- Artist
- Henry Moore OM, CH 1898–1986
- Medium
- Gouache, ink, watercolour and crayon on paper
- Dimensions
- Support: 483 × 381 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by the War Artists Advisory Committee 1946
- Reference
- N05707
Catalogue entry
N05707 WOMAN SEATED IN THE UNDERGROUND 1941
Inscr. ‘Moore 41’ b.r.
Pen, chalk and gouache, 19×15 (48×38).
Presented by the War Artists' Advisory Committee 1946.
Exh: Britain at War, New York, and Canadian and U.S. tour, 1941–4; New York, Chicago and San Francisco, 1946–7 (86, repr. p.70); British Council tour, Australia, 1947–8 (33, repr.); Berlin (repr.) and Vienna, 1951 (67).
Lit: Neumann, 1959, pp.80–3, repr. pl.49.
Repr: Read, 1944, pl.187; Sweeney, 1946, p.70; Argan, 1948, pl.27.
See N05706. The Shelter Sketch-Books include a drawing for this figure, omitting the receding tunnel on the right (repr. Editions Poetry, 1944).
Neumann sees the seated figure as the female archetype, which is always predominant in Moore's work, in a new spectral aspect inspired by the war, ‘The Great Goddess manifesting herself as mistress of death’; the idea is paralleled in another shelter drawing entitled ‘Three Fates’ (private collection; see Neumann, op. cit., pp.84–5, repr. pl.51; also repr. Read, op. cit., pl.184a, and Read and Sylvester, I, 1957, p.231).
Published in:
Mary Chamot, Dennis Farr and Martin Butlin, The Modern British Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, London 1964, II
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