Henry Moore Artwork Catalogue
Large Reclining Figure
Large Reclining Figure
unsigned, [0/1]
Large Reclining Figure is the product of Moore’s fourth and final collaboration with the architect I. M. Pei. In 1976, one of Pei’s most ambitious projects opened in Singapore: a fifty-two storey skyscraper – then the tallest in South East Asia – for the Overseas-Chinese Banking Corporation. Pei had wanted to site a major sculptural commission at the base of the building, but it was several years before a suitable space became available. When Pei approached Moore about the commission, he was fearful of his response. Moore – by now in his eighties - had already told Pei that he was no longer producing monumental sculptures and that he was concentrating on producing drawings for the Foundation. He conceded, however, that it might be possible if the commission were based on an existing work.[1]
Together,
Moore and Pei selected Reclining
Figure 1938 (LH 192) –
a 33 cm sculpture - as an idea suitable for enlargement. However, Moore didn’t
own a cast of this work. The original wax maquette was destroyed during
the casting of the unique lead version, which Moore had sold to the Museum of
Modern Art, New York, in 1939. In 1946, Moore had authorised the Modern Art
Foundry, New York, to cast a bronze edition of 3 from a wax mould of the lead
at MoMA, but he did not retain an artist’s copy.[2] For this latest project,
Moore felt the lead would have been too soft to cast from, so he arranged for
two plaster casts to be taken from one of the bronzes which was in the Peggy
Guggenheim Collection. In 1982, Moore wrote to Thomas Messer, Director of the
Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, explaining, ‘The casts will only be used in making
the enlargement – one will be cut up into several pieces to help in the
enlarging, and the other kept whole to see that the joining and fitting
together is correct…’[3]
Work on the
enlargement began in 1983. Initially, Moore’s assistants made a full-size model
in polystyrene (now destroyed), which was then refined before being cast in
bronze at the Morris Singer Foundry in Basingstoke. At over 9 m long and
weighing 4 tons, the final work is Moore’s largest to
be cast in bronze. Only two bronze casts were made; the one destined for
Singapore was sent by sea in 1984, and the second is sited at Moore’s former
home in Perry Green.[4]
The cast in
Perry Green sits atop a small hill created to Moore’s design. Originally a
pyramid of waste gravel, he had it bulldozed into a more rounded shape to
accommodate a sculpture. Finding an appropriate sculpture, however, proved
challenging. Moore said: ‘This hill is first seen
from three or four hundred yards away, and therefore a sculpture there needs to
be of some size. The first things I tried on the hill were too small – from a
distance they just looked as though there could be a stray sheep that had got
there.’[5] When Large Reclining Figure was finally
chosen for the site, it was the realisation of an idea he had had more than 40
years earlier, when he photographed the original lead maquette against the
landscape, bringing it close to the camera so that it appeared colossal.[6] The
siting exemplifies Moore’s belief that the contrast between solid and void
makes the sky the perfect background for sculpture.[7] Seen
across the fields, the work’s cleft head, pointed breasts and molten backbone
punctuate the horizon, commanding attention.
When
Moore conceived Reclining Figure in
1938, he had become a leading exponent of Surrealism and Abstraction in
England. Although the work is clearly figurative, its fluid, biomorphic forms
allude to these artistic movements and the beginning of a particularly
expressive and inventive phase of his career in which he embraced techniques –
like modelling and casting – that afforded new possibilities in his exploration
of form. Moore did not live to see Large Reclining
Figure
placed on the hill in Perry Green, but the posthumous realisation of this
ambitious vision serves as a powerful reminder of the creative energy that
characterised his career.
[1] Roger Berthoud, The Life of Henry Moore, Faber and Faber, London, 1987, revised and updated 2003, p. 471.
[2] In 1985 Moore authorised another bronze edition of 4+1 (LH 192a) which was cast by the Royal College of Art in London, from a model owned by Pei.
[3] Letter from Henry Moore to Thomas Messer, 1982, Henry Moore Archive.
[4] There is also a white fibreglass version, made in 1983, in the Henry Moore Foundation’s collection.
[5] Gemma Levine, With Henry Moore: The Artist at Work, photographed by Gemma Levine, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1978, p. 40.
[6] Moore photographed Reclining Figure 1938 (LH 192) in the garden of his former home, Burcroft, in Kent.
[7] Ibid., p.40.