Henry Moore OM, CH

Upright Motive No.7

1955–6, cast c.1958–61

© The Henry Moore Foundation. All Rights Reserved

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Not on display

Artist: Henry Moore OM, CH 1898–1986
Medium: Bronze
Dimensions: Object: 3404 x 772 x 972 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the artist 1978
Reference: T02276

Display caption

In the mid 1950s, Moore made twelve Upright Motives. These three, though often displayed together, have also been shown independently. A cast of Upright Motive No.2, for example, is sited in the centre of Harlow. Likewise, a cast of Upright Motive No.1: Glenkiln Cross can be found on the Glenkiln estate in Scotland.

Gallery label, August 2004

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Catalogue entry

Entry

Upright Motive No.7 is a tall, vertically orientated bronze sculpture comprising geometric shapes and amorphous, undulating forms. The lowest section consists of an oblong, lying horizontally, with a smaller cuboid stacked on top of it. One of the faces of this form curves inward at its centre and has three deep grooves carved into it (fig.1). Directly above it a series of three curvaceous forms project outwards on three sides of the sculpture (fig.2).

The fourth side of the column is, by contrast, reasonably flat until approximately half way up the sculpture where a rounded, roughly bell-shaped swelling marks its widest point (fig.3). A series of approximately equidistant circular depressions have been made in its surface around three-quarters of the form’s circumference. The other side, however, has been carved to form a deep recess into which the section above appears to have been wedged (fig.4). This upper-most section is deeper than it is thick and features rounded knots or stumps on three sides leading towards a narrow apex. The other side of the column, which further down has the flatter surface, is marked by two thin raised lines that rise diagonally from the central swelling up towards the top of the column where they meet a bulbous growth that projects outwards with two recessed depressions on both sides (fig.5).

Making the Upright Motives

Sources and development

Grouping the Upright Motives

The Henry Moore Gift

Alice Correia
March 2013

Notes

Henry Moore cited in John Hedgecoe (ed.), Henry Moore, London 1968, p.245.

Ann Garrould, Henry Moore. Volume 4: Complete Drawings 1950–76, London 2003, p.73.

Alan G. Wilkinson, Henry Moore Remembered: The Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Toronto 1987, p.160.

Henry Moore cited in Gemma Levine, With Henry Moore: The Artist at Work, London 1978, p.123.

See Henry Moore at Perry Green, London 2011, p.17.

Henry Moore in ‘Henry Moore Talking to David Sylvester’, 7 June 1963, transcript of Third Programme, broadcast BBC Radio, 14 July 1963, Tate Archive TGA 200816, p.18. (An edited version of this interview was published in the Listener, 29 August 1963, pp.305–7.)

Julie Summers, ‘Fragment of Maquette for King and Queen’, in Claude Allemand-Cosneau, Manfred Fath and David Mitchinson (eds.), Henry Moore From the Inside Out: Plasters, Carvings and Drawings, Munich 1996, p.126.

For more information on the firm’s history see ‘H.H. Martyn & Co.’, in Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951, http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/organization.php?id=msib6_1232025346, accessed 2 April 2013.

Henry Moore sales log book, Henry Moore Foundation Archive.

G.W. Reid, letter to Henry Moore, 25 November 1960, Henry Moore Foundation Archive.

Henry Moore sales log book, Henry Moore Foundation Archive.

Moore in Hedgecoe 1968, p.248.

John Russell in Henry Moore, John Russell and A.M. Hammacher, Drie Staande Motieven, Otterlo 1965, unpaginated.

Ibid., figs.1–7.

Henry Moore in Moore, Russell and Hammacher 1965, unpaginated.

Henry Moore, Henry Moore at the British Museum, London 1981. In his introduction to the book Moore concluded that ‘It has been a wonderful experience for me to recapture the delight, the excitement, the inspiration I got in these pieces as a young and developing sculptor’ (p.16).

Ibid., p.117.

Herbert Read, Henry Moore: A Study of his Life and Work, London 1965, p.206.

Andrew Causey, The Drawings of Henry Moore, London 2010, p.71.

Sam Smiles, ‘Equivalents for the Megaliths: Prehistory and English Culture, 1920–50’, in David Peters Corbett, Ysanne Holt and Fiona Russell (eds.), The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past 1880–1940, New Haven 2002, pp.199–223.

Henry Moore, letter to Paul Nash, 15 September 1933, Tate Archive TGA 8313/1/2/153.

Penelope Curtis and Fiona Russell, ‘Henry Moore and the Post-War British Landscape: Monuments Ancient and Modern’, in Jane Beckett and Fiona Russell (eds.), Henry Moore: Critical Essays, Aldershot 2003, p.138.

Alan Wilkinson, The Drawings of Henry Moore, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1977, p.42.

Ibid., p.42.

See John Russell, Henry Moore, London 1973, p.117.

Robert Melville, Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings 1921–1969, London 1970, p.27.

Garrould 2003, p.89.

Will Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, London 1960, p.197.

Anita Feldman Bennet, ‘Rediscovering Humanism’ in Henry Moore: In the Light of Greece, exhibition catalogue, Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation Museum of Contemporary Art, Andros 2000, p.69.

John Russell, Henry Moore, London 1968, p.151.

[Richard Calvocoressi], ‘T.2281, Three Motives Against Wall No.2’, The Tate Gallery 1978–80: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1981, p.126.

Moore in Moore, Russell and Hammacher 1965, unpaginated.

Ibid.

Russell 1968, p.141.

Ibid., p.143.

Ibid., p.155.

Moore cited in Hedgecoe 1968, p.250.

Anon., ‘Acquisitions of Works of Art by Museums and Galleries: Supplement’, Burlington Magazine, vol.107, no.747, June 1965, p.338.

Margaret Garlake, New Art / New World: British Art in Postwar Society, New Haven and London 1998, p.191.

Susan Compton (ed.), Henry Moore, exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, London 1988, p.237.

Julian Stallabrass, ‘Upright Motive No.5’, in David Mitchinson (ed.), Celebrating Moore: Works from the Collection of the Henry Moore Foundation, London 2006, p.247.

Garlake 1998, p.192.

Stallabrass 2006, p.246.

Ibid., p.247.

Robert Melville, ‘Henry Moore: Meditations on the Effigy’, in Henry Moore, Meditations on the Effigy, London 1968, pp.3–7.

See ‘Note on the Henry Moore Gift’, 1978, Tate Public Records TG 4/6/10/4.

These figures are based on those listed in a memo in the records for the exhibition. See Tate Public Records TG 92/344/2.

Norman Reid, letter to Mary Danowski, 31 August 1978, Tate Public Records TG 4/6/10/4.

Ruth Rattenbury, letter to Mrs B. Tinsley, 25 July 1978, Tate Public Records TG 92/344/2.

Roy Perry, ‘Damage Report T.2274 T.2276 Henry Moore’, 1 June 1983, Tate Public Records TG 4/9/391/6.

See Richard Dorment, ‘Single Form, Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain’, Guardian, 23 May 2011, p.23.

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