Henry Moore's Artwork

ARTWORK

Title: Reclining Figure (1929) 

• Artwork Description & Analysis: 
•  medium:brown hornton stone
• This was the first figure in brown Hornton stone
•  Heavily influenced by an Aztec sculpture, the Chacmool figure, of which he saw a   cast in a Paris museum.
• "Its stillness and alertness, a sense of readiness - and the whole presence of it, and the legs coming down like columns."
•  Moore's own Reclining Figure is emblematic.

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Title: Four-Piece Composition: Reclining Figure (1934)

Artwork Description & Analysis:

•   Early 1930s- interest in non-Western art.
•  Inspiration for the piece may have come from Alberto Giacometti's Woman with Her Throat Cut (1932).
• In this respectFour-Piece Composition demonstrates how Moore combined such seemingly opposed currents as Constructivism and Surrealism.
• Cumberland alabaster

Title: Bird Basket (1939)

Artwork Description & Analysis: 

• In particular from friction drums made on the Oceanic island of New Ireland.
• Interest in open and closed forms: he was intrigued by the way it was possible to perceive continuities between the mass of an object and the space around it.
• The strings serve to emphasize the space around the figure, even though our eye can still see through them to the hard mass of the sculpture's body.
• medium:

Title: Helmet (1939-1940)

Artwork Description & Analysis: 

• To feature the idea of internal and external forms.
• Providing another means to pose the contrast between hard and soft.
• By an illustration of ancient Greek.

Title: Tube Shelter Perspective (1941)

Artwork Description & Analysis:  

• At the outset of WWII, Moore was approached to be an official War Artist.
• The War Artists Committee later purchased a number of larger drawings from Moore, including Tube Shelter Perspective, and distributed them to galleries around England to help boost morale.

Title: Reclining Figure (1957-1958)

Artwork Description & Analysis: 

•  The commission to produce a sculpture for the headquarters of UNESCO, in Paris.
• A figure stretching over 16 feet in length.
• Create a bronze sculpture.
• This sculpture is a testament to his adaptability, with the finished sculpture weighing 39 tons and composed of four separate blocks of material.
• It has been described as a latter day Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom.