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Lot Essay
Reclining Mother and Child IV combines two of Moore’s most prominent themes—the reclining figure and the mother and child. These subjects were an endless source of experimentation and innovation for the artist. Moore explained: “The vital thing for an artist is to have a subject that allows [him] to try out all kinds of formal ideas—things that he doesn’t yet know about for certain but wants to experiment with, as Cézanne did in his Bathers series…The subject-matter is given. It’s settled for you, and you know it and like it, so that within it, within the subject that you’ve done a dozen times before, you are free to invent a completely new form-idea” (quoted in C. Lichtenstern, Henry Moore: Work-Theory-Impact, London, 2008, p. 95).
For Moore, the enduring appeal of the reclining figure lay in its endless formal and spatial possibilities. This symbiotic relationship between form and space was one of his central and most enduring sculptural innovations, offering infinite views through and around the sculpture. Moore stressed the importance of this relationship, stating: “You can’t understand space without being able to understand form and to understand form you must be able to understand space” (quoted in ibid., p. 105). This can be seen to great effect in the present work, in which Moore investigates notions of positive and negative space, creating a sinuous and organic form.
There is something innately organic about Moore’s Reclining Mother and Child IV, which displays a more playful and personal relationship between his two figures than earlier mother and child examples. Alan Bowness reflected on this mature period of the artist’s career: “Moore’s sculptures have indeed become increasingly concerned with human relationships. It has always been a major preoccupation, from the earliest Mother and Child sculpture, but it seems to me that what we are offered in the late works is a paradigm of the human relationship, with the figures groping, touching, embracing, coupling, even merging with each other” (A. Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings: 1964-1973, London, 1977, vol. 4, p. 17).
For Moore, the enduring appeal of the reclining figure lay in its endless formal and spatial possibilities. This symbiotic relationship between form and space was one of his central and most enduring sculptural innovations, offering infinite views through and around the sculpture. Moore stressed the importance of this relationship, stating: “You can’t understand space without being able to understand form and to understand form you must be able to understand space” (quoted in ibid., p. 105). This can be seen to great effect in the present work, in which Moore investigates notions of positive and negative space, creating a sinuous and organic form.
There is something innately organic about Moore’s Reclining Mother and Child IV, which displays a more playful and personal relationship between his two figures than earlier mother and child examples. Alan Bowness reflected on this mature period of the artist’s career: “Moore’s sculptures have indeed become increasingly concerned with human relationships. It has always been a major preoccupation, from the earliest Mother and Child sculpture, but it seems to me that what we are offered in the late works is a paradigm of the human relationship, with the figures groping, touching, embracing, coupling, even merging with each other” (A. Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings: 1964-1973, London, 1977, vol. 4, p. 17).