Property of A PRIVATE AMERICAN COLLECTOR

Property of A Private American Collector

Details

Property of A PRIVATE AMERICAN COLLECTOR

HENRY MOORE (1898-1986)
Woman
stamped on the back of the base 'Guss. H. Noack, Berlin'--bronze with green patina
Height: 60 in. (152.5 cm.)
Original model executed in 1957-58; this bronze version cast in an edition of eight

Provenance

Marlborough Fine Art, Ltd., London

Literature

ed. A. Bowness, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1955-64, London, 1965, vol. 3, p. 36, no. 439 (another cast illustrated, p. 37 and pls. 71-73)
J. Hedgecoe and H. Moore, Henry Moore, New York, 1968 (another cast illustrated, pp. 322-324, 328, 330, 374 and 470)
R. Melville, Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1921-1969, London, 1970, p. 360, figs. 531-534 (another cast illustrated, p. 237)
ed. D. Mitchinson, Henry Moore: Sculpture with Comments by the artist, London, 1981, p. 147 and 312 (another cast illustrated in black and white and color, pls. 304 and 305)

Lot Essay

Also known as Seated Torso and Parze, other casts of this work are in the Museum des 20. Jarhunderts, Vienna and the collection of the British Council, London.

Right from the beginning I have been more interested in
the female form than in the male. Nearly all my drawings
and virtually all my sculptures are based on the female form.
Woman has that startling fullness of the stomach and the
breasts. The smallness of the head is necessary to emphasise
the massiveness of the body. If the head had been any larger
it would have ruined the whole idea of the sculpture. Instead
the face and particularly the neck are more like a hard column
than a softed goitred female neck. Woman emphasises fertility like the Paleolithic Venuses in which the roundness and fullness of form is exagerrated. (D. Mitchinson, op. cit. , p. 147)