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Lot Essay
Though a pervasive theme throughout Moore’s oeuvre, the artist created more images of the Mother and Child in the final decade of his life than in any other period of his career. The present work is a model for one of the sculptor’s final expressions of this theme on a monumental scale: the touching and beautiful Travertine marble Mother and Child: Hood, 1983 (Lund Humphries, no. 851; fig. 1). Moore wrote in 1979: "The 'Mother and Child' 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" (quoted in A. Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Berkeley, 2002, p. 213). One may interpret the significance of the subject in various ways, endowing it with either a sacred or secular meaning, while recognizing that it exists in an eternal, mythic dimension with a humanist message.
In the present work, the forms of Mother and Child are cast as elemental and virtually abstract. The mother is predominantly defined by the delicate arch of her head and back as she gazes down at her infant, a smooth inward slope where her face and shoulders would reside. The concave figure covers and protects the child. The form widens to create a recess, simultaneously her womb and her embracing arms, in which the child is nestled. The child is similarly simplified, as if a fetus newly born into the world. In this composition, the one is only identifiable through the presence of the other.
For Moore, the idea of the Mother and Child occupied a place at the very heart of creation, in both the physical, natural world, and within the creative arts of humankind. In his case, it is a metaphor for the work of the sculptor. Gail Gelburd has insightfully established this connection: "Moore continuously found new ways of exploring the theme so that the imagery could take on meaning beyond the aesthetics of its form. The development of the mother and child imagery reveals that 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" (G. Gelburd, intro., Mother and Child: The Art of Henry Moore, exh. cat., Hofstra University Museum, Hempstead, New York, 1987, p. 37).
In the present work, the forms of Mother and Child are cast as elemental and virtually abstract. The mother is predominantly defined by the delicate arch of her head and back as she gazes down at her infant, a smooth inward slope where her face and shoulders would reside. The concave figure covers and protects the child. The form widens to create a recess, simultaneously her womb and her embracing arms, in which the child is nestled. The child is similarly simplified, as if a fetus newly born into the world. In this composition, the one is only identifiable through the presence of the other.
For Moore, the idea of the Mother and Child occupied a place at the very heart of creation, in both the physical, natural world, and within the creative arts of humankind. In his case, it is a metaphor for the work of the sculptor. Gail Gelburd has insightfully established this connection: "Moore continuously found new ways of exploring the theme so that the imagery could take on meaning beyond the aesthetics of its form. The development of the mother and child imagery reveals that 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" (G. Gelburd, intro., Mother and Child: The Art of Henry Moore, exh. cat., Hofstra University Museum, Hempstead, New York, 1987, p. 37).