.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Family Group belongs to a series of maquettes conceived by Henry Moore between 1944 and 1945 on the theme of the family unit. The subject appeared in Moore's work at this time following a commission from Henry Morris to create a sculpture for the Village College at Impington. The ideals of this progressive school, whose buildings had been designed by famed modernist architect and founder of the Bauhaus Walter Gropius, greatly appealed to Moore. As he explained, "instead of just building a school, he [Morris] was going to make a centre for the whole life of the surrounding villages, and we hit upon this idea of the family being the unit we were aiming at" (quoted in A. Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Aldershot, 2002, p. 89). A lack of funding meant that the Impington sculpture was never realized, but Moore used the ideas he had developed for it in his Family Group at Stevenage (1948-1949), a bronze cast of which is now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Family Group and the other maquettes in the series also partly grew out of Moore's enduring fascination with the theme of the mother and child, a subject he first explored in 1922. The family is a subject, too, that relates to his celebrated Shelter Drawings where he depicted men, women and children huddling together in London's bomb shelters during the Second World War. Indeed, family life, which was profoundly disrupted by the war, became an especially significant issue in British society at the time. The theme, moreover, resonated deeply with Moore on a more personal level: his first and only child would be born in 1946. "The family group idea was so close to one as a person; we were just going to have our first child, Mary, and it was an obsession," he recollected (quoted in ibid., p. 237).
The present maquette is a particularly interesting and complex example of Moore's exploration into the compositional and formal possibilities of the four-member family. Combining both the naturalistic and the non-naturalistic, it is, as Will Grohmann has observed, "far removed from the others in its formal aspects" (The Art of Henry Moore, London, 1960, p. 142). In this very distinctive rendering of the subject, the solidity of the maquette's lower half is contrasted with the mother's hollow right breast and the large cavity of the father's chest in the upper half. This treatment of the man's torso recalls Moore's organic abstractions of the 1930s as well as his reclining figures in which the piercing of a hole serves to unify three-dimensional form with empty space.
Two separate editions were made from the original terracotta. The present work was cast from the first edition of 6 plus 1, starting in 1945. The second casting from 1955-1957 by Fiorini is an edition of 9 plus 1. Other casts are housed in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Family Group and the other maquettes in the series also partly grew out of Moore's enduring fascination with the theme of the mother and child, a subject he first explored in 1922. The family is a subject, too, that relates to his celebrated Shelter Drawings where he depicted men, women and children huddling together in London's bomb shelters during the Second World War. Indeed, family life, which was profoundly disrupted by the war, became an especially significant issue in British society at the time. The theme, moreover, resonated deeply with Moore on a more personal level: his first and only child would be born in 1946. "The family group idea was so close to one as a person; we were just going to have our first child, Mary, and it was an obsession," he recollected (quoted in ibid., p. 237).
The present maquette is a particularly interesting and complex example of Moore's exploration into the compositional and formal possibilities of the four-member family. Combining both the naturalistic and the non-naturalistic, it is, as Will Grohmann has observed, "far removed from the others in its formal aspects" (The Art of Henry Moore, London, 1960, p. 142). In this very distinctive rendering of the subject, the solidity of the maquette's lower half is contrasted with the mother's hollow right breast and the large cavity of the father's chest in the upper half. This treatment of the man's torso recalls Moore's organic abstractions of the 1930s as well as his reclining figures in which the piercing of a hole serves to unify three-dimensional form with empty space.
Two separate editions were made from the original terracotta. The present work was cast from the first edition of 6 plus 1, starting in 1945. The second casting from 1955-1957 by Fiorini is an edition of 9 plus 1. Other casts are housed in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice and in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.