Henry Moore searched for what was going on under the ‘skin’ of his images

Supporting sideways on one hand and one hip, she lies there, head raised and torso twisted in relation to the lower body. The plaster sculpture (51 x 91 x 46 cm), the surface of which is roughly hatched and colored light grey, has a monumental appearance. Reclining Figure No.7 (1980) by Henry Moore (1898 – 1986) is inspired by the ‘chac mools’, large Mexican, pre-Columbian stone statues of recumbent warriors.

Throughout his life, Moore drew inspiration from non-Western sculpture, from Cycladic white marble abstract idols (from 3000 BC) and the circular stone constellations of Stonehenge (2300 BC), to carved wood masks of Papuans in New Guinea.

The history of Western European sculpture interested him less, with the exception of Michelangelo. This makes an overview of Moore’s work a journey through time through diverse cultures and through the history of man on earth from the earliest human forms.

In addition to images from ancient cultures, Moore was fascinated by natural objects. He found them during walks: bones, shells and water-polished stones that reminded him of human figures or limbs.

However abstract his sculptures may sometimes be, the human body or an organic human or animal form can almost always be recognized in them. The massive, two meter high Three Way Piece No.1: Points (1964), which balances on three ‘points’, seems to be brought to life by a mysterious, primal inner force that manifests itself in undulating bulges. The ‘prototype’ for this mythical monster was a small flint resting on three sharp points. This play with scale is typical of Moore’s oeuvre, in which small objects can take on gigantic proportions, in reality or in the imagination.

Sometimes Moore combined highly stylized and abstracted forms with realistic details in one work, as in the sculpture group King and Queen (1952). Two larger-than-life figures sitting on a couch, the bodies streamlined in one fluid, abstract movement, have an almost religious presence. All the more striking are the detailed narrow hands, resting in the lap, and the slender feet that look vulnerable.

Moore experimented with the most diverse plastic techniques and materials, stone, wood and wood bark, resin, fiberglass, plaster, porcelain, bronze. He wanted the sculpture to do justice to the nature of the material: rough or smooth, light or heavy, and the traces of the processing remained visible.

Inside and outside

Following the views of the mathematician and biologist D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, in his book On Growth and Form (1917), Moore argued that a natural form is determined by two opposing forces: either by growth from within – such as the growth of bones – or by external influences, such as wind and rain. He saw a parallel to these opposing forces in the techniques of carving stone directly, in which the sculptor works from the outside towards the image hidden in the stone (Moore shared this view with Michelangelo) and vice versa, building and modeling the sculpture in, for example, plaster or wax.

He was fascinated by the tension that can arise beneath the surface, such as when muscles tense and knuckles press against the skin from the inside. In his sculptures, Moore tried to increase the tension between growth and surface as high as possible, as happens with Three Way Piece No.1: Pointswhere the image seems to grow from within with large swellings.

That fascination for the dynamics between the shell or skin and what lies beneath, also explains how Moore came to create large holes and openings in his images. He searched for the outer limit of piercing, opening up, the physical object without disturbing the experience of its wholeness. Space thus became an almost tangible element in his sculpture. For Moore, the voids are not an emptiness or absence of something, but rather a presence. Such is the abstract, oval, porcelain shape of Three Way Ring (1966) so radically pierced that material and space keep each other in balance.

Moore’s struggle with matter and his attempts to infuse a stone or shape with life make him one of the last important representatives of a millennia-old tradition of sculpture.