Reclining Figure: Umbilicus

With its rhythmic, undulating curves and soft organic forms, Reclining Figure: Umbilicus dynamically explores one of the central themes that dominated Henry Moore’s long and prolific career: the sinuous lines of the reclining figure. For Moore this theme was, in his own words, ‘an absolute obsession’, and served as the site of some of his greatest and most daring formal innovations. ‘From the very beginning, the reclining figure has been my main theme,’ the artist later explained. ‘The first one I made was around 1924, and probably more than half of my sculptures since then have been reclining figures’ (quoted in A. Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Aldershot, 2002, p. 212). Conceived in 1984, Reclining Figure: Umbilicus is a testament to Moore’s enduring fascination with the subject, its sensuous, biomorphic forms illustrating his masterful ability to balance abstraction and figuration within his sculptures.

Moore’s interest in the reclining pose had been initially sparked by Pre-Columbian sculpture, which he had discovered as a student at the Royal College of Art in the early 1920s. He especially admired a Chacmool figure from Chichen Itza, a thousand-year-old sandstone carving of the Toltec-Mayan rain spirit, displayed today in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. ‘It was the pose that struck me,’ Moore later recalled to Alan Wilkinson, ‘this idea of a figure being on its back and turned upwards to the sky instead of lying on its side... its stillness and alertness, a sense of readiness – and the whole presence of it, and the legs coming down like columns’ (ibid., p. 98). The power of this pre-Columbian carving guided Moore throughout his career, continuing to inform his visions of the female figure in various states of repose, each one imbued with a rich, internal energy.

For Moore, the intense focus on this single, central artistic motif enabled him to experiment with an array of formal and spatial possibilities. He described the enduring appeal of having this singular subject: ‘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. In my case the reclining figure provides chances of that sort. 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). Propped up on her elbows, the female figure’s head – enlivened by the just-visible, delicate contours of her facial features – is turned slightly as she languorously reclines, a model of elegant composure and poise.

More than the standing or seated figure, the reclining figure provided the greatest compositional freedom for Moore and was the ideal vehicle for his artistic endeavours. ‘[The reclining figure] is free and stable at the same time,’ he explained. ‘It fits in with my belief that sculpture should be permanent, should last for eternity. Also it has repose’ (quoted in A. Wilkinson, op. cit., p. 218). With this motif, Moore was able to continually experiment with the relationship between form and space, mass and weightlessness, figuration and abstraction, and, crucially, achieve his desire to impart solid, inert materials with a dynamism and energetic vigour. Reclining Figure: Umbilicus, with its combination of soft hollows, sensuously curving protrusions and the arches of space that lead the eye through the sculpture, exemplifies Moore’s unique conception and complete mastery of the reclining figure.