Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity

Purchased from the artist through the Leicester Galleries, London, by the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1940; transferred to the Tate Gallery 1983.

This small reclining figure is cast in lead and mounted on a flat rectangular oak base that is stained black. It is possible that Henry Moore cast this sculpture himself without the involvement of a foundry, as it is known that he cast several lead figures at his home around the time this sculpture was made. Prior to casting Moore would have made an original model, probably using wax, from which the lead sculpture was cast.

The surface of the sculpture is very smooth and there are few marks that provide evidence of what casting technique was used. However, it is likely that a sculpture of this size would have been cast using the traditional lost wax technique. Moore would have worked the surface of the metal after casting using files and sandpaper in increasingly fine grades to achieve the polished finish. A clear wax is visible on the surface, which enhances the shine but also protects the lead against finger marks and corrosion. There are some circular outlines on the lead surface that show the formation of a slightly different crystalline structure in the metal as the lead in these areas cooled at a different rate from the rest of the cast (fig.1). No inscription is visible on the surface of the sculpture. Some scratches are evident and a Tate conservation report written in 2004 suggests that these may be historical.1

The sculpture is fixed to its base with three recessed screws that pass through the base from underneath (fig.2). Three other holes are visible in the base in different positions which may indicate that this was a base intended originally for another work, or that the fixing locations were altered.

This sculpture presents a reclining female figure propped up on her left elbow. The figure’s head and torso form a vertical axis that contrasts with the horizontal axis created by her legs, which stretch out to the left. While the outlines of individual limbs are identifiable, various parts of the body are conjoined within the singular form as though they had melted into each other. This effect is heightened by the colour and surface sheen of the lead, which give the impression that the sculpture might be soft to touch.

The head is u-shaped, with two curving sides suggesting the sides of the head, and a point at the front may be read as a chin (fig.1), but otherwise no facial features have been represented. Together, the head and thick tubular neck are reminiscent of an open, upward thrusting mouth, but when seen from the rear the two sides of the head are reminiscent of insect antenna (fig.2).

The neck leads down from the head to a pair of broad powerful shoulders and an arched back. The right shoulder curves downwards delineating the sculpture’s back, and there is no separate right arm. The left shoulder leads to the left arm on which the weight of the upper body is propped. The upper part of the left arm is separated from the main body of the sculpture by an oval hole. Bent at the elbow, the left forearm rests on the wooden base and merges with the side of the figure.

The breast plate projects forwards from the neck, arching over the hollowed torso with curved edges creating a loosely-shaped pair of breasts (fig.3). The left breast is pierced with a hole suggesting an areola or nipple. Although there is no separate right arm, one is subtly suggested. Following the curve of the shoulder down the side of the body, a slight ridge running from the abdomen to the hip can be discerned. This ridge is suggestive of a forearm and culminates in a mound, which could be a hand.

The curved, undulating leg section is pierced with a hole separating the two legs. Despite the schematic treatment of the limbs, it is possible to ascertain that the left leg rests on its side, bent at the knee, so that the front of the thigh faces forwards and the calf extends backwards on a diagonal. The right knee is raised so that the front of the right leg faces upwards and the right thigh creates an arch or bridge over the left. The right calf merges into the left, which is presented as a triangular wedge with a flat upper surface. When seen from the rear, the back, hips, buttocks and legs create a sequence of rounded forms and a sliver of empty space can be seen underneath the left arm and torso of the sculpture.

Although his teaching duties as Head of the Sculpture Department at the Chelsea School of Art kept him in London for much of his time, in 1935 Moore bought a cottage called Burcroft near Canterbury in Kent. In a letter dated 30 April 1939 to his friend Arthur Sale, Moore explained that ‘We go [to Burcroft] whenever we can be free from London because I can work better there’.1 It is likely that this lead sculpture was one of a number of small metal sculptures cast by Moore in a kiln constructed in his garden. This practice of ‘backyard casting’ was relatively common among artists producing small scale sculptures in the 1930s, and lead was a particularly favoured material due to its low melting point.

At Burcroft Moore employed Bernard Meadows as an assistant. Meadows was a sculpture student at Norwich School of Art and later the Royal College of Art in London, and worked for Moore during his summer vacations between 1936 and 1940. On 9 December 1987 Tate curator Judith Collins interviewed Meadows with a focus on his role in the creation of Moore’s lead sculptures. Collins’s catalogue entry notes that Meadows ‘remembers casting lead pieces during the summer months of 1938 and 1939’, and that he ‘then stayed on alone at Burcroft in the winter holidays of 1938 and 1939 working on the lead casts’.2 Collins continued:

In order to create the lead Reclining Figure it is likely that Moore first made a model in wax. In 1960 Moore recounted that during his experiments with backyard casting he discovered that he could skip one of the usual stages of the lost wax process by modelling directly in wax.4 Meadows recalled in 1987 that the wax used for the lead sculptures made between 1938 and 1940 was ‘beeswax, bought from Boots the Chemist’ in Canterbury.5 Having modelled the original wax sculpture it was then encased in a hard material, usually plaster mixed with an aggregate of ground-up pottery. Moore then used the lost wax technique to make the lead version, whereby the casing containing the wax was placed in the kiln and heated so that the wax could be melted out. Molten lead was then poured into the sculpture-shaped void left inside the casing. In light of her conversation with Meadows, Collins narrated that ‘the lead was melted down in a large domestic saucepan, one of Irina Moore’s, over a primus stove in the studio. The main consideration was whether the saucepan handle could withstand the weight of the lead when the saucepan was lifted and carried outside to the mould for the pouring of the molten metal’.6 When the lead had cooled and hardened, the outer casing would have been removed to reveal the sculpture inside. However, one of the disadvantages of working in wax and using this direct lost wax casting method was that since there was only one original sculpture, there was only one opportunity to cast the sculpture in metal. If any stage in the process went wrong, the sculpture would be lost. This element of risk may explain why Mary Moore, the artist’s daughter, recounted that Moore ‘thought he’d try lead casting at home, because by then he was so macho and he just thought, “Well, why can’t I do it?”’.7 However, Moore was also practical, and it seems likely that the surviving terracotta version of this sculpture was a copy of the wax original, made so that a reference copy would survive after the casting process.

It is probable that Reclining Figure was one of a number of sculptures made between August and early October 1939. In a letter to his friend the critic Herbert Read dated 9 October Moore noted:

According to Collins:

It is known that Moore cast at least sixteen lead sculptures at Burcroft between 1938 and 1940. Fourteen of these, including Reclining Figure, were exhibited at his exhibition New Sculpture and Drawings at the Leicester Galleries, which having been postponed from November 1939 took place in February 1940.

Prior to casting in lead in 1938–40 Moore had only made three other lead sculptures: Mask 1929 (formerly in the collection of Kenneth Clark), Seated Figure 1930 (destroyed) and Reclining Figure 1930 (private collection). These are believed to have been cast at a professional foundry, probably Gaskin or Fiorini, both based in London. Moore’s Reclining Figure 1939 is a unique cast in lead, although Moore later cast four bronze versions.9 Although the details regarding when and where these subsequent casts were made was not recorded, one example was accessioned into the collection of the British Council in March 1948, suggesting that the bronzes were cast some time between 1939 and 1948. In 1973 Moore explained that at the time he was making lead sculptures:

The later bronze casts of this work and other sculptures after lead originals, such as Reclining Figure 1939 (Tate T00387), would have been made at a professional bronze foundry. In order to re-cast a lead sculpture in bronze a mould would be made directly from the lead sculpture. It is known for example that Moore borrowed a lead Reclining Figure from its owner, Peter Gregory, in 1958 in order to cast an edition in bronze.11 However, it is likely that the foundry was able to recast this Reclining Figure using the surviving terracotta model.

The reclining figure propped up on its elbows with raised knees emerged as a central motif in Moore’s work during the late 1920s. Moore carved his first reclining figure around 1924 but took up the subject with greater seriousness in 1929 and it became his most frequently recurring subject. In 1947 Moore accounted for his preference for the reclining figure, stating:

The origins of Moore’s fascination with the subject of the reclining figure cannot be pinpointed to a single definitive source. For example, in the catalogue to Moore’s 1968 exhibition at the Tate Gallery, images of a reclining Chacmool, a rain spirit of the ancient Toltec-Mayan culture (fig.4), and Michelangelo’s carvings of allegorical figures in the Medici Chapel in Florence were reproduced under the heading ‘comparative material’. However, the author of the catalogue, the critic David Sylvester, noted that prior to Moore’s trip to Italy in the early 1920s Moore had only made one (male) reclining figure, and that the subject only took hold of Moore’s imagination upon his return. Central to Sylvester’s argument was the importance of Michelangelo’s work, in particular the sculpture Dawn c.1520 (fig.5). Sylvester argued that even when Moore’s figures became more abstract they nonetheless had ‘poses which are the perogative of the Mediterranean tradition’.13

In 2006 the curator Terry Friedman suggested that Moore may have based the pose of Reclining Figure on the nude figure of Dionysos (438–423 BC), one of the Parthenon marbles housed in the British Museum (fig.6). A series of three photographic illustrations of Dionysos was included in the publication Henry Moore at the British Museum (1981). For this book Moore selected and discussed artworks from the British Museum’s collection that had influenced him during his career.14 Moore stated that the sculpture of Dionysos ‘always attracted me, perhaps because of my interest in reclining figures’.15 According to Friedman, ‘though Moore’s figure is female, a similar prominence is given to the broad chest cage, the knees and the outspread legs, while the absence of hands and feet in the Greek sculpture, broken off and lost in the mists of time, became an essential element in Moore’s association between the partial human figure and water-worn punctured rock’.16

By choosing the subject of the reclining female figure for his sculptures, Moore was free to experiment with sculptural forms, both compositionally (in the position of the body and its limbs) and spatially (in the ways in which the figure’s limbs projected into space and interacted with spatial gaps). In addition to these perceived virtues, Moore also believed that because the subject of the reclining figure was known and understood, he was not tied to creating naturalistic artworks. On the subject of his reclining figures Moore was clear that he did not seek to imbue his sculptures with a specific meaning, but rather to use the motif as a starting point for formal experiments:

Reclining Figure may be understood as a development of Moore’s earlier Reclining Figure 1929 (fig.7) and Recumbent Figure 1938 (fig.8), which were carved in Brown and Green Hornton stone respectively. Like Reclining Figure both of these earlier sculptures present a female figure lying down with her belly and legs extending from her upright head and shoulders. In all three sculptures the figure rests on an elbow – on the right elbow in the two earlier works and on the left elbow in the 1939 lead sculpture – and her knees are bent. All three have rounded projecting breasts. In the later lead work, however, Moore dispensed with the heavy block-like composition of the 1929 sculpture and accentuated the holes and pierced shapes seen in Recumbent Figure in order to give the 1939 sculpture a sense of movement and fluidity, characteristics which are enhanced by its smoothed polished surfaces.

Moore’s desire to open out the sculpture through the use of holes had presented technical problems when working in stone and wood that were only resolved by his turn to metal casting in 1937–8. Working in wax or plasticine enabled Moore to create pierced and more thinner forms than were possible in stone, and he observed in 1960 that working in this way allowed sculptors to make ‘spatial forms’.18 Reflecting on Moore’s changing forms and materials, Sylvester noted that ‘lead has a mechanistic sleekness, and Moore has exploited this in sculptures possessing so much open space, and so little solid mass, that they are skeletons rather than bodies, scaffoldings rather than buildings. Hence, the eye pursues at speed their rhythms and their hard contrasts of light and shadow.’19

The fluid shapes of Reclining Figure may also have been conceived in response to the trend for elastic, gelatinous forms already prevalent in Europe by the early 1930s. In 1935 the critic Geoffrey Grigson had used the term ‘biomorphic’ to describe a type of art that suggested an organic quality or drew upon memories of naturally occurring forms such as pebbles and bones.20 And by 1936 the curator Alfred H. Barr had ‘identified biomorphic abstraction as the most significant new development in international abstract art, and named Moore as its paradigmatic representative’.21

Despite being seen as representative of biomorphic abstraction, Moore’s curved, seemingly soft forms may have developed in response to the surrealist work of Jean Arp. In the early 1920s Arp had developed a curvilinear style that drew upon the forms of botanical subjects, evoking weathered pebbles or swollen buds. For example, in Head and Shell c.1933 (fig.9) Arp used irregularly rounded shapes to express a fluid balance of forces that he felt characterised natural forms and symbolised the idea of nature as the site of a non-rational order. Moore may have seen examples of Arp’s biomorphic sculptures in publications such as Cahiers d’Art, or in Carola Giedion Welcker’s book Modern Plastic Art, published in 1937, while art historian Michel Remy has proposed that Moore met Arp during one of his many visits to Paris in the early 1930s.22 At this time Arp’s sculptures were identified under the generic title of ‘Concretions’, which the artist later explained:

In 1970 the art critic Robert Melville observed that ‘during the period from 1931 to the beginning of the war, Moore carved a superb series of organic abstractions. They are as “shape conscious” as the sculpture of ... Arp, but they are more persistently penetrated by human associations’. ²⁴ For Melville, Moore’s apparent engagement with Arp revealed ‘his connections with Surrealism. He belongs to the Surrealist generation’.25 The inclusion of an illustration of Arp’s Human Concretion 1933 under the heading ‘comparative material’ in Moore’s 1968 catalogue would seem to support Melville’s proposition that he had indeed been influenced in some way by the work of the French sculptor, while the art critic John Russell proposed more emphatically that instead of merely replicating Arp’s work, Moore’s sculptures reflected ‘a wish to adapt the formal language of Arp to purely human preoccupations’.26 Indeed, in 1937, Moore wrote:

Although it is rare for Moore’s sculptures to have originated from a specific drawing, Reclining Figure with Red Rocks 1938 (fig.10) presents the fully realised form of Reclining Figure in a quasi-natural landscape. Having completed Recumbent Figure in 1938 the figure of a reclining woman composed of curved forms and pierced with holes clearly preoccupied Moore around the time that this drawing was made. Indeed, the art historian Kenneth Clark later identified 1938 as ‘the vintage year of reclining figure drawings’.28 Recumbent Figure had been sited outdoors at the home of architect Serge Chermayeff, set against the rolling hills of the South Downs, which alerted Moore to the possibility of installing his sculptures in the open air. In Reclining Figure with Red Rocks the sculpture is positioned in the foreground on a green lawn. Behind the figure in the middle distance are two upright red rocks, behind which is a horizon line differentiating between the grass and the paler green sky. When this drawing was exhibited in Moore’s exhibition Drawings for Sculpture at the Mayor Gallery, London in February 1939 an unnamed critic writing for the Times noted that ‘Henry Moore has a highly developed sense of form in the abstract’, going on to propose that ‘his use of colour to reinforce form is so apt that one would like to see paintings by him’.29 The critic concluded that ‘everything he does is so full of meaning that one is well content to let him carry on’.30

While his design for Reclining Figure appears to have been determined in his 1938 drawing, Moore nonetheless continued to toy with the compositional potential of this sculptural form. In Ideas for Metal Sculpture: Reclining Figures 1939 (fig.11) Moore presents a sequence of reclining female figures in the top half of the page that are very similar to the lead sculpture. The heads, each with a u-shaped incision, indicate how Moore experimented with the size and position of various elements to consider how such changes impacted on the final design. Although a mirror image, the sketch at the top centre of the page is perhaps closest to the final three-dimensional version. Cumulatively, the ideas presented on this page point to how Moore was conjoining and opening out the body in order to create non-naturalistic arrangements of solid and empty forms. The flat, protruding breast plates of the sketched figures also demonstrate how Moore engaged with the structural capabilities of metal and the consequential compositional possibilities available to him. This thin and cantilevered element of the sculpture would have been very difficult to achieve in carved stone or wood; Moore explained that ‘working direct in wax has many possibilities, since wax has a toughness about it that will allow you to do very thin forms ... By working direct in wax, one was able to make shapes and forms much thinner and more open’.31 Indeed it is probable that Moore’s choice of materials was determined by the form and composition of the sculpture that he wanted to make rather than by a specific desire to start working in metal.

Although Moore had made piercings in his stone sculptures from as early as 1928, it was not until the early 1930s that he recognised the potential of holes in sculpture. In 1937 Moore articulated his appreciation of holes in his article ‘A Sculptor Speaks’, published in the Listener:

In Reclining Figure with Red Rocks the arch created by the right leg both complements and is complemented by the standing rocks in the background, so that the forms of the human body seem at one with the surrounding environment. Indeed, Friedman suggested that Reclining Figure ‘like its many related sculptures by Moore, is both human and geological, both figure and landscape’.33

Looking back at his time in Kent Moore identified this period as the moment when his interest in the relationship between sculpture and the natural environment became a major preoccupation:

Moore’s newly developed concern with the placement of sculpture within the landscape can be seen in the drawing Ideas for Sculpture in Landscape c.1938 (fig.12). This page is covered with a series of small framed drawings that illustrate the placement of sculptural forms in various outdoor settings. Some of these sculptures exist as a three-dimensional work, including the figure in the largest frame on the left of the page, Reclining Figure. In other designs, such as that in the top left corner, the idea for the sculpture remained unexecuted in three-dimensions. Curator Anita Feldman Bennet has suggested that in this drawing ‘Moore is exploring the use of landscape not only as possible sites for sculpture, but as a potential for metamorphosis with the figure’.35 She suggested that the holes evident in the left hand Reclining Figure ‘are repeated in the circular patterns of the surrounding foliage’ with the result that the sculpture not only mirrors, but fuses with the natural environment.36 What these drawings also demonstrate is Moore’s concern with matters of size and scale. By enlarging the small lead sculpture in drawings such as Reclining Figure with Red Rocks and Ideas for Sculpture in Landscape Moore sought to imagine his ideas on a much larger scale.37

Reclining Figure was exhibited at Moore’s exhibition New Sculpture and Drawings at the Leicester Galleries, London, in February 1940. In a memo dated 8 February 1940 written to Leigh Ashton, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), the secretary of the museum wrote:

The sculpture was duly purchased by the V&A for the sum of £40 on 29 February 1940. On entering the museum’s collection the sculpture was placed in the Department of Circulation, then under the direction of Mr Bedford. The department’s remit was to make works of art available to art schools and regional galleries so that students could view exemplary examples of art without having to travel to London. The Department of Circulation had its own specific collection designed to meet these needs and curated complete exhibitions, which included interpretative literature, that travelled around the country. It is likely that Reclining Figure was included in the exhibitions Twentieth-Century Sculpture, which toured between 1953 and 1963, and Modern Sculpture and Sculptors’ Drawings, which toured between 1967 and 1972.39

In 1983 Reclining Figure 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 Reclining Figure entered the Tate collection it was noted that the V&A’s acquisition number ‘CIRC. 17–1940’ was written in white ink on the underside of the sculpture.