Henry Moore at Tate

Henry Moore OM, CH, Helmet Head No.4: Interior-Exterior  1963, cast date unknown

Moore made a sequence of Helmet Head pieces that were intended to convey emotions of vulnerability and protection. He explained the idea partly came from ‘Wyndham Lewis talking about the shell of lobster covering the soft flesh inside. This became an established idea with me – that of an outer protection to an inner form, and it may have something to do with the mother and child idea ... The helmet is a kind of protection thing, too, and it became a recording of things inside other things. In the helmet you do not quite know what is inside.’

Gallery label, February 2010

Henry Moore OM, CH, Hands II  1973

Henry Moore OM, CH, Maquette for Madonna and Child  1943, cast 1944–5

The mother and child had been a major theme in Moore’s work since the 1920s. Yet when the vicar of St Matthew, Northampton, invited Moore to make a sculpture of the Madonna and Child, he was reluctant to accept. He felt unsure how to adapt his secular interests to the Christian tradition. These bronzes are casts of the original terracotta models he made for the project. They are unusually naturalistic and steeped in references to Renaissance religious art. This suggests Moore was trying to produce a sculpture that people would find both modern and familiar.

Gallery label, September 2016

Henry Moore OM, CH, Reclining Figures Man and Woman II  1975

Henry Moore OM, CH, Mother and Child with Wave Background I  1976

Henry Moore OM, CH, Family Group  1984

Henry Moore OM, CH, Mother and Child  1953, cast c.1954

Moore treated the subject of mother and child repeatedly. This sculpture is one of a group of small bronzes made by the artist during the early 1950s that focus specifically on the relationship between mother and child. During the Second World War Moore's interpretation of the theme emphasised the mother's nurturing role, a response to the human suffering of war. He continued to explore this aspect of the subject in the 1950s. Here he distorts the figures to suggest the submission of the mother to the aggressive needs of the child as it tries to suckle from her breast.

Gallery label, February 2010

Francis Bacon, Triptych August 1972  1972

This work is generally considered one in a series of Black Triptychs which followed the suicide of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer. Dyer appears on the left and Bacon is on the right. The central group is derived from a photograph of wrestlers by Edward Muybridge, but also suggests a more sexual encounter. The seated figures and their coupling are set against black voids and the central flurry has been seen as ‘a life-and death struggle’. The artist’s biographer wrote: ‘What death has not already consumed seeps incontinently out of the figures as their shadows.’

Gallery label, September 2016

Henry Moore OM, CH, A Tilbury Shelter Scene  1941

During the winter of 1940-1 Moore, in his capacity as a war artist, was given access to London's public shelters. Though he concentrated on underground stations, he did make drawings of other shelters, including a vast area in the basement of a warehouse in Tilbury where he noted 'Figures lying against platform with great bales of paper above also making beds¿ Dramatic, dismal lit, masses of reclining figures fading to perspective point - Scribbles and scratches, chaotic foreground¿ Dark wet settings'.

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Woman Seated in the Underground  1941

Although many of the Shelter Drawings showed groups of people, some concentrated on individuals. In this picture a lone woman sits apart from the other shelterers. Swathed in layers of clothing, she stares out of the picture, anxiously clasping her hands. This sense of tension is heightened by the abrupt jump from foreground to background and the network of nervous, scratchy lines that describe the figure.

The apparent absence of period detail led some commentators to interpret such figures as timeless symbols of fear, vulnerability and endurance.

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Shelter Scene: Bunks and Sleepers  1941

This picture was exhibited at an exhibition called War Pictures at the National Gallery in 1941. It was also reproduced in the exhibition catalogue. In his catalogue essay, the critic Eric Newton compared the war between Germany and Britain to 'the fundamental opposition between the sea's restless power and the land's opposing firmness'. The wave-like undulations of the figures lying in the foreground of the drawing and the vertical cliff of figures on the bunks correspond remarkably with Newton's analogy.

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Hands of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin I  1978

Henry Moore OM, CH, Trees V Spreading Branches  1979

Henry Moore OM, CH, Maquette for Madonna and Child  1943, cast 1944–5

The mother and child had been a major theme in Moore’s work since the 1920s. Yet when the vicar of St Matthew, Northampton, invited Moore to make a sculpture of the Madonna and Child, he was reluctant to accept. He felt unsure how to adapt his secular interests to the Christian tradition. These bronzes are casts of the original terracotta models he made for the project. They are unusually naturalistic and steeped in references to Renaissance religious art. This suggests Moore was trying to produce a sculpture that people would find both modern and familiar.

Gallery label, September 2016

Francis Bacon, Three Figures and Portrait  1975

Two dynamic figures and bird-like creature are placed within a claustrophobic setting. The three figures are watched over by a portrait. This work is usually seen as an image of suffering. One - and possibly both - of the twisting human figures have been identified as George Dyer, Bacon’s companion, lover and muse. Dyer killed himself in 1971, but Bacon continued to portray him after his death. The bird-like form in the foreground, with its snarling human mouth, has been linked to the Furies, goddesses of vengeance in Greek mythology.

Gallery label, June 2021

Henry Moore OM, CH, Feet on Holiday I  1979

Henry Moore OM, CH, Helmet Head and Shoulders  1952, cast date unknown

British sculptor Henry Moore once described the helmet motif as ‘a recording of things inside other things’. It was related to a major theme in his work: the mother and child. While some of Moore’s sculptures present this relationship as benign and nurturing, other works suggest something more mysterious and ambiguous. Although the protective wings gently envelop the interior void, the toothed visor and claw shape impart a sense of menace, even aggression. The scuffed patina implies some ancient, battle-scarred creature.

Henry Moore was born in Castleford, West Yorkshire in 1898 and died near Much Hadham, Hertfordshire in 1986.

Gallery label, August 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Falling Warrior  1956–7, cast c.1957–60

Moore was internationally famous for sculptures of female figures when, in the mid- 1950s, he produced a number of sculptures of vulnerable males. For these he looked to classical precedents, photographs and such other sources as the plaster casts of the victims of Pompeii. These suffering male figures spoke, perhaps, to current Cold War anxieties and memories of recent warfare.

Gallery label, September 2016

Henry Moore OM, CH, Woman  1957–8, cast date unknown

This is one of the largest of Moore's sculptures of a seated female nude, and it was cast in an edition of nine. The original plaster is in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the curator there, Alan Wilkinson, has described this sculpture as 'one of the most potent images of fertility produced in the 20th century'. He also related it to Moore's early interest in Palaeolithic sculpture, an influence the artist readily acknowledged. Moore wrote of the work: ''Woman' has that startling fullness of the stomach and breasts. The smallness of the head is necessary to emphasize the massiveness of the body - if the head had been any larger it would have ruined the whole idea of the sculpture.'

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Atom Piece (Working Model for Nuclear Energy)  1964–5, cast 1965

In 1963 Moore was invited by the University of Chicago to make a sculpture commemorating the first controlled nuclear chain reaction, which had been conducted at the university in 1942. Nuclear Energy, which is shown in the photograph above, was unveiled in 1967. This sculpture is a working model for Nuclear Energy. Moore intended it to suggest ‘a contained power and force’ appropriate to the subject. Its shape suggests a human skull and a mushroom cloud. In 1987, the city of Hiroshima, which had been destroyed by a nuclear bomb in 1945, purchased one of the seven casts.

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Working Model for Three Way Piece No.1: Points  1964, cast c.1964–9

Henry Moore OM, CH, Reclining Figure  1951

In the late 1940s, the Arts Council invited Moore to submit ideas for a sculpture to be sited at the South Bank site of the Festival of Britain. Although the organising committee suggested a family theme, Moore chose to make this tense, skeletal reclining form. The work on display is the plaster model for the bronze, which was cast in an edition of five.

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Mother and Child with Dark Background  1976

Henry Moore OM, CH, Mother and Child Studies and Reclining Figure  1977

Henry Moore OM, CH, Maquette for Madonna and Child  1943, cast 1944–5

The mother and child had been a major theme in Moore’s work since the 1920s. Yet when the vicar of St Matthew, Northampton, invited Moore to make a sculpture of the Madonna and Child, he was reluctant to accept. He felt unsure how to adapt his secular interests to the Christian tradition. These bronzes are casts of the original terracotta models he made for the project. They are unusually naturalistic and steeped in references to Renaissance religious art. This suggests Moore was trying to produce a sculpture that people would find both modern and familiar.

Gallery label, September 2016

Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait on Folding Bed  1963

The body is often highly distorted in Bacon’s paintings. In this picture, for example, parts of the head and lower body are almost illegible. Bacon has used texture and visceral colours to describe the flesh, bone and blood of the head. The dribbles and splatters of paint are reminiscent of leaking bodily fluids, bringing attention to the physical material of the body and suggesting violence.

The art historian David Mellor has argued that such pictures share much with Walter Sickert’s Camden Town paintings of prostitutes on beds ‘where gross, abject matter was well to the fore’.

Gallery label, July 2008

Henry Moore OM, CH, Reclining Figure: Bunched  1961, cast 1961–2

By the mid-1950s Moore had almost entirely eliminated drawing from his creative process and explored his ideas through small maquettes. These had an intrinsic quality of immediacy or spontaneity and allowed him to imagine the finished product in the round. In order to translate the scale of the work more effectively, he often made larger working models as an intermediate stage between the maquette and the finished sculpture. Moore’s maquettes were typically cast in bronze in editions of up to ten. The sculptor strove for monumentality in his work and tried to imbue the same quality in the small maquettes. He also took a great deal of care with their finish. Some were more polished than others, some darker, some greener. Moore did all the patination himself, treating the bronze with different acids to achieve different effects then working on it by hand, rubbing and wearing it down.

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Draped Seated Woman  1957–8, cast c.1958–63

Two casts of this monumental female figure have been sited in public urban spaces: one in Wuppertal in Germany, another in the East End of London. London County Council’s policy of placing such work in deprived areas was part of a post-war revival of civil aspirations and social reform.

Gallery label, June 2003

Henry Moore OM, CH, Family Group  1949, cast 1950–1

Family Group is derived from one of a number of maquettes that Moore made for a sculpture for Impington Village College in Cambridgeshire. In the end none of them was accepted. Several years later, however, he was approached to make a sculpture for the Barclay Secondary School in Stevenage and returned to the theme. The bronze was cast in an edition of four. One is still at the Barclay Secondary School. The others were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Nelson D Rockefeller, and Tate.

Gallery label, September 2004

Henry Moore OM, CH, Sleeping Child  1979