Reclining Figure: Festival (LH 293) is a bronze sculpture by English artist Henry Moore, commissioned by the Arts Council in 1949 for the Festival of Britain in 1951. The sculpture can be viewed as an abstraction of a reclining female human figure, resting on two arms, with a small head.
By 1949, Moore was already recognised as Britain's greatest living sculptor, having won the prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1948. The Arts Council suggested that a family group would be appropriate for its commission, based on the festival theme of "discovery", but Moore decided to create a reclining female form instead. The Tate Gallery organised a retrospective of Moore's works in 1951, to run alongside the festival on the South Bank. John Read produced a television documentary for the BBC about Moore which included the making of the sculpture, from the initial sketches to the casting of the full-size bronze. [1]
For this sculpture, Moore used a new working method that he would continue to use for his later works, starting with initial sketches before making plaster maquettes, then creating a small bronze working model which would be enlarged to create the full-size final cast. Moore made his sketches and maquettes in 1950 (LH 292a, b and LH 292). A key plaster model measuring 105.5 × 227 × 89 centimetres (41.5 × 89.4 × 35.0 in) was donated to the Tate Gallery in 1978. Strings stuck to the surface create lines that draw the viewer's eye over the sculpture. [2]
A working model was cast in bronze in 1950, in an edition of seven (plus one artist's model). One example sold at Christie's in 2008 for £553,250. [3]
Finally, Moore made an edition of five full-size bronzes, plus an artist's copy, measuring 228.5 centimetres (90.0 in) in length.
Moore said in 1968, "The Festival Reclining Figure is perhaps my first sculpture where the space and the form are completely dependent on and inseparable from each other. I had reached the stage where I wanted my sculpture to be truly three-dimensional. In my earliest use of holes in sculpture, the holes were features in themselves. Now the space and form are so naturally fused that they are one." (quoted at the Tate)
In 1968, he included the work as one of his four most important works, alongside his Recumbent Figure 1938 in green Hornton Stone, the elmwood Reclining Figure 1939 now in the Detroit Institute of Arts, and first large bronze two-piece sculpture Reclining Figure 1959 .
At the Festival of Britain, the first full-size bronze cast was sited in front of Brian O'Rorke's Country Pavilion. Moore knew the sculpture would be relocated after the festival so made a work that did not relate specifically to the original site but which could be viewed in the round. After the end of the Festival, this cast went on loan to Leeds City Art Gallery, and it was exhibited in the grounds of Temple Newsam House. It was vandalised with blue paint in November 1953, and removed from display in 1956. It was lent to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1961, which acquired ownership in 1969, and there it remains. [4]
A bronze cast, held by Musée National d'Art Moderne, is displayed in the Jardin des Tuileries near the Musée de l'Orangerie, in Paris. [5]
A third cast was sold for £19,081,250 at Christie's in February 2012, setting a record for a British sculpture and exceeding the £10.3 million paid for Damien Hirst's The Golden Calf in 2008. [6] A further record was set when a fourth cast was sold for £24,722,500 at Christie's in June 2016. [7] [8]
Henry Spencer Moore was an English artist. He is best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures which are located around the world as public works of art. As well as sculpture, Moore produced many drawings, including a series depicting Londoners sheltering from the Blitz during the Second World War, along with other graphic works on paper.
Two-Piece Reclining Figure: Points is a sculpture by Henry Moore, catalogued as LH 606, and created in 1969–70.
Reclining Figure 1969–70 is a bronze sculpture by English artist Henry Moore.
Draped Seated Woman 1957–58 is a bronze sculpture by the British artist Henry Moore, cast in an edition of seven in the 1950s. The sculpture depicts a female figure resting in a seated position, with her legs folded back to her right, her left hand supporting her weight, and her right hand on her right leg. The drapery emphasises the female figure, but the facial features are abstracted and barely picked out.
Draped Reclining Woman 1957–58 is a bronze sculpture by British artist Henry Moore, with a series of six castings made by Hermann Noack in Berlin.
King and Queen is a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore, designed in 1952. It depicts two figures, one male and one female, seated beside each other on a bench, both facing slightly to the left. It is Moore's only sculpture depicting a single pair of adult figures. Moore's records suggest it was originally known as Two Seated Figures.
Spindle Piece is a bronze sculpture by Henry Moore. Unusually, the sculpture was made in four sizes: a plaster maquette cast in bronze as Maquette for Spindle Piece in 1968, a larger plaster working model which was also cast in bronze as Spindle Piece in 1968, a larger series of bronze sculptures Large Spindle Piece cast in 1974, and the largest model, known as The Spindle, carved in travertine in 1981.
Meridian is a bronze sculpture by British artist Barbara Hepworth. It is an early example of her public commissions, commissioned for State House, a new 16-storey office block constructed at 66–71 High Holborn, London, in the early 1960s. The sculpture was made in 1958–59, and erected in 1960. When the building was demolished in 1990, the sculpture was sold and moved to the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens in Purchase, New York.
Three Piece Sculpture: Vertebrae, also known as Dallas Piece or Vertebrae, is an abstract bronze sculpture by Henry Moore. It was cast in 1978–79, specifically for a site outside I.M. Pei's Dallas City Hall, and is the largest version of a sculpture that Moore created in 1968.
Three-Way Piece No.1: Points is a bronze abstract sculpture by Henry Moore. Three full-size sculptures were cast in 1967, one installed on the Columbia University campus in Upper Manhattan, New York City, and the others at Des Moines Art Center, and Fairmount Park in Philadelphia.
Sheep Piece is a sculpture by Henry Moore made in three sizes from 1969-1972, starting in 1969 with a 14 centimetres (5.5 in) maquette modelled in plaster and then cast in bronze, enlarged in 1971 to a 142 centimetres (56 in) working model in plaster and then cast in bronze, and finally a full size bronze on a monumental scale, 570 centimetres (220 in) high, cast in 1971-72. The four full-size casts are at the Henry Moore Foundation in Perry Green, Hertfordshire, in Zürich, in Kansas City, and at the Donald M. Kendall Sculpture Gardens in Purchase, New York.
Reclining Figure 1938 is a small sculpture by Henry Moore of an sinuous abstracted human figure. An enlarged version was made in 1984 for the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation, Singapore. The resulting Large Reclining Figure is some 9 metres (30 ft) long, making it the largest sculpture made by Moore.
Recumbent Figure 1938 (LH191) is an early sculpture by Henry Moore. It was commissioned by the architect Serge Chermayeff for his modernist villa at Bentley Wood, near Halland, Sussex. At the time it was made, it was Moore's largest stone sculpture. It was donated to the Tate Gallery in 1939, making it the first example of Moore's work in a public collection.
Oval with Points is a series of enigmatic abstract sculptures by British sculptor Henry Moore, made in plaster and bronze from 1968 to 1970, from a 14-centimetre (5.5 in) maquette in 1968 made in plaster and then cast in bronze, through a 110-centimetre (43 in) working model in 1968–1969 also made plaster and then cast in bronze, to a full-size 332-centimetre (131 in) bronze version cast in 1969.
Family Group is a sculpture by Henry Moore. It was his first large-scale bronze sculpture, and his first large bronze with multiple castings. Made for Barclay School in Stevenage, it evolved from drawings in the 1930s, through a series of models to bronze castings in 1950–51. It also one of the last important sculptures that Moore developed from preliminary drawings: in future, he worked mainly from found objects, maquettes and models.
UNESCO Reclining Figure 1957–58 is a sculpture by Henry Moore. It was made in a series of scales, from a small plaster maquette, through a half-size working model made in plaster and cast in bronze, to a full-size version carved in Roman travertine marble in 1957–1958. The final work was installed in 1958 at the World Heritage Centre, the headquarters of UNESCO at the Place de Fontenoy in Paris. This was Moore's last major public commission in which he created a new work for a specific site; he afterwards generally worked from an existing sketch or model.
Reclining Figure 1963–5 is a statue by Henry Moore. The original two-part bronze statue of a human figure was commissioned for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, where it has been displayed outdoors since 1965 in a pool of water to the north of the new Metropolitan Opera House. Other copies in plaster or bronze exist, and are displayed in other cities.
Three Way Piece No.2: Archer is a large sculpture by the British artist Henry Moore. Two casts exist: cast 1 in Toronto, cast 2 is owned by the National Gallery, Berlin. The work is 340 cm long and 325 cm high. A plaster cast of the work was also made, and was shown in June 1965 at the Queen's Theatre in London as part of a memorial service to T.S. Eliot.
An Athlete Wrestling with a Python was the first of three bronze sculptures produced by the British artist Frederic Leighton. Completed in 1877, the sculpture was a departure for Leighton, and heralded the advent of a new movement, New Sculpture, taking realistic approach to classical models. It has been described as a "sculptural masterpiece" and as "possibly Leighton's greatest contribution to British art". Despite its indebtedness to the Classical tradition, it can be understood as one of the first stirrings of modern sculpture in Britain as well as in Europe. The Athlete was arguably the most influential piece of English sculpture of the 19th century.
Locking Piece is a sculpture by Henry Moore. It comprises two interlocking forms holding a third element between them, on a bronze base. It is usually mounted on a separate plinth. The sculpture was created in 1962–1964, and bronze casts were made in 1964–1967.
