Audio: Henry Moore, Mother and Child with Apple
Henry Moore (1898-1986)
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Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… Read more PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF AYALA ZACKS ABRAMOV
Henry Moore (1898-1986)

Mother and Child with Apple

Details
Henry Moore (1898-1986)
Mother and Child with Apple
bronze with brown and green patina
Height: 28¼ in. (71.8 cm.)
Base: 19¾ x 17¾ in. (50.2 x 45 cm.)
Conceived in 1956 and cast in an edition of ten plus one
Provenance
Ayala Zacks-Abramov, Toronto & Jerusalem, by whom acquired circa 1956-1957 and thence by descent to the present owners.
Literature
W. Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, London, 1960 (another cast illustrated pls. 116 & 117).
A. Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings, vol. III, Sculpture, 1955-1964, London, 1965, no. 406 (illustrated pls. 32 & 33).
R. Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1969, London, 1970, nos. 512-513 (another cast illustrated p. 359; titled 'Mother and Child No. 1: Reaching for Apple').
G. Carlo Argan, Henry Moore, New York, 1971 (another cast illustrated fig. 133).
D. Mitchinson, ed., Henry Moore, Sculpture with Comments by the Artist, London, 1981, no. 290-291 (another cast illustrated p. 141).
C. Lichtenstein, Henry Moore, Work, Theory, Impact, London, 2008 (another cast illustrated on the dust jacket).
Special Notice
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent. These lots have been imported from outside the EU for sale using a Temporary Import regime. Import VAT is payable (at 5%) on the Hammer price. VAT is also payable (at 20%) on the buyer’s Premium on a VAT inclusive basis. When a buyer of such a lot has registered an EU address but wishes to export the lot or complete the import into another EU country, he must advise Christie's immediately after the auction.
Sale Room Notice
Please note the additional acquisition date in the provenance.
Ayala Zacks-Abramov, Toronto & Jerusalem, by whom acquired circa 1956-1957 and thence by descent to the present owners.
Please also note that this work was conceived in 1956 and cast in an edition of ten plus one.

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Adrienne Everwijn-Dumas
Adrienne Everwijn-Dumas

Lot Essay

Conceived in 1956, Mother and Child with Apple belongs to a series of works exploring the playful relationship between a mother and her child, which Henry Moore executed in the early 1950s. A mother tenderly embraces her infant as he stretches towards an apple she holds in her hand. The sculpture evokes a scene of play and learning, symbolically rich in meaning: the maternal figure is presented as a nourishing source, but also – by showing the fruit of the earth to the child – as the source of knowledge, the gate through which the new-born is introduced to the world. Although figurative, the sculpture illustrates the gentle curves and abstract roundness of Moore’s forms. Both mother and child appear as rocks polished by persistent winds and flowing waters.

Mother and Child with Apple explores a central theme in Moore’s work. The mother and child group figured among the very first sculptures the artist executed in 1922 and, together with the reclining figure, the subject would occupy Moore for his entire career. The ‘mother and child’ theme assumed even more emphasis after 1943, when Moore was commissioned to produce a ‘Madonna and Child’ for the Church of St. Matthew in Northampton. The confrontation with that sacred theme forced Moore to meditate on the theme more thoroughly: ‘The Madonna and Child should have an austerity and a nobility and some touch of grandeur (even hieratic aloofness) which is missing in the everyday Mother and Child’, Moore noted (quoted in D. Mitchinson, ed., Henry Moore Sculpture, with Comments by the Artist, London, 1981, p. 90). With its spontaneous sense of gesture and informal pose, Mother and Child with Apple seems to refute the rigid connotation of sacred art, yet the depiction of the infant Jesus playing with a fruit – usually a pomegranate or some red grapes symbolising his sacrifice – is part of the iconographic tradition of the Virgin and Child. Masaccio’s Virgin and Child (National Gallery, London) portrays the infant Christ eating some grapes, held in his mother’s hand. While working on a project for the London Underground in 1928, Moore had used Masaccio’s work as a source of inspiration and it is possible that the composition may have also influenced his 1943 Madonna and Child. With Mother and Child with Apple Moore has introduced a playful, domestic note in the theme of the mother and child, while also subtly invoking the sacred undertones of the image’s tradition.

Formally, Mother and Child with Apple offered Moore the opportunity to explore another sculptural variation of a given theme. Combining two interlacing forms of different scales, the theme of the mother and child became a recurrent, inexhaustible source of invention for the artist. Moore affirmed: ‘The “Mother and Child” idea is one of my two or three obsessions, one of my inexhaustible subjects. This may have something to do with the fact that the “Madonna and Child” was so important in the art of the past and that one loves the old masters and has learned so much from them. But the subject itself is eternal and unending, with so many sculptural possibilities in it – a small form in relation to a big form, the big form protecting the small one, and so on. It is such a rich subject, both humanly and compositionally, that I will always go on using it’ (H. Moore in 1979, quoted in A. Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Berkeley, 2002, p. 213). Mother and Child with Apple seems to explore the contrast between movement and stasis: as the child paws on his mother’s lap, she sits still with reassuring immobility. Meanwhile, the striving arms of both figures create in the air a wonderful arabesque of resonating curves. Pushing the creative boundaries of the artist, the mother and child composition ultimately becomes the very symbol of the creative act of the artist himself. As Gail Gelburd observed: ‘Moore’s involvement in this theme reaches beyond maternity to an inquiry into birth and creativity. The theme of the mother and child, the mother giving birth, the child struggling to emerge from the maternal womb, is like the stone giving birth to the form, the form struggling to emerge from the block of stone’ (Mother and Child: The Art of Henry Moore, exh. cat., Hempstead, New York, 1987, p. 37).

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