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Lot Essay
During the 1950s, Moore received commissions for large sculptures to be placed in architectural settings, most importantly Draped Reclining Figure (Bowness, no. 336) for the Time-Life Building in London and the travertine marble Reclining Figure (Bowness, no. 416) for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. The problems of relating a figure to its architectural surroundings continued to fascinate the artist, and during this time he produced about a dozen sculptures on a smaller scale in which the composition incorporates a figure placed before a larger, wall-like backdrop.
In these works the wall is abstractly conceived, but rather than merely being a neutral or decorative prop, it serves to generate most of the psychological atmosphere inherent in the overall composition. In some versions the wall is slightly concave, suggesting a protective, sheltering environment for the figure; in others a flat, square wall projects a more severe and anonymous sense of urban living. In the present work the scalloped-shaped wall is reminiscent of the oval-shaped mandorla that surrounds the seated Christ in majesty in early medieval manuscript illumination or the flame-shaped mandorla placed behind the seated Buddha in the early Buddhist sculpture of China, Korea and Japan. Moore tapped into diverse early sculptural traditions, which he studied at the British Museum. He wrote in 1941, "Underlying these individual characteristics, these featural peculiarilties in the primitive schools, a common world-language of form is apparent in them all; through the working of instinctive sensibility, the same shapes and form relationships are used to express similar ideas at widely different places and periods in history" (quoted in "On Sculpture & Primitive Art," R.L. Herbert, ed., Modern Artists on Art, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1964, pp. 148-149).
In these works the wall is abstractly conceived, but rather than merely being a neutral or decorative prop, it serves to generate most of the psychological atmosphere inherent in the overall composition. In some versions the wall is slightly concave, suggesting a protective, sheltering environment for the figure; in others a flat, square wall projects a more severe and anonymous sense of urban living. In the present work the scalloped-shaped wall is reminiscent of the oval-shaped mandorla that surrounds the seated Christ in majesty in early medieval manuscript illumination or the flame-shaped mandorla placed behind the seated Buddha in the early Buddhist sculpture of China, Korea and Japan. Moore tapped into diverse early sculptural traditions, which he studied at the British Museum. He wrote in 1941, "Underlying these individual characteristics, these featural peculiarilties in the primitive schools, a common world-language of form is apparent in them all; through the working of instinctive sensibility, the same shapes and form relationships are used to express similar ideas at widely different places and periods in history" (quoted in "On Sculpture & Primitive Art," R.L. Herbert, ed., Modern Artists on Art, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1964, pp. 148-149).