Henry Moore O.M., C.H.

(British, 1898-1986)

Maquette for Unesco Reclining Figure 21.5 cm. (8 1/2 in.) wide

Footnotes

Provenance
With Thomas Gibson Fine Art, London, where acquired by
Lady Huxley
Sale; Sotheby's, London, 30 November 1988, lot 367
Private Collection, South Africa

Literature
John Hedgecoe, A Monumental Vision: The Sculpture of Henry Moore, Collins & Brown, London, 1968, p.222, cat.no.382 (ill.b&w)
Ionel Jianou, Henry Moore, Arted Paris, 1968, p.81, cat.no.395
John Russell, Henry Moore, Penguin, London, 1968, p.167 (ill.b&w)
Robert Melville, Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings, 1921-1969, Thames and Hudson, London, 1970, p.239, cat.no.530 (ill.b&w)
Alan Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture Volume 3, 1955-64, Lund Humphries, London, 1986, p.31, cat.no.414 (another cast, ill.b&w) and plate 39d (ill., plaster maquette)
Susan Compton, Richard Cork, Peter Fuller and Henry Moore, Henry Moore, The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1988, cat.no.139 (ill., another cast)
Alan G. Wilkinson, Henry Moore Remembered, Key Porter Books, Toronto, 1988, p.172, cat.no.122
David Mitchinson (ed.), Celebrating Moore: Works from the Collection of The Henry Moore Foundation, Lund Humphries, London, 2006, p.252, cat.no.180 (col.ill.)

Upon the completion of their new headquarters in Paris, UNESCO's art advisory panel turned their attention to commissioning works of art to accompany the building, works that would fit both visually and ideologically. Three artists were invited to create the principle, flagship pieces that would adorn the three-pointed star behind the Champ-de-Mars and Les Invalides: Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Henry Moore. As it happened, Moore had connections to UNESCO. He was personal friends with Herbert Read, part of the advisory panel, and with Julian Huxley, the first Director General of the organisation from 1946-48. These lifelong friendships had sprung out of a shared disposition that would lead all three to the doors of the United Nations' special agency dedicated to the preservation of, and education in, the world's areas of outstanding natural beauty or cultural heritage. The finished piece would be described by Herbert Read as "one of the sculptor's greatest achievements" (Herbert Read, Henry Moore, A Study of his Life and Work, Thames and Hudson, London, 1965), but it did not come without its initial difficulties. The most obvious and inhibiting of these difficulties was the design of the building, with no thought spent by the architects on the accommodating of works of art, especially to the exterior. The façade at the main entrance of the building, where Moore's work was to be situated, was massive and visually disruptive, and behind it lay what Moore described as overly "busy fenestration" (Herbert Read, Henry Moore, A Study of his Life and Work, Thames and Hudson, London, 1965, p.198), with awkward uprights traversing the glass panelling. The glass itself rendered the initial commission of a bronze unworkable, as Moore felt that it would disappear against the dark backdrop that glass structures create, so Roman travertine marble was chosen instead. He would spend several weeks in a quarry near Rome, carving out enormous blocks the size of houses to be worked slowly down into constituent pieces that could be transported to the French capital, but before he could do this he had to tackle the composition. The press at the time narrated with typical hyperbole the months of meditation Moore had spent on the meaning of UNESCO, a process which Moore downplayed with equally typical modesty and underemphasis as a light-hearted chat with Huxley during a social visit. But Huxley's reflections on what UNESCO stood for were nonetheless important, and gave Moore a solid starting point on what he wanted his work to say – in this case the antecedent to the question of how he wanted it to look. His first thoughts on how to translate this into sculpture were to show a female reading, teaching a group of children, or even merely lost in contemplation. A perfect match ideologically, Moore came to the frustrating realisation that the impact of these figures would be lost in the hectic background. In response, he revisited an old idea of putting the figures in front of a wall of the same marble to form part of the overall structure, thus circumnavigating the issue of the backdrop altogether. This was a clever solution, and would be commandeered later in the decade in the design of several wall-backed works. It did however mean that the full composition would only be visible to those in front of the work, and not behind, or within the building. Eventually, Moore settled on familiar thematic territory, electing not to get tangled up in esoteric webs over what to say by attempting no explicit commentary at all. Moore himself described the reclining figure as an obsession, a motif that lives in his head on a semi-permanent basis. Where standing figures are structurally unsound, and seated ones are tied too intrinsically to that on which they are seated, the reclining figure abounds with possibilities. "Of the three poses, the reclining figure gives the most freedom, compositionally and spatially" (Philip James (ed.), Henry Moore on Sculpture, Macdonald, London, 1965, p.264). Moore's first forays into the theme of the reclining figure came in the late 1920s, with works strongly drawing on Pre-Columbian influence. Using this aesthetic feel as a starting point, his style in the Reclining Figures would come into its own assertively in the 1930s as he started exploring the motif in elm wood, a material that allows itself to be opened up spatially much more easily than bronze or stone. In comparison to the preceding Reclining Figures, the UNESCO work would be highly simplified towards abstraction, and Moore believed this would help him "to avoid any kind of allegorical interpretation that is now trite" (ibid, p.258). The gentle curvature of the design on such a monumental scale lends a caring, nurturing feel to the figure while maintaining an authoritative air, an idea that cuts right to the heart of what UNESCO seeks to do in nurturing our innate and unbounded capacity for the creation and appreciation of culture, of meaning. The present work captures in bronze and in table-top scale the whole process behind the UNESCO Reclining Figure. From the switch to travertine marble, which the artist would emulate in the present maquette by deliberately working the rough surface into the bronze, to the eventual simplification of the ideological message to a single mood, or aura, that could embody what UNESCO stood for without attempting a verbal narrative. As such, this maquette represents a unique, highly personal insight into one of the most important moments of Henry Moore's career. In finding a way to represent the core meaning of UNESCO visually, Moore managed to express something that was very close to his own heart, something he laid out in an address leading up to the unveiling of his work: "Isn't there a primary duty to make sure that the people have the interest and eagerness that demand the best art just as surely as they demand the best education or the best housing? It is a problem beyond the scope of this address, but not beyond the scope of UNESCO – the renewal of the sources of artistic inspiration among the people at large" (Alan Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore Writing and Conversations, Lund Humphries, Aldershot