www.christies.com:
Moore created this initial form, and those that followed, from inspiration that nature so often brought to him: a found object in the shape of a piece of bone dug from his garden. As Moore later explained: "There are many structural and sculptural principles to be learnt from bones, e.g. that in spite of their lightness they have great strength. Some bones, such as the breastbone of birds, have the lightweight fineness of a knife-edge ,
A rare and dynamic cast, not only for its sinuous, structured curves, its elegant balance of volume and its poetic relationship to the earth, but for the inventive and miraculous success of its inversion.
www.nga.gov:
A gleaming, free-standing, abstract bronze sculpture made up of three rounded forms fills a two-story, covered entryway. The rounded, smooth forms sit side by side. The form on our right curves slightly inward up the left side and is lightly pinched at the center along the right side. The form on the left is shaped like a fat U with a deep, wide curve at the bottom. Most of the sculpture s surface is lightly mottled in a rich honey-brown color, except at the top of the front face of the U s arm, which looks as if it were cut vertically to expose an elongated oval shaped disk of highly polished, bright gold-colored bronze. A third form appears as a straight vertical element behind and to the left of the U-shaped piece. The building behind the sculpture has two stories of floor-to-ceiling windows, which reflect darkly in this photograph. The floor and ceiling above the sculpture, where the entryway covers it, are smooth, buff-pink stone. Two rows of deep-set triangles recede into the ceiling.
www.tate.org.uk:
Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece is an abstract bronze sculpture comprising two thin, irregularly shaped forms positioned next to each other on a bronze base in an almost parallel arrangement. From most angles the curvilinear edges of each form overlap, so that different configurations are established when seen in the round. Moving around the sculpture in this way reveals that the breadth of the two forms is emphasised from the longer sides of the sculpture (fig.1), while their thinness and verticality are enhanced from the two shorter sides (fig.2). The elliptical gap between the forms can be seen from two of the corners, which also reveals some surfaces to be slightly concave.
The larger of the two pieces features a prominent rounded notch cut into its upper edge that curves up to a tall, sharp-tipped spur with a flat top (fig.4). This end of this form drops smoothly down to the base, whereas the other end splits into two planes separated by a deep fissure. One is thinner and slightly taller with a more curvaceous vertical face, while the other is thicker with a sheer flat face. An oval-shaped projection emerges from the side of the more curvaceous form and marks the tallest part of the sculpture.
The surfaces of the smaller piece are similarly smooth and feature analogous curved faces and clean-cut edges but no protrusions (fig.6). From the outer edge it rises from a wider, rounded swelling at the base before narrowing as it extends upwards towards the mid-point, from which it remains a consistent width to the top edge. The overall width of the piece thins progressively into a blade-like, curved inner edge with a pointed tip that echoes the sharp angle of the spur behind it.
www.wikipedia.org:
Knife Edge Two Piece 1962 65 is an abstract bronze sculpture by Henry Moore. It is one of Moore's earliest sculptures in two pieces, a mode that he started to adopt in 1959. Its form was inspired by the shape of a bone fragment. Moore created the sculpture from an edition of 10 working models in 1962; these working models are now in public collections. Moore created four full-size casts between 1962 and 1965, with one retained by him.
By 1960 Moore was moving on from his earlier works, directly inspired by the human form and with textured surfaces, such as Draped Seated Woman 1957 58, to more rounded abstract shapes, inspired by the shapes of stones or bones. Moore made a connected work in 1961, also inspired by bone, Standing Figure (Knife Edge) (LH 482).
Moore liked the site so much that he did not even visit an alternative site in Hyde Park; he felt that the sculpture might have been lost in such a big park, recalling an experience he had trying to find the sculpture Riva by Jacob Epstein in the park. He welcomed the fact that the sculpture would be next to a public path and would have seating nearby to allow contemplation, and compared the gardens favourably with the setting for Hubert Le Sueur s equestrian statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, "which, in order to look at closely and appreciate in detail, you have to risk your life in crossing a maze of traffic". The siting of the sculpture was disliked by some, with Neil Marten MP asking Parliament why "this lovely part of Westminster should be littered with something that looks like a crashed unidentified flying object.
www.tate.org.uk:
From plaster to bronze
By the time Moore made Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece in 1962 he rarely made preparatory drawings for his sculptures. Instead he preferred to test his sculptural ideas in three dimensions from the outset by making small models or maquettes from plaster or other malleable materials. It is probable that this sculpture originated from a maquette, most likely made in the small sculpture studio on the grounds of his home, Hoglands, in Perry Green, Hertfordshire. This studio was lined with shelves displaying Moore s ever growing collection of found bones, shells and flint stones, the shapes of which often served as starting points for Moore s formal experiments in three dimensions. In 1963 he described to the critic David Sylvester how these natural objects informed his work:
I look at them, handle them, see them from all round, and I may press them into clay and pour plaster into that clay and get a start as a bit of plaster, which is a reproduction of the object. And then add to it, change it. In that sort of way something turns out in the end that you could never have thought of the day before.
It is likely that Moore developed the maquette for Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece in just this way, taking a plaster cast from the impression left by one or more bones in a piece of clay. As the plaster hardened Moore could add and subtract forms, and smooth or sharpen edges and points as he wished. Moore would then have used the finished plaster maquette as a template for Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece. By systematically charting and measuring specific points on the surface of the maquette, an armature for the larger sculpture could be made to a precise size. It is likely that the armature for this sculpture was made with wood and possibly chicken wire by one of Moore s assistants, who in 1962 were Geoffrey Greetham, Robert Holding, Clive Sheppard, and Isaac Witkin.2 Lengths of scrim, a bandage-like fabric, would have been soaked in wet plaster and stretched between the individual struts of the armature. Once dry the scrim and plaster formed an outer shell onto which thicker layers of plaster could be applied.
After the plaster had been built up to the required depth Moore and his assistants then worked into the surface using an array of tools including chisels, files and sandpaper. These tools could be used to produce a variety of textures depending on the consistency of the plaster as it dried, which were in turn reproduced in the cast bronze. In 1977 the curator Alan Bowness noted that most of the post-war bronzes had rough, variegated textures , whereas from the early 1960s Moore began to introduce smooth and polished bronze surfaces .
In October 1963 Moore responded to a query about the origins of this sculpture from Dennis Farr, Assistant Keeper of the Tate collection, by stating that Sculpture (Knife Edge Two Piece) was finished in the summer of 1962 .4 According to records held in the Henry Moore Foundation Archive Tate s bronze was cast in February 1963. Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece is not stamped with a foundry mark, although it is known to have been cast at the Art Bronze Foundry in London.5 While the finely polished surfaces of this sculpture provide no definitive evidence as to whether it was cast using the lost wax or sand casting method, in either case the foundry technicians would have taken a hollow mould from the plaster original into which molten bronze could be poured.
www.wikipedia.org:
Introduction
Henry Spencer Moore (30 July 1898 31 August 1986) was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art.
His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures. Moore's works are usually suggestive of the female body, apart from a phase in the 1950s when he sculpted family groups. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces. Many interpreters liken the undulating form of his reclining figures to the landscape and hills of his birthplace, Yorkshire.
His style
The aftermath of World War II, The Holocaust, and the age of the atomic bomb instilled in the sculpture of the mid-1940s a sense that art should return to its pre-cultural and pre-rational origins. In the literature of the day, writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre advocated a similar reductive philosophy. At an introductory speech in New York City for an exhibition of one of the finest modernist sculptors, Alberto Giacometti, Sartre spoke of"The beginning and the end of history". Moore's sense of England emerging undefeated from siege led to his focus on pieces characterised by endurance and continuity.
Moore's signature form is a reclining figure. Moore's exploration of this form, under the influence of the Toltec-Mayan figure he had seen at the Louvre, was to lead him to increasing abstraction as he turned his thoughts towards experimentation with the elements of design. Moore's earlier reclining figures deal principally with mass, while his later ones contrast the solid elements of the sculpture with the space, not only round them but generally through them as he pierced the forms with openings.
Earlier figures are pierced in a conventional manner, in which bent limbs separate from and rejoin the body. The later, more abstract figures are often penetrated by spaces directly through the body, by which means Moore explores and alternates concave and convex shapes. These more extreme piercings developed in parallel with Barbara Hepworth's sculptures. Hepworth first pierced a torso after misreading a review of one of Henry Moore's early shows. The plaster Reclining Figure: Festival (1951) in the Tate, is characteristic of Moore's later sculptures: an abstract female figure intercut with voids. As with much of the post-War work, there are several bronze casts of this sculpture. When Moore's niece asked why his sculptures had such simple titles, he replied,
"All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know."
Moore's early work is focused on direct carving, in which the form of the sculpture evolves as the artist repeatedly whittles away at the block. In the 1930s, Moore's transition into modernism paralleled that of Barbara Hepworth; the two exchanged new ideas with each other and several other artists then living in Hampstead. Moore made many preparatory sketches and drawings for each sculpture. Most of these sketchbooks have survived and provide insight into Moore's development. He placed great importance on drawing; in old age, when he had arthritis, he continued to draw.
His work
After the Second World War, Moore's bronzes took on their larger scale, which was particularly suited for public art commissions. As a matter of practicality, he largely abandoned direct carving, and took on several assistants to help produce the larger forms based on maquettes. By the end of the 1940s, he produced sculptures increasingly by modelling, working out the shape in clay or plaster before casting the final work in bronze using the lost wax technique. These maquettes often began as small forms shaped by Moore's hands a process which gives his work an organic feeling. They are from the body. At his home in Much Hadham, Moore built up a collection of natural objects; skulls, driftwood, pebbles, rocks and shells, which he would use to provide inspiration for organic forms. For his largest works, he usually produced a half-scale, working model before scaling up for the final moulding and casting at a bronze foundry. Moore often refined the final full plaster shape and added surface marks before casting.
Moore produced at least three significant examples of architectural sculpture during his career. In 1928, despite his own self-described"extreme reservations", he accepted his first public commission for West Wind for the London Underground Building at 55 Broadway in London, joining the company of Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill. In 1953, he completed a four-part concrete screen for the Time-Life Building in New Bond Street, London, and in 1955 Moore turned to his first and only work in carved brick, "Wall Reliefat the Bouwcentrum in Rotterdam. The brick relief was sculpted with 16,000 bricks by two Dutch bricklayers under Moore's supervision.
His life
Moore was born in Castleford, the son of a coal miner. He became well-known through his carved marble and larger-scale abstract cast bronze sculptures, and was instrumental in introducing a particular form of modernism to the United Kingdom. His ability in later life to fulfill large-scale commissions made him exceptionally wealthy. Despite this, he lived frugally; most of the money he earned went towards endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.
After the war and following several earlier miscarriages, Irina gave birth to their daughter, Mary Moore, in March 1946. The child was named after Moore's mother, who had died two years earlier. Both the loss of his mother and the arrival of a baby focused Moore's mind on the family, which he expressed in his work by producing many"mother-and-childcompositions, although reclining and internal/external figures also remained popular.
In the 1950s, Moore began to receive increasingly significant commissions, including a reclining figure[24] for the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958. With many more public works of art, the scale of Moore's sculptures grew significantly and he started to employ an increasing number of assistants to work with him at Much Hadham, including Anthony Caro and Richard Wentworth.
Moore told a friend about his work Nuclear Energy. He once told a friend that he hoped viewers would"go around it, looking out through the open spaces, and that they may have a feeling of being in a cathedral."
The surroundings of the work is important for Moore: 'When I was offered the site near the House of Lords ... I liked the place so much that I didn't bother to go and see an alternative site in Hyde Park one lonely sculpture can be lost in a large park. The House of Lords site is quite different. It is next to a path where people walk and it has a few seats where they can sit and contemplate it."
The Moore Foundation was established to encourage the public appreciation of the visual arts and especially the works of Moore. It now runs his house and estate at Perry Green, with a gallery, sculpture park and studios.
After the bronze sculpture had been cast at the foundry its surface was artificially patinated. A patina is the surface colour of a sculpture and is usually achieved by applying chemical solutions to the pre-heated bronze surface. The brown patina of Tate s Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece has a speckled appearance with darker and lighter tones (fig.8). The darker patina was probably evenly applied and then rubbed back on the high points, allowing the lighter tones to shine through. A coat of protective lacquer has been applied to the surface to prevent these lighter areas from oxidising and changing colour.
Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece marked the intermediary stage in the development of a much larger version of the sculpture. In 1963 Moore stated that in my mind the final size of your [Tate s] sculpture was meant to be well over life-size, ten or twelve feet high, so that a person could have walked along the length of the sculpture between the two forms but it is not always possible to carry out everything in its intended full size there just isn t time .6 However, Moore did eventually manage to commence work on the larger Knife Edge Two Piece. Moore s assistants would have used the same procedures by which they enlarged the maquette to scale up the plaster working model and cast the resulting full-size plaster in bronze. The full-size Knife Edge Two Piece 1962 5 stands at 275 cm and was cast in an edition of three. One of these casts is positioned outside the Houses of Parliament in London, where it was unveiled in November 1967 (fig.9). The two other casts are held in Queen Elizabeth Park, Vancouver, and the Kykuit Rockefeller Estate, New York.
www.wikipedia.org:
Henry Spencer Moore Om Ch Fba Rbs (30 July 1898 31 August 1986) was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures. Moore's works are usually suggestive of the female body, apart from a phase in the 1950s when he sculpted family groups. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces. Many interpreters liken the undulating form of his reclining figures to the landscape and hills of his birthplace, Yorkshire. Moore was born in Castleford, the son of a coal miner. He became well-known through his carved marble and larger-scale abstract cast bronze sculptures, and was instrumental in introducing a particular form of modernism to the United Kingdom. His ability in later life to fulfill large-scale commissions made him exceptionally wealthy. Yet he lived frugally and most of the money he earned went towards endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.
After the Second World War, Moore's bronzes took on their larger scale, which was particularly suited for public art commissions. As a matter of practicality, he largely abandoned direct carving, and took on several assistants to help produce the larger forms based on maquettes. By the end of the 1940s, he produced sculptures increasingly by modelling, working out the shape in clay or plaster before casting the final work in bronze using the lost wax technique. These maquettes often began as small forms shaped by Moore's hands a process which gives his work an organic feeling. They are from the body. At his home in Much Hadham, Moore built up a collection of natural objects; skulls, driftwood, pebbles, rocks and shells, which he would use to provide inspiration for organic forms. For his largest works, he usually produced a half-scale, working model before scaling up for the final moulding and casting at a bronze foundry. Moore often refined the final full plaster shape and added surface marks before casting. Moore produced at least three significant examples of architectural sculpture during his career. In 1928, despite his own self-described"extreme reservations", he accepted his first public commission for West Wind for the London Underground Building at 55 Broadway in London, joining the company of Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill. In 1953, he completed a four-part concrete screen for the Time-Life Building in New Bond Street, London, and in 1955 Moore turned to his first and only work in carved brick, "Wall Reliefat the Bouwcentrum in Rotterdam. The brick relief was sculpted with 16,000 bricks by two Dutch bricklayers under Moore's supervision.
Moore created this initial form, and those that followed, from inspiration that nature so often brought to him: a found object in the shape of a piece of bone dug from his garden. As Moore later explained: "There are many structural and sculptural principles to be learnt from bones, e.g. that in spite of their lightness they have great strength. Some bones, such as the breastbone of birds, have the lightweight fineness of a knife-edge ,
A rare and dynamic cast, not only for its sinuous, structured curves, its elegant balance of volume and its poetic relationship to the earth, but for the inventive and miraculous success of its inversion.
www.nga.gov:
A gleaming, free-standing, abstract bronze sculpture made up of three rounded forms fills a two-story, covered entryway. The rounded, smooth forms sit side by side. The form on our right curves slightly inward up the left side and is lightly pinched at the center along the right side. The form on the left is shaped like a fat U with a deep, wide curve at the bottom. Most of the sculpture s surface is lightly mottled in a rich honey-brown color, except at the top of the front face of the U s arm, which looks as if it were cut vertically to expose an elongated oval shaped disk of highly polished, bright gold-colored bronze. A third form appears as a straight vertical element behind and to the left of the U-shaped piece. The building behind the sculpture has two stories of floor-to-ceiling windows, which reflect darkly in this photograph. The floor and ceiling above the sculpture, where the entryway covers it, are smooth, buff-pink stone. Two rows of deep-set triangles recede into the ceiling.
www.tate.org.uk:
Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece is an abstract bronze sculpture comprising two thin, irregularly shaped forms positioned next to each other on a bronze base in an almost parallel arrangement. From most angles the curvilinear edges of each form overlap, so that different configurations are established when seen in the round. Moving around the sculpture in this way reveals that the breadth of the two forms is emphasised from the longer sides of the sculpture (fig.1), while their thinness and verticality are enhanced from the two shorter sides (fig.2). The elliptical gap between the forms can be seen from two of the corners, which also reveals some surfaces to be slightly concave.
The larger of the two pieces features a prominent rounded notch cut into its upper edge that curves up to a tall, sharp-tipped spur with a flat top (fig.4). This end of this form drops smoothly down to the base, whereas the other end splits into two planes separated by a deep fissure. One is thinner and slightly taller with a more curvaceous vertical face, while the other is thicker with a sheer flat face. An oval-shaped projection emerges from the side of the more curvaceous form and marks the tallest part of the sculpture.
The surfaces of the smaller piece are similarly smooth and feature analogous curved faces and clean-cut edges but no protrusions (fig.6). From the outer edge it rises from a wider, rounded swelling at the base before narrowing as it extends upwards towards the mid-point, from which it remains a consistent width to the top edge. The overall width of the piece thins progressively into a blade-like, curved inner edge with a pointed tip that echoes the sharp angle of the spur behind it.
www.wikipedia.org:
Knife Edge Two Piece 1962 65 is an abstract bronze sculpture by Henry Moore. It is one of Moore's earliest sculptures in two pieces, a mode that he started to adopt in 1959. Its form was inspired by the shape of a bone fragment. Moore created the sculpture from an edition of 10 working models in 1962; these working models are now in public collections. Moore created four full-size casts between 1962 and 1965, with one retained by him.
By 1960 Moore was moving on from his earlier works, directly inspired by the human form and with textured surfaces, such as Draped Seated Woman 1957 58, to more rounded abstract shapes, inspired by the shapes of stones or bones. Moore made a connected work in 1961, also inspired by bone, Standing Figure (Knife Edge) (LH 482).
Moore liked the site so much that he did not even visit an alternative site in Hyde Park; he felt that the sculpture might have been lost in such a big park, recalling an experience he had trying to find the sculpture Riva by Jacob Epstein in the park. He welcomed the fact that the sculpture would be next to a public path and would have seating nearby to allow contemplation, and compared the gardens favourably with the setting for Hubert Le Sueur s equestrian statue of Charles I at Charing Cross, "which, in order to look at closely and appreciate in detail, you have to risk your life in crossing a maze of traffic". The siting of the sculpture was disliked by some, with Neil Marten MP asking Parliament why "this lovely part of Westminster should be littered with something that looks like a crashed unidentified flying object.
www.tate.org.uk:
From plaster to bronze
By the time Moore made Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece in 1962 he rarely made preparatory drawings for his sculptures. Instead he preferred to test his sculptural ideas in three dimensions from the outset by making small models or maquettes from plaster or other malleable materials. It is probable that this sculpture originated from a maquette, most likely made in the small sculpture studio on the grounds of his home, Hoglands, in Perry Green, Hertfordshire. This studio was lined with shelves displaying Moore s ever growing collection of found bones, shells and flint stones, the shapes of which often served as starting points for Moore s formal experiments in three dimensions. In 1963 he described to the critic David Sylvester how these natural objects informed his work:
I look at them, handle them, see them from all round, and I may press them into clay and pour plaster into that clay and get a start as a bit of plaster, which is a reproduction of the object. And then add to it, change it. In that sort of way something turns out in the end that you could never have thought of the day before.
It is likely that Moore developed the maquette for Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece in just this way, taking a plaster cast from the impression left by one or more bones in a piece of clay. As the plaster hardened Moore could add and subtract forms, and smooth or sharpen edges and points as he wished. Moore would then have used the finished plaster maquette as a template for Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece. By systematically charting and measuring specific points on the surface of the maquette, an armature for the larger sculpture could be made to a precise size. It is likely that the armature for this sculpture was made with wood and possibly chicken wire by one of Moore s assistants, who in 1962 were Geoffrey Greetham, Robert Holding, Clive Sheppard, and Isaac Witkin.2 Lengths of scrim, a bandage-like fabric, would have been soaked in wet plaster and stretched between the individual struts of the armature. Once dry the scrim and plaster formed an outer shell onto which thicker layers of plaster could be applied.
After the plaster had been built up to the required depth Moore and his assistants then worked into the surface using an array of tools including chisels, files and sandpaper. These tools could be used to produce a variety of textures depending on the consistency of the plaster as it dried, which were in turn reproduced in the cast bronze. In 1977 the curator Alan Bowness noted that most of the post-war bronzes had rough, variegated textures , whereas from the early 1960s Moore began to introduce smooth and polished bronze surfaces .
In October 1963 Moore responded to a query about the origins of this sculpture from Dennis Farr, Assistant Keeper of the Tate collection, by stating that Sculpture (Knife Edge Two Piece) was finished in the summer of 1962 .4 According to records held in the Henry Moore Foundation Archive Tate s bronze was cast in February 1963. Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece is not stamped with a foundry mark, although it is known to have been cast at the Art Bronze Foundry in London.5 While the finely polished surfaces of this sculpture provide no definitive evidence as to whether it was cast using the lost wax or sand casting method, in either case the foundry technicians would have taken a hollow mould from the plaster original into which molten bronze could be poured.
www.wikipedia.org:
Introduction
Henry Spencer Moore (30 July 1898 31 August 1986) was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art.
His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures. Moore's works are usually suggestive of the female body, apart from a phase in the 1950s when he sculpted family groups. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces. Many interpreters liken the undulating form of his reclining figures to the landscape and hills of his birthplace, Yorkshire.
His style
The aftermath of World War II, The Holocaust, and the age of the atomic bomb instilled in the sculpture of the mid-1940s a sense that art should return to its pre-cultural and pre-rational origins. In the literature of the day, writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre advocated a similar reductive philosophy. At an introductory speech in New York City for an exhibition of one of the finest modernist sculptors, Alberto Giacometti, Sartre spoke of"The beginning and the end of history". Moore's sense of England emerging undefeated from siege led to his focus on pieces characterised by endurance and continuity.
Moore's signature form is a reclining figure. Moore's exploration of this form, under the influence of the Toltec-Mayan figure he had seen at the Louvre, was to lead him to increasing abstraction as he turned his thoughts towards experimentation with the elements of design. Moore's earlier reclining figures deal principally with mass, while his later ones contrast the solid elements of the sculpture with the space, not only round them but generally through them as he pierced the forms with openings.
Earlier figures are pierced in a conventional manner, in which bent limbs separate from and rejoin the body. The later, more abstract figures are often penetrated by spaces directly through the body, by which means Moore explores and alternates concave and convex shapes. These more extreme piercings developed in parallel with Barbara Hepworth's sculptures. Hepworth first pierced a torso after misreading a review of one of Henry Moore's early shows. The plaster Reclining Figure: Festival (1951) in the Tate, is characteristic of Moore's later sculptures: an abstract female figure intercut with voids. As with much of the post-War work, there are several bronze casts of this sculpture. When Moore's niece asked why his sculptures had such simple titles, he replied,
"All art should have a certain mystery and should make demands on the spectator. Giving a sculpture or a drawing too explicit a title takes away part of that mystery so that the spectator moves on to the next object, making no effort to ponder the meaning of what he has just seen. Everyone thinks that he or she looks but they don't really, you know."
Moore's early work is focused on direct carving, in which the form of the sculpture evolves as the artist repeatedly whittles away at the block. In the 1930s, Moore's transition into modernism paralleled that of Barbara Hepworth; the two exchanged new ideas with each other and several other artists then living in Hampstead. Moore made many preparatory sketches and drawings for each sculpture. Most of these sketchbooks have survived and provide insight into Moore's development. He placed great importance on drawing; in old age, when he had arthritis, he continued to draw.
His work
After the Second World War, Moore's bronzes took on their larger scale, which was particularly suited for public art commissions. As a matter of practicality, he largely abandoned direct carving, and took on several assistants to help produce the larger forms based on maquettes. By the end of the 1940s, he produced sculptures increasingly by modelling, working out the shape in clay or plaster before casting the final work in bronze using the lost wax technique. These maquettes often began as small forms shaped by Moore's hands a process which gives his work an organic feeling. They are from the body. At his home in Much Hadham, Moore built up a collection of natural objects; skulls, driftwood, pebbles, rocks and shells, which he would use to provide inspiration for organic forms. For his largest works, he usually produced a half-scale, working model before scaling up for the final moulding and casting at a bronze foundry. Moore often refined the final full plaster shape and added surface marks before casting.
Moore produced at least three significant examples of architectural sculpture during his career. In 1928, despite his own self-described"extreme reservations", he accepted his first public commission for West Wind for the London Underground Building at 55 Broadway in London, joining the company of Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill. In 1953, he completed a four-part concrete screen for the Time-Life Building in New Bond Street, London, and in 1955 Moore turned to his first and only work in carved brick, "Wall Reliefat the Bouwcentrum in Rotterdam. The brick relief was sculpted with 16,000 bricks by two Dutch bricklayers under Moore's supervision.
His life
Moore was born in Castleford, the son of a coal miner. He became well-known through his carved marble and larger-scale abstract cast bronze sculptures, and was instrumental in introducing a particular form of modernism to the United Kingdom. His ability in later life to fulfill large-scale commissions made him exceptionally wealthy. Despite this, he lived frugally; most of the money he earned went towards endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.
After the war and following several earlier miscarriages, Irina gave birth to their daughter, Mary Moore, in March 1946. The child was named after Moore's mother, who had died two years earlier. Both the loss of his mother and the arrival of a baby focused Moore's mind on the family, which he expressed in his work by producing many"mother-and-childcompositions, although reclining and internal/external figures also remained popular.
In the 1950s, Moore began to receive increasingly significant commissions, including a reclining figure[24] for the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958. With many more public works of art, the scale of Moore's sculptures grew significantly and he started to employ an increasing number of assistants to work with him at Much Hadham, including Anthony Caro and Richard Wentworth.
Moore told a friend about his work Nuclear Energy. He once told a friend that he hoped viewers would"go around it, looking out through the open spaces, and that they may have a feeling of being in a cathedral."
The surroundings of the work is important for Moore: 'When I was offered the site near the House of Lords ... I liked the place so much that I didn't bother to go and see an alternative site in Hyde Park one lonely sculpture can be lost in a large park. The House of Lords site is quite different. It is next to a path where people walk and it has a few seats where they can sit and contemplate it."
The Moore Foundation was established to encourage the public appreciation of the visual arts and especially the works of Moore. It now runs his house and estate at Perry Green, with a gallery, sculpture park and studios.
After the bronze sculpture had been cast at the foundry its surface was artificially patinated. A patina is the surface colour of a sculpture and is usually achieved by applying chemical solutions to the pre-heated bronze surface. The brown patina of Tate s Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece has a speckled appearance with darker and lighter tones (fig.8). The darker patina was probably evenly applied and then rubbed back on the high points, allowing the lighter tones to shine through. A coat of protective lacquer has been applied to the surface to prevent these lighter areas from oxidising and changing colour.
Working Model for Knife Edge Two Piece marked the intermediary stage in the development of a much larger version of the sculpture. In 1963 Moore stated that in my mind the final size of your [Tate s] sculpture was meant to be well over life-size, ten or twelve feet high, so that a person could have walked along the length of the sculpture between the two forms but it is not always possible to carry out everything in its intended full size there just isn t time .6 However, Moore did eventually manage to commence work on the larger Knife Edge Two Piece. Moore s assistants would have used the same procedures by which they enlarged the maquette to scale up the plaster working model and cast the resulting full-size plaster in bronze. The full-size Knife Edge Two Piece 1962 5 stands at 275 cm and was cast in an edition of three. One of these casts is positioned outside the Houses of Parliament in London, where it was unveiled in November 1967 (fig.9). The two other casts are held in Queen Elizabeth Park, Vancouver, and the Kykuit Rockefeller Estate, New York.
www.wikipedia.org:
Henry Spencer Moore Om Ch Fba Rbs (30 July 1898 31 August 1986) was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures. Moore's works are usually suggestive of the female body, apart from a phase in the 1950s when he sculpted family groups. His forms are generally pierced or contain hollow spaces. Many interpreters liken the undulating form of his reclining figures to the landscape and hills of his birthplace, Yorkshire. Moore was born in Castleford, the son of a coal miner. He became well-known through his carved marble and larger-scale abstract cast bronze sculptures, and was instrumental in introducing a particular form of modernism to the United Kingdom. His ability in later life to fulfill large-scale commissions made him exceptionally wealthy. Yet he lived frugally and most of the money he earned went towards endowing the Henry Moore Foundation, which continues to support education and promotion of the arts.
After the Second World War, Moore's bronzes took on their larger scale, which was particularly suited for public art commissions. As a matter of practicality, he largely abandoned direct carving, and took on several assistants to help produce the larger forms based on maquettes. By the end of the 1940s, he produced sculptures increasingly by modelling, working out the shape in clay or plaster before casting the final work in bronze using the lost wax technique. These maquettes often began as small forms shaped by Moore's hands a process which gives his work an organic feeling. They are from the body. At his home in Much Hadham, Moore built up a collection of natural objects; skulls, driftwood, pebbles, rocks and shells, which he would use to provide inspiration for organic forms. For his largest works, he usually produced a half-scale, working model before scaling up for the final moulding and casting at a bronze foundry. Moore often refined the final full plaster shape and added surface marks before casting. Moore produced at least three significant examples of architectural sculpture during his career. In 1928, despite his own self-described"extreme reservations", he accepted his first public commission for West Wind for the London Underground Building at 55 Broadway in London, joining the company of Jacob Epstein and Eric Gill. In 1953, he completed a four-part concrete screen for the Time-Life Building in New Bond Street, London, and in 1955 Moore turned to his first and only work in carved brick, "Wall Reliefat the Bouwcentrum in Rotterdam. The brick relief was sculpted with 16,000 bricks by two Dutch bricklayers under Moore's supervision.