Henry Moore - Meditations on the Effigy

HENRY MOORE Meditations on the Effigy GOLDMARK

HENRY MOORE Meditations on the Effigy

HENRY MOORE Meditations on the Effigy

A seventieth birthday portfolio

Essay and notes by Robert Melville (1968)

Goldmark Gallery 2009

1.

Two Reclining Figures in Yellow and Red lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 50 34.3 x 29.8 cm

ÂŁ4850

Vast projects engage the dreams of sculptors. When circumstances compelled Modigliani to turn from sculpture to painting he went on making innumerable drawings of female caryatids for a temple that was to be supported by hundreds of colonnes de tendresse.

Moore sometimes sees the image of woman herself as a primitive temple architecture, carved out of bare rock. This is a drawing for a vast project, but not quite of the same order as those multipiece reclining figures which are like maquettes for an alternative Gordale Scar.

Here, the gaps in the figures are not wild terrestrial splits, but huge, rough-hewn entrances to chambers filled with heavy light, and the heads are not blind precipices but towers of feeling overlooking the affluence of creation.

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HENRY MOORE Meditations on the Effigy

The text in this catalogue is from Robert Melville’s notes and essay which accompanied the 1968 portfolio Henry Moore now rarely uses drawings as a means of generating ideas for sculpture. The function of the preparatory sketches has for the most part been assumed by the maquettes, and when Moore makes a maquette he is usually in the small studio where, as he himself has said, he keeps his ‘bits of pebbles, bits of bone, found objects and so on’. In answer to a question put to him in 1963, he said that he thought the last important works to start from drawings were the Family Groups of 1944-45. But in fact the tall, imposing Standing Figure of 1950 was based on a very small drawing made in 1948: the drawing is the third figure, second row, in a late example of those remarkable sheets of ideas for sculpture, consisting of battalions of

fantastically inventive variations on a theme, which were so vital an aspect of his graphic production in the pre-war years. The 1948 sheet is brilliantly recalled in the present series of lithographs.

Some four years after he completed the last of the Family Group bronzes he produced another series of drawings on the same theme which were not intended as ideas for sculpture although the treatment of the figures suggests that they are made of a harder and more durable substance than flesh. At about the same time he made some delightful studies of his daughter doing her homework at a desk, and it’s evident from the notes in the margin that he had sculptural

2.

Two Forms in Red and Yellow lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 20 15.9 x 19 cm

£2950

Ghosts of stone and bronze figures, shades of Nature goddesses reclining on their platforms, encircled by shadows like dipping wings and falling leaves.

‘Sculpture is an art of the open air,’ the sculptor says. ‘Daylight, sunlight is necessary to it.’ The black shadows suggest that moonlight too is necessary – also a setting where a goddess is not dependent upon art lovers and museum attendants for company, a place where wind and rain acknowledge her sovereignty, and birds, beasts and flowers pay homage to her absolute stillness, her absolute silence.

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problems in mind: ‘Contrast figure with architecture of desk.’ ‘Make desk a sculptural invention in itself (remember chair in Ladder Rocking Chair).’ The drawings did not propound sculptural solutions and the theme has not been given sculptural form, but the pictorial treatment remains a fascinating pictorial commentary on the relationship between object and effigy.

The inevitable preoccupation with sculpture takes a more discursive turn now that there is no burning necessity to make drawings for translation into solid form, and the lithographs and etchings which comprise this

portfolio of Meditations on the Effigy are in a sense recollections in tranquillity of a lifetime of creative enterprise. It will be seen that they refer freely to the rich store of images in the sketchbooks and that they continue the endless dialogue between object and effigy.

It will be seen too that they affirm the inescapable claim on the artist’s imagination of a conception of sculpture formed by stonecarving. They are the graphic notations of a maker of living stones, and they remind us that among the host of images he has raised to seen and unseen things, the image of a woman who obeys geological rather than biological laws predominates.

Robert Melville (1905-1986), English art critic and journalist. Hugh Casson described him as “unchallenged as the most serious (and I don't mean solemn) and illuminating art critic in the country”.

3.

Eight Reclining Figures I lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 50 31.1 x 26 cm

ÂŁ3750

Images of truth to material, more stone than woman. Incurious, knowing nothing of impatience, snug in a winding-sheet of their own substance, they comprehend their undividedness as fulfilment. But a calligraphy like a network of arteries prefigures their emergence.

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4.

Bird Motifs lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 50 28 x 24 cm

ÂŁ3500

These bird motifs have a way of becoming phantoms of prehistoric figurines, with interjections like the palimpsests of the deep caves, and are a tribute to the first sculptors and their images of well-being. They are the ghosts of those faceless ancestor-mothers of the mammoth hunters, whittled at both ends to establish the dignity of the full belly.

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5.

Two Reclining Figures in Yellow and Green lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 50 33.6 x 29.8 cm

£4000

Coleridge wrote about a scene of ‘perfect serenity’ at Ullswater on November 18th, 1799. He referred to a ‘round fat backside of a hill,’ and the road running over the crest appeared to him to be a sort of suture and in many places exactly like a vulva: he had a slightly shorter word in mind. The note concluded: ‘I never saw so sweet an image.’ This is neither an erotic fancy nor a pathetic fallacy; he is simply recording an accidental monumentalisation of the feminine principle, and it is of the nature of man to find such an image ‘sweet’. The sculptor's images are of a different order. His references to the configurations of the land in his shaping of human figures arose in the first place from his sensitivity to the structure of stone.

These female hills and valleys, hollows and ridges, caves and pot-holes are not so much analogies for this or that part of the human body as the natural features of monumental stone women. The two reclining figures like rock formations appear to be new ideas for sculpture.

6.

Upright Motifs lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 50 36.8 x 32.4 cm

£4500

These thirteen standing figures are of the same strain as the sheet of ideas for metal sculpture drawn in 1948 which included the germinal idea for the bronze Standing Figure of 1950. The height of the bronze is 7ft. 3in., which is about the lifesize of the figures in the drawings. The sculptor himself has remarked that ‘the figures of an artist whose vision is attuned to certain dimensions create an illusion of those dimensions regardless of their actual size. For example Boucher’s nudes, even when they are much larger than lifesize, are always images of a woman about 5ft. 4in. in height whereas the smallest thumbnail sketches by Michelangelo project monumental figures at least 7ft. tall.’ The standing figures in the present drawing appear to be unusually tall because of their leanness, but the natural life-size of his monumental reclining figures is greater. The large Unesco figure is about twice life-size, which means that the natural height of his reclining figures is nearer to 8ft. than 7ft.

7.

Three Forms in Orange and Yellow lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 20 15.2 x 19.4 cm

ÂŁ2950

The small maquettes have taken over tasks which the drawings used to perform, and the ideas for sculpture are no longer elaborated on paper. Drawing tends to become autobiographical, and the artist is evolving a summary and decorative language of lines and colours which alludes to many aspects of his sculpture. These standing figures like standing stones refer back to the early carving period in which he first created object-personages and disclosed his animistic vision of natural objects inhabited by spirits.

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8.

Motif in Red, Blue and Yellow lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 50 15.2 x 20.3 cm

£2950

‘All art has its roots in the “primitive”, or else it becomes decadent’, the sculptor once said, but in order to be useful to him the drawings of ideas for sculpture had to be given ‘the possibility of an existence beyond the paper’. The ideas were close to the primitive sources of form, but not the illusionistic technique in which they were presented. Now that his graphic symbols are not tied to the needs of the working sculptor and serve rather to summon up things past, they can find their way back to the primitive sources of language. The pictographs in the present lithograph are decoratively arranged, but they are symbols of a kind in which the sculptor could write the story of his life.

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9.

Seated Mother and Child etching, signed and numbered 4 of 50 22.5 x 27.3 cm

ÂŁ2450

A shadowy personage (perhaps the father considered as a bogey-man) emerges from a web of line to confront a woman and her child. Matter-of-fact and enigmatic, it is like the faithful record of a dream.

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10.

Reclining Figure and Torsos lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 50 34.3 x 30.5 cm

£1950

The reclining figure in this lithograph has many of the characteristics of the Unesco carving, but it does not convey the same sense of a figure lying partly on its side, and the nether limbs appear to be joined to form a trough. The first of the sculptor’s great reclining figures, carved in 1929, was a feminine counterpart of the Chac Mools at Chichén Itzá - those reclining male figures of the post-classic Maya period which bear a sacrificial bowl on the stomach — but in the process of adapting and transforming the Chac Mool, Moore suppressed the stone bowl. In the present study, the forming of a trough in the figure itself suggests that the sculptor has had in mind the Chac Mool’s significance as a rain god, and has reconstituted the stone bowl in the spirit of his original approach to the Maya figure, eliminating its association with human sacrifice in favour of a catchment for rain.

11.

Standing Figures lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 50 23.5 x 20.3 cm

ÂŁ3500

More than three in number and less crescent-like in their placing, this group of standing figures nevertheless recalls the three female figures in Battersea Park, carved in 1948. It’s the way they stand, and the drapery like loosened cerements, and the tiny, far-off heads. But the Battersea figures were in a sense personifications. Not personifications of specific virtues such as Faith, Hope, and Charity, but of a mingling of human experiences and sensations connected with the coming up from tube shelters after air raids. More fortunate than Eurydice, they had returned from the underworld, and the lifting of their faces to scan the sky conveyed a sense partly of relief and partly of trepidation, since the upper air was the bombers’ element. The figures in the drawing have no such significance, but there is a residual content of augury; they read the sky for signs. Apart from memory-traces of a sculptural event, they place their faith in a configuration of lines and colours.

12.

Eight Reclining Figures II lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 50 29.8 x 24.1 cm

ÂŁ3500

Images of total emergence. Fresh from the stone, the women feel naked, cover themselves with a light garment which writes a poem of folds and creases in celebration of their contours. The women come face to face with the sky, and the paper rustles with quiet elation.

13.

Crowd Looking at a Tied-up Object etching, signed and numbered 4 of 50 21 x 27 cm

£1950

A reminiscence of the drawing of the same name, made just after the period of the shelter drawings, which reflected the artist’s frustrated desire to create big sculptures. The colossal dimensions of this tied-up object exceed anything he has so far executed, but one has the impression that the artist’s own surmises as to the nature of the form under the sheet may well have given rise to the remarkable series of vertical bronzes, cast in 1955-56, which he calls Upright Motives: their forms are so enigmatic that they still seem to be hidden

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14.

Large Reclining Figure and Small Motifs lithograph, signed and numbered 4 of 50 27.9 x 36.8 cm

ÂŁ1750

The Reclining Figure, a slow tidal wave of stone, owes nothing of its hugeness to the contrast with the interlace of small forms below. It’s a huge conception, no less independent of contrast than of its actual dimensions. Likewise, the distant peak of a head is not dependent on the faintness of its outline for its look of being a day’s journey from the darker forms. If the figure were translated into a maquette small enough to hold in the hand, the vestigial head would still look infinitely remote.

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Meditations on the Effigy A series, published on the occasion of the artist’s seventieth birthday, consisting of 10 lithographs in an edition of 50, 2 lithographs in an edition of 20, printed in 1966-7 by J. E. Wolfensberger in Zurich, and 2 etchings in an edition of 50, printed in 1966 by Lacourière Frélaut in Paris.

All lithographs and etchings numbered and signed by the artist.

The Standard Edition contains 10 lithographs (Edition numbers 21-50) and 2 etchings (Edition numbers 21-50).

The Edition de Tête contains 10 lithographs, 2 etchings and 2 lithographs specially designed for it in an edition of twenty only (all numbered 1-20), bound in a leather case made by F. and J. Randall, London.

10 copies of each lithograph hors de commerce were printed for the artist, marked A to J, and 10 copies of both etchings, numbered I/X-X/X. London 30th July 1968

Photograph opposite frontispiece

by Felix Man from the collection of Goldmark Gallery

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