While Michelangelo sought to free human forms from stone, British sculptor Henry Moore left his abstract figures an integral part of the materials from which he hewed them. His sculptures seem to be the product of natural forces, as if water...
[more]While Michelangelo sought to free human forms from stone, British sculptor Henry Moore left his abstract figures an integral part of the materials from which he hewed them. His sculptures seem to be the product of natural forces, as if water and wind erosion created the negative spaces and hollows. In fact, Moore felt his figurative sculptures expressed the forms and dynamics of landscapes. Commenting on his reclining figures, torsos, and mother-and-child figures, Moore said, 'I am most deeply interested in the human figure, but I have discovered laws of form and rhythm in studying natural forms such as pebbles, rocks, bones, trees, and plants.' Material, in Moore's art, is intimately related to form. In fact, the forms call attention to the materials, from the blockiness of recumbent bodies worked in stone to the fluid lines and shiny surfaces of his abstract bronze pieces.
Moore's 1929 'Reclining Figure' was his first widely acknowledged work; it was inspired by the Toltec sculpture of Chac-Mool, an example of the pre-Columbian art Moore admired. Throughout Moore's early period his sculpture emphasized the solid block: immobile figures rest heavily upon their arms and legs, never breaking the rectilinear geometry of the body. But gradually his figures lost their massive frontality -- the body presented itself from several angles and opened in hollows, allowing more interaction between the sculpture and the space it inhabits. Over the 1930s, these voids continued to open and Moore's forms were reduced to slender, hollowed-out figures, still discernibly human because of the framing elements of the arm and leg. In the '40s and '50s Moore exploited the fluid possibilities of bronze to further refine his forms, exploring the sculptural tension between voids and solids with such pieces as his 'Interior-Exterior Reclining Figure.'
Moore was also a graphic artist, and during World War II he made thousands of Expressionist drawings of London air-raid shelters, a theme that allowed him to pursue his interest in basic human relationships (such as mother-child) and to study the interaction of darkness and light much as he had studied the tension between matter and void.
[show less]
