Working Model for Standing Figure: Knife Edge

‘Sculpture has some disadvantages compared with painting, but it can have one great advantage over painting - that it can be looked at from all round; and if this attitude is used and fully exploited then it can give to sculpture a continual, changing, never-ending surprise and interest’ (Henry Moore)

Henry Moore’s Working Model for Standing Figure: Knife Edge was conceived in 1961 from the inspiration that nature brought so often to him: a found object in the shape of a piece of bone dug from his garden. He created a maquette from this by adding a head and base formed out of plasticine to suggest a human torso. Moore created a second larger version the same year, and in 1976 he enlarged the work again. As Moore later explained: `There are many structural and sculptural principles to be learnt from bones, e.g. that in spite of their lightness they have great strength. Some bones, such as the breastbone of birds, have the lightweight fineness of a knife-edge. Finding such a bone led to my using this knife-edge thinness in 1961 in a sculpture Seated Woman: Thin Neck. In this figure the thin neck and head, by contrast with the width and bulk of the body, gives more monumentality to the work. Later in 1961 I used this knife-edge thinness throughout a whole figure ... Standing Figure: Knife Edge [the second version of the work]. In walking around this sculpture the width and flatness from the front gradually change through the three-quarter views into the thin sharp edges of the side views, and then back again to the width seen from the back. And the back half of the figure bends backwards, is angled towards the sky, opens itself to the light in a rising upward movement - and this may be why, at one time, I called it Winged Victory. In a sculptor's work all sorts of past experiences and influences are fused and used - and somewhere in this work there is a connection with the so-called Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre - and I would like to think that others see something Greek in this Standing Figure' (H. Moore, quoted in R. Melville, Henry Moore Sculpture and Drawings 1921-69, London, 1970, pp. 261-262).

Moore's exploration of an upright figure had begun over a decade earlier in 1947-48 with Three Standing Figures, carved in Darley Dale stone, now cited in Battersea Park, London. These are sentinels who scan the sky for the enemy danger, an attitude repeated in 1950 when Standing Figure, was commissioned to be positioned in Scotland across a lonely landscape over which the work kept watch for many decades. This was the last important work to be closely related in an earlier drawing from 1948, in which of the ten standing forms repeated across the page, one in the centre of the composition finds a representation in the finished monumental sculpture. These sentinel like forms continue through the early decade resulting in the Upright Motives series of 1955-56, which evoked for the sculptor `the aspect of a Crucifixion scene, as though framed against the sky above Golgotha' (ibid., p. 212).

In Standing Figure: Knife Edge, a few years later, the watchfulness of the earlier upright figures has been replaced by an attitude of triumphal victory and a dramatic magnificence. The figure is an abbreviated human form with a representation of a head, a diagonal shaft which denotes the midriff and heavy drapery to the lower half to form a base. Its commanding height and the dancing movement that is conveyed by the twist of the form has resulted in one of Moore's most successful compositions of this period. An early collector wrote to Moore to describe his admiration of the work when she had been positioned on his grounds, ‘She bursts upon the viewer as you drive in and drop down a small hill. She is revealed feet first coming up until she stands alone and magnificent against the evergreen tree background. She engenders [the feeling] of awe and wonder and excitement' (R. Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore, London, 1987, p. 291).

Moore revisited this work in 1976 to create a third and larger version, Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge which stands at 3.6 metres, casts of which can be see in Norway, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Hovikodden; Japan, National Museum of Art, Osaka; and U.S.A., Little Rock, Askansas. The artist's cast of the second version, slightly smaller at 2.8 metres high, is displayed in the W.B. Yeats Memorial Garden at St Stephen's Green, Dublin, and other casts can be seen in U.S.A, One Maritime Plaza, San Francisco; and Germany, Botanischer Garten Grugapark, Essen.