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Lot Essay
Henry Moore's reputation as the pre-eminent modern sculptor is grounded in the essential humanity of his works, regardless of their scale. His evolution as a modernist followed familiar pathways of experimentation. He first found inspiration in the antique, then allied himself with Surrealism, and then embraced "pure" abstraction. Like other artists before and after him, however, he found abstraction to have its limitations and he returned in his later work to the human form in various prototypical circumstances.
Male figures appear infrequently in Moore's work, but when they do, the viewer is quickly alerted to the fact that these men herald a moment of supreme human drama, and they bear in their virile attitude and forms an especially weighty significance. Moore elected to not treat the subject in a freely exploratory series of formal variations as he normally did in his reclining female figures, or as he would do later in his interpretation of landscape forms, which often assume a feminine aspect. Moore's conception of the male figure required instead that he imbue it with an immediate expressive power. The present biomorphic head was conceived in 1984 and comprises both smooth and rough surfaces. The strong profile and hole for the eye are centered above the shoulders and give the whole a firm geometry.
"In his late work Moore took a much greater interest in different surface tensions within one and the same piece. More than ever before, there are moments when hard and soft, smooth and rough come into direct contact with one another. David Sylvester makes this very point, 'Underlying this new concern is a new extreme concentration on tactile and motorical rather than visual sensations... The hard-and-soft figures are haptic images: they make bodies look the way they feel, from outside, and, still more perhaps, from inside. They ask to be looked through rather than looked at'" (C. Lichtenstern, Henry Moore, Work, Theory, Impact, London, 2008, p. 175).
Male figures appear infrequently in Moore's work, but when they do, the viewer is quickly alerted to the fact that these men herald a moment of supreme human drama, and they bear in their virile attitude and forms an especially weighty significance. Moore elected to not treat the subject in a freely exploratory series of formal variations as he normally did in his reclining female figures, or as he would do later in his interpretation of landscape forms, which often assume a feminine aspect. Moore's conception of the male figure required instead that he imbue it with an immediate expressive power. The present biomorphic head was conceived in 1984 and comprises both smooth and rough surfaces. The strong profile and hole for the eye are centered above the shoulders and give the whole a firm geometry.
"In his late work Moore took a much greater interest in different surface tensions within one and the same piece. More than ever before, there are moments when hard and soft, smooth and rough come into direct contact with one another. David Sylvester makes this very point, 'Underlying this new concern is a new extreme concentration on tactile and motorical rather than visual sensations... The hard-and-soft figures are haptic images: they make bodies look the way they feel, from outside, and, still more perhaps, from inside. They ask to be looked through rather than looked at'" (C. Lichtenstern, Henry Moore, Work, Theory, Impact, London, 2008, p. 175).