Henry Moore OM, CH

Working Model for Three Way Piece No.2: Archer

1964, cast date unknown

© 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: 775 x 787 x 651 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the artist 1978
Reference: T02299

Catalogue entry

Entry

Working Model for Three Way Piece No.2: Archer 1964 is a bronze sculpture with smooth reflective surfaces comprising irregular rounded forms, sharp edges and points arranged into a seemingly organic, albeit abstract composition.

The sculpture is made up of two upright elements of roughly the same height – an elliptical, crooked column and a D-shaped wedge – connected in the middle by a curvaceous horizontal bridge that creates an arched space beneath (fig.1). The top of the column-like form is flat and smooth and appears truncated, while the bottom of the wedge-shaped form, which terminates in a sharp point, does not quite meet the base (fig.2).

Two cantilevered protrusions project from one side of the horizontal bridge at right angles to the other elements of the sculpture. One has a rounded elliptical face and emerges smoothly from the joint between the wedge and the bridge, while the other, which has a flat, circular face, extends out from a swelling close to the midway point of the crocked column (fig.3).

From the side it is clear that the wedge is tilted at a slight angle so that it is not entirely vertical (fig.4). Indeed, the asymmetrical composition of the sculpture, whereby different elements project and twist in different directions, imbues it with a sense of dynamic tension, counterbalanced by the structure and solidity provided by the combination of equally weighted vertical and horizontal forms.

From plaster to bronze

Sources and interpretations

The Henry Moore Gift

Alice Correia
September 2013

Notes

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

John Russell, Henry Moore, London 1973, p.233.

John Read in Henry Moore: One Yorkshireman Looks at His World, dir. by John Read, television programme, broadcast BBC2, 11 November 1967, http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/henrymoore/8807.shtml, accessed 3 November 2013.

Alan G. Wilkinson, Henry Moore Remembered: The Collection at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, Toronto 1987, p.217.

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

Moore in Levine 1978, p.124.

Wilkinson 1987, p.217.

Edward B. Henning, ‘Henry Moore: Three Way Piece No.2: Archer’, Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol.58, no.8, October 1971, p.238.

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.

See Richard Wentworth, ‘The Going Concern: Working for Moore’, Burlington Magazine, vol.130, no.1029, December 1988, p.928. For a discussion of Moore’s enlargement methods see Anne Wagner, ‘Scale in Sculpture: The Sixties and Henry Moore’, Tate Papers, no.15, spring 2011, http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/scale-sculpture-sixties-and-henry-moore, accessed 13 August 2013.

Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore. Volume 4: Complete Sculpture 1964–73, London 1977, p.11.

Henry Moore, letter to Heinz Ohff, 8 March 1967, Henry Moore Foundation Archive.

Moore in ‘Henry Moore talking to David Sylvester’, 7 June 1963, pp.3–4, Tate Archive TGA 200816.

Moore cited in Wilkinson 1987, p.6.

Anon., ‘What the People Say About “The Archer”’, Toronto Star, 28 October 1966. See http://torontoist.com/2010/07/historicist_henry_moores_big_bronze_whatchamacallit/, accessed 20 September 2013.

John Warkentin, Creating Memory: A Guide to Outdoor Public Sculpture in Toronto, Toronto 2010, p.160.

Bowness 1977, p.9.

Henry Moore, ‘In conversation with Alan Wilkinson, c.1980’, reprinted in Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Aldershot 2002, p.295.

Herbert Read, Modern Sculpture: A Concise History, London 1964, p.209.

Ibid., p.209.

See Read 1964, pp.163–228.

Henry Moore, ‘Statement for Unit One’, in Herbert Read (ed.), Unit One, London 1934, pp.29–30, reprinted in Wilkinson 2002, p.192.

Read 1964, p.77.

David Sylvester, Henry Moore, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1968, p.128.

Ibid.

Moore cited in ibid.

Ibid.

Henning 1971, p.238.

Henry Moore cited in James Johnson Sweeney, ‘Henry Moore’, Partisan Review, March–April 1947, reprinted in Wilkinson 2002, pp.44–5. In his introduction to the book Henry Moore at the British Museum Moore wrote 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’. Henry Moore, Henry Moore at the British Museum, London 1981, p.16.

Ibid., p.7.

Henning 1971, p.238.

Henry Moore, ‘The Sculptor Speaks’, Listener, 18 August 1937, pp.338–40, reprinted in Wilkinson 2002, p.145.

Henning 1971, p.238.

Norbert Lynton, ‘Anthony Caro at Kasmin Limited’, Guardian, 16 November 1965, p.8.

Anon., ‘Acquisitions of Modern Art by Museums’, Burlington Magazine, vol.114, no.829, April 1972, p.269.

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 exhibition’s records; 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.

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