Henry Moore OM, CH

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