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Lot Essay
Small Maquette No. 2 for Reclining Figure is one of just two maquettes that Moore conceived in preparation for his most celebrated masterpiece: Reclining Figure: Festival, 1951. Commissioned by the Arts Council in 1949, Moore was invited to create a sculpture for the upcoming Festival of Britain to be held in 1951, a momentous event to celebrate the post-war resurgence of Britain’s technological and cultural prowess. Indeed, as a focal point on the newly-built South Bank in London, Moore’s monumental sculpture symbolised for many visitors the resilience and inventiveness of the British people in the wake of the Second World War. It was the very embodiment of the occasion for which it was made: one of the finest and most ambitious of all the artist’s great series of reclining figures – a work that marks a moment of triumph and culmination in Moore’s practice as well as a new beginning.
Moore deemed Reclining Figure: Festival to be one of the most significant sculptures he had ever created. As he explained, this figure represented a watershed moment, being ‘perhaps my first sculpture where the space and the form are completely dependent on and inseparable from each other. I had reached the stage where I wanted my sculpture to be truly three-dimensional. In my earliest use of holes in sculpture, the holes were features in themselves. Now the space and form are so naturally fused they are one’ (H. Moore quoted in J. Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore, New York, 1968, p. 188). This unprecedented unity between solid and void meant that the empty spaces flowing through the sculpture now assumed as much importance in Moore’s work as the solid form itself.
The present maquette is key to this period of Moore’s practice. In order to generate the greater fusion of form and space that he sought, Moore employed a working method that was to shape his whole approach to sculpture thereafter. Whilst Moore used sketches to generate the initial idea for Reclining Figure: Festival, the maquette served as the basis for an intermediate ‘working model’ size from which the larger sculpture evolved. This became his modus operandi and from the mid-1950s onwards, when Moore was striving for an ever-greater three-dimensionality, maquettes largely replaced his use of drawings in the initial conception of the work.
It was this new heightened concern with three-dimensionality and the fusion of space and form which separated the final version of Small Maquette No. 2 for Reclining Figure from Moore's earlier recumbent figures. Commentators, both at the time it was first exhibited and today, have interpreted Reclining Figure: Festival in different ways. For some, its haunting skeletal form embodies a sense of anxiety, created as it was, in the wake of the war. For others, it is a celebration of humanity's survival, the sculpture's form and distinguished lines denoting strength. These various interpretations are themselves reflective of Moore's later comment that ‘sculpture should always at first sight have some obscurities, and further meanings. People should want to go on looking and thinking; it should never tell all about itself immediately ... In my sculpture explanations often come afterwards’ (H. Moore quoted in A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture: 1964-1973, Vol. 4, London, 1977, p. 17).
Moore deemed Reclining Figure: Festival to be one of the most significant sculptures he had ever created. As he explained, this figure represented a watershed moment, being ‘perhaps my first sculpture where the space and the form are completely dependent on and inseparable from each other. I had reached the stage where I wanted my sculpture to be truly three-dimensional. In my earliest use of holes in sculpture, the holes were features in themselves. Now the space and form are so naturally fused they are one’ (H. Moore quoted in J. Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore, New York, 1968, p. 188). This unprecedented unity between solid and void meant that the empty spaces flowing through the sculpture now assumed as much importance in Moore’s work as the solid form itself.
The present maquette is key to this period of Moore’s practice. In order to generate the greater fusion of form and space that he sought, Moore employed a working method that was to shape his whole approach to sculpture thereafter. Whilst Moore used sketches to generate the initial idea for Reclining Figure: Festival, the maquette served as the basis for an intermediate ‘working model’ size from which the larger sculpture evolved. This became his modus operandi and from the mid-1950s onwards, when Moore was striving for an ever-greater three-dimensionality, maquettes largely replaced his use of drawings in the initial conception of the work.
It was this new heightened concern with three-dimensionality and the fusion of space and form which separated the final version of Small Maquette No. 2 for Reclining Figure from Moore's earlier recumbent figures. Commentators, both at the time it was first exhibited and today, have interpreted Reclining Figure: Festival in different ways. For some, its haunting skeletal form embodies a sense of anxiety, created as it was, in the wake of the war. For others, it is a celebration of humanity's survival, the sculpture's form and distinguished lines denoting strength. These various interpretations are themselves reflective of Moore's later comment that ‘sculpture should always at first sight have some obscurities, and further meanings. People should want to go on looking and thinking; it should never tell all about itself immediately ... In my sculpture explanations often come afterwards’ (H. Moore quoted in A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture: 1964-1973, Vol. 4, London, 1977, p. 17).