Standing Female Torso

Ronald Moody was born in 1900 in Jamaica, leaving in 1923 to study dentistry at King's College, London. Moody was inspired by the collections of African and Asian art at the British Museum to abandon dentistry and pursue sculpture. An early string of successful exhibitions and a spell living in France followed in the late 1930s, before the Nazi occupation of France forced him to flee. Moody’s return from France was fraught with dangers and he eventually arrived in England in 1941 having contracted pleurisy and tuberculosis. During his convalescence he worked with the BBC to broadcast radio programs including a series on world art history and a lecture challenging the notion of ‘Primitive art’, a term which frequently encoded the British art establishment’s thinly veiled racism towards black artists of the day.

Moody’s forceful yet serene wood carvings display cosmopolitan influences including Egyptian, Pre-Columbian and Buddhist sculpture, and embody his interest in transcendental philosophy and metaphysics. A versatile sculptor, Moody also produced bronze head portraits, notably of his brother Harold, a prominent voice in the cause for racial equality. Through his involvement with the Caribbean Artists movement from the early 1960s, the later phase of his career marked a period of increased dialogue with his Caribbean heritage. It also brought experimentation with more diverse media including concrete and aluminium. Eleven of his works were included in a 1989 retrospective of Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain at the Hayward Gallery. This, and the display of his monumental half-length figure Johanaan, currently on display at Tate Britain’s Walk Through British Art, have helped to bring Moody’s work to a wider audience since his death in 1984.