have been undertaken by Moore’s studio assistants, who in 1966 included Hans Drews, John Farnham and Yardini Yeheskiel.

In order to make the full-size plaster from which Tate’s bronze was eventually cast, Moore and his assistants would have initially constructed an armature to the required size and shape for each section of the sculpture. The armature was made up of numerous lengths of wood, and possibly chicken wire. This structure was then draped in scrim, a bandage like fabric, onto which wet plaster could be applied to create a hard shell. Layers of plaster were then built up to create the basic shape while the interior of the plaster remained hollow.

After the plaster components had been modelled to the required shape and size, Moore could concentrate on their surface texture. Using an array of tools, including chisels, files and sandpaper, he could create different types of textures depending on the wetness of the plaster as it dried (fig.7). Moore found plaster to be a very useful material because it could be ‘both built up, as in modelling, or cut down, in the way you carve stone or wood’.4 The surface texture of the plaster was captured in the bronze casting process and in 1977 the curator Alan Bowness noted that ‘most of the post-war bronzes had rough, variegated textures, but from 1963 or so Moore began to introduce smooth and polished bronze surfaces’ as seen in this work.5

Once Moore was satisfied with the surface finish of the sculpture and was sure that he wanted to proceed with the casting process, he sent the two plaster parts to the Noack Foundry in West Berlin to be cast in bronze. In 1967 Moore stated, ‘I use the Noack foundry for casting most of my work because in my opinion, Noack is the best bronze founder I know ... Also, the Noack foundry is reliable in all ways – in keeping to dates of delivery – and in sustaining the quality of their work’.6 The sculpture was probably made using the sand casting method, although the finely polished surfaces of the bronze hide the traces of the casting technique.

After casting at the foundry the bronze sculpture would have been returned to Moore so that he could check the quality of the casting and make decisions about the patination. A patina is the surface colour of a sculpture and is usually achieved by applying chemical solutions to the pre-heated bronze surface. Publicly Moore always maintained that he patinated his works himself, and rarely acknowledged that this physical work would have been undertaken by his assistants. It is also known that during the 1960s, as Moore increased his sculptural production and more of his works were editioned, Noack would sometimes patinate his sculptures for him at the foundry. Moore made regular visits to the foundry and could adjust the patina when he felt it necessary. Tate’s cast of Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe has been coated with a warm chestnut brown patina but there is some colour variation across the sculpture: the edges and protrusions are lighter in colour while the recessed areas are darker (fig.8). Streaky brushstrokes are visible on the surface, which, according to conservator Lyndsey Morgan, indicate where the protective lacquer coating has broken down (fig.9).

Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe was cast in an edition of nine plus one artist’s copy. Tate’s example is stamped with the artist’s signature and the number ‘0/9’ on the base (fig.10); the ‘0’ indicates that this work was originally the artist’s copy. The first cast in the edition was purchased by the Whitworth Art Gallery of the University of Manchester in 1967 with a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.7 The remaining casts are believed to be held in private collections internationally. The original full-size plaster is held in the Henry Moore Sculpture Center at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and was a gift of the artist in 1974.

Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe was first exhibited at the commercial gallery Marlborough Fine Art, London, in 1966. In the exhibition catalogue the work was titled Two Piece Reclining Figure No.7, which identified it as the seventh work in Moore’s series of bronze, two-piece reclining figure sculptures begun in 1959.8 In 1961 Moore wrote a letter to Martin Butlin, Assistant Keeper of the Tate collection, explaining the origins of his two-piece works, noting that ‘in 1933 and 1934 I made many sculptures composed of two, three and sometimes four pieces’.9 One of Moore’s best known sculptures from the early 1930s is Four-Piece Composition: Reclining Figure 1934 (Tate T02054; fig.11), in which the human body is separated into four distinct components spread out along a plinth. Comparing Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe with this earlier work demonstrates how Moore refined his presentation of the human figure, distilling it into two abstract shapes engaged in an obscure physical relationship. While the curator Alan Bowness has remarked that in this work ‘the obvious metaphor is between figure and bone’, in Moore’s series of two-piece reclining figures, its thrusting beam would usually be interpreted as a leg.10

In his maquette studio at Hoglands Moore surrounded himself with pebbles, flint stones and shells as well as bone fragments, all of which were used as source material for his sculptures. The art historian Herbert Read argued in 1934 that, by drawing upon the shapes of these natural forms, Moore was able to break free from the ‘false imprisonment’ of mimetic representation and yet retain an organic energy within his work.11 References to bones and other organic forms in interpretations of Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe are supported not only by knowledge of Moore’s working methods, but also by statements he made on the importance of natural forms for artistic creativity. In 1934 Moore wrote that ‘the observation of nature is part of an artist’s life; it enlarges his form-knowledge, keeps him fresh from working only by formula, and feeds inspiration. The human figure is what interests me most deeply, but I have found principles of form and rhythm from the study of natural objects such as pebbles, rocks, bones, trees, plants, etc’.12 These principles underpinned Moore’s later work and anticipated his comment, made in 1967, that when looking for human resonances in natural forms ‘taste is not the guide. I’m not interested in the niceties of a shape’.13 By breaking down the body into distinct parts derived from natural forms, Moore sought to identify the figure with the earth, and humanity with its environment, expressing their union in an ‘organic whole’.14

In Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe Moore combined his interest in the human figure with his concurrent explorations of interlocking forms. After separated the body into two distinct parts in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Moore then began thinking about ways in which separate sculptural parts could intersect or interlock to create a single unit while maintaining their individuality. These ideas came to fruition in works such as Locking Piece 1963–4 (Tate T02293), in which two differently shaped elements intersect. According to Bowness, it was the relationship between the two parts of Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe that was of interest to Moore, and the subsequent omission of the term ‘Reclining Figure’ from its title reflected these concerns. As Bowness made clear, ‘the sub-titles bestowed on these sculptures by the artist ... [are] names of convenience, applied after the work is made, to help distinguish one piece from another, and not of any great significance except that names like Pipe, Interlocking, Points do suggest the theme of connexion which the sculptures embody’.15

Moore made only one known statement about Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe. Discussing the sculpture in 1968, he stated:

Evidently, in developing his ideas for Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe Moore was particularly interested in how the sculpture would be experienced in the round. That this formal concern became an organising principle of this work illustrates continuity between Moore’s experiments of the 1960s and his earlier ideas and aspirations for sculpture. In his statement for the 1934 publication Unit One he wrote:

In his statement Moore also related his asymmetrical sculptures to naturally occurring forms, asserting that ‘asymmetry is connected also with the desire for the organic (which I have) rather than the geometric. Organic forms, though they may be symmetrical in their main disposition, in their reaction to environment, growth, and gravity, lose their perfect symmetry’.18 The formal connections that can be made between Moore’s work of the 1930s and 1960s are what most likely prompted the curator David Sylvester to describe the bronzes of the 1960s as originating from ‘a biomorphic abstract sculptural language’.19 Coined in the 1930s by the critic Geoffrey Grigson, the term ‘biomorphic’ denoted, according to the art historian Jennifer Mundy, ‘an organic quality that was an indelible residue of the way in which the form had been arrived at’.20 While the term could infer a likeness to forms produced by organic processes, it ‘did not necessarily imply that the form looked like anything real’.21

Although the figurative references in Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe are minimal, some commentators, including the curator Alan Wilkinson, have identified a sexual aspect to the way in which the ‘pipe’ attempts to penetrate the second form. Wilkinson argued in 1987 that in Moore’s work of the 1960s, there is ‘an overt sexuality rarely encountered in his earlier work’.22 Similarly, Bowness remarked that in Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe ‘penetration of one form into another seems to refer obliquely to the sexual relationship, and the pipe is an obvious phallic form’.23 This interpretation is in keeping with Sylvester’s assessment of Moore’s two-piece series as a whole. The critic asserted in 1968 that ‘this series presents by far the most specifically sexual imagery in Moore’s work’.24 For Sylvester, what Moore had described as a ‘looming leg’ in Two Piece Reclining Figure No.1 1959 (fig.12), can in fact be understood as a phallus and it is possible to apply this interpretation to the projecting beam of Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe.25 Sylvester supported his reading of the two-piece sculptures with reference to the drawing Two Reclining Figures 1961 (fig.13). The sketch towards the top of the page appears to be a drawing of Two Piece Reclining Figure No.1, while Sylvester’s description of the drawing below it seems to describe the act of fellatio: ‘the lower half is a huge mouth opened wide to receive an inexplicably elongated form sticking out of the torso’.26 Reflecting on the ‘erotic’ undertones of Moore’s two-piece sculptures, the artist’s biographer Roger Berthoud observed that ‘Two Piece Sculpture No.7 – Pipe is the most obviously phallic, but there is a recurring sense of upward straining or outward-thrusting members or of actual or imminent coupling in these bronzes’.27

Writing in 1970, before Bowness and Berthoud, the critic Robert Melville proposed that Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe represented violent sexual intercourse, asserting that in this sculpture, Moore ‘takes up the Classical theme of Rape ... the two forms do not signify a divided figure: they are separate organisms, and one of them emblemizes the importune male’.30 Melville’s recourse to the ‘Classical theme’ of rape allowed him – and his readers – to consider the violent and sexualised forces at work in Moore’s sculpture without regard to contemporary definitions and understandings of the term ‘rape’. As the historian Helen Morales has argued, ‘“rape” in our commonly accepted, though not uncontroversial, sense of the word (sexual intercourse without the woman’s consent) did not exist as a concept in classical antiquity’.31

Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe was presented by Henry Moore to the Tate Gallery in 1978 as part of the Henry Moore Gift, which comprised thirty-six sculptures in bronze, marble and plaster. Moore first indicated his plan to give the gallery a large selection of his work in the early 1960s, and in June 1969 a deed of agreement was signed, which outlined the terms of the Gift and the works included in it. It was agreed that the works would remain in Moore’s possession for his lifetime, should he so choose. However, in 1977 Tate’s director Norman Reid petitioned Moore to present his Gift so that it could be displayed in its entirety alongside the Tate’s existing collection of his work in an exhibition celebrating the artist’s eightieth birthday scheduled for the following year. Moore duly agreed and the Gift was delivered to the Tate in June 1978. A press release was prepared announcing that ‘The group [of sculptures] is the most substantial gift of works ever given to the Tate by an artist during his lifetime’.32 Two Piece Sculpture No.7: Pipe was exhibited in gallery eighteen between Working Model for Three Way Piece: Archer 1964 (Tate T02299) and Upright Form: Knife Edge 1966 (Tate T01172) (fig.14). The exhibition was attended by over 20,500 people and nearly 11,000 copies of the catalogue were sold.33 At its close in late August the Director of Tate, Norman Reid, reflected in a letter to Moore’s daughter Mary Danowski that although he was sad to see the exhibition come to an end ‘we have the consolation of the splendid group of sculptures which Henry has presented to the nation’.34