Henry Moore
The late 1940s brought wide international acclaim to Moore — after his first overseas retrospective at MoMA in New York held in 1946, he represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1948, where he was awarded the International Sculpture Prize. A number of exhibitions and public commissions followed. In 1951 Moore had a one-man exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London and was invited to participate in the era-defining Festival of Britain. Moore’s commission for the Festival resulted in a monumental bronze Reclining Figure: Festival, which was displayed outdoors on London’s South Bank, and was subsequently moved to its current home, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh. In the months leading up to the Festival, Moore worked tirelessly on the subject of a reclining figure, producing many drawings and works on paper as well as maquettes in plaster and bronze.
This remarkable work on paper combines two major obsessions of Moore’s art: reclining figure and figure in landscape. Arguably the most iconic image of his oeuvre, the reclining — usually female — figure recurs in countless variations, from organically to geometrically shaped, figurative to abstract, small to monumental. As the artist later explained, familiarity with the subject and its basic form allowed him to experiment and discover endless new possibilities. In devising his figure as a combination of protruding and hollow spaces, Moore explores its relationship with the surrounding landscape; not only is the figure placed in nature, its hollow forms allow nature to become part of it. Moore was also interested in the relationship of figure and architecture, seen in this composition in the portal-like element that echoes the form of the body.