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Lot Essay
Conceived in 1923 and cast circa 1930, Head of a Girl is among the earliest expressions of Henry Moore’s lifelong engagement with the human head. Its intimate scale - just 16.7 cm. high - encourages close, contemplative viewing, drawing attention to the subtle modelling of the face, the gentle inclination of the head, and the softly closed eyes. Rather than recording a specific likeness, Moore distils the head into a vessel for emotion and inward reflection, a concept that he would continue to explore throughout his career.
Head of a Girl displays a refinement unusual within Moore’s later, more monumental idiom, as Penelope Curtis notes: 'the delicacy of the modelling resembles New Empire Egyptian portraits, with particularly similar treatment of the lips (P. Curtis, Celebrating Moore, London, 2006, p. 81).
This sensitivity can be traced directly to Moore’s formative encounters with ancient art at the British Museum, which he first visited the year before Head of a Girl was conceived in terracotta, in 1922. ‘One room after another caught my enthusiasm’, Moore later recalled. ‘In my most formative years, nine-tenths of my understanding and learning about sculpture came from the British Museum’ (H. Moore, Henry Moore at the British Museum, London, 1981, p. 7).
Among the works that left a lasting impression was what Moore described as a ‘lovely tender carving of a girl’s head, no bigger than one’s thumbnail’, encountered in the Museum’s Palaeolithic gallery (A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture 1921-48, London, 1988, vol. 1, p. xxxvi). Now recognised as the earliest known portrait of a woman, carved from mammoth tusk, the object embodied for Moore a sculptural ideal in which expression could be achieved through extreme economy of means - an insight that would remain central to his artistic idiom.
Moore’s close study of Egyptian portrait heads, pre-Columbian carvings and African masks informed a belief in formal unity, expressive restraint and abstraction as a reflection of inner life. These principles are palpable in Head of a Girl, lending the sculpture its quiet intensity and marking it as a work in which Moore’s early engagement with the art of the past is distilled into a poised and self-contained modern form.
In Head of a Girl, these sources converge with the modernism of Moore’s contemporaries Amedeo Modigliani and Constantin Brâncuși, whose pursuit of smooth, essential forms and the abstraction of the human figure resonates in Moore’s subtle treatment of the face. A cast was exhibited at the XVII Venice Biennale, situating the work within an international avant-garde context at a pivotal moment in Moore’s early career.
As Penelope Curtis has observed, this is ‘an un-Moore-like Moore’, (P. Curtis, Celebrating Moore, London, 2006, p. 81), revealing an artist negotiating between naturalism and stylisation, modelling and abstraction. Conceived before Moore’s move towards Surrealism and deep abstraction in the 1930s, the sculpture nonetheless anticipates the psychological intensity and formal purity that would come to define his mature treatments of the head and reclining figure.
Modest in scale yet rich in implication, Head of a Girl occupies a key position in Moore’s œuvre - an early work in which competing influences are held in productive tension. At once ancient and modern, introspective yet formally assured, it captures Moore at a moment of profound discovery, revealing the earliest stirrings of ideas that would go on to redefine the language of twentieth-century sculpture.
Head of a Girl displays a refinement unusual within Moore’s later, more monumental idiom, as Penelope Curtis notes: 'the delicacy of the modelling resembles New Empire Egyptian portraits, with particularly similar treatment of the lips (P. Curtis, Celebrating Moore, London, 2006, p. 81).
This sensitivity can be traced directly to Moore’s formative encounters with ancient art at the British Museum, which he first visited the year before Head of a Girl was conceived in terracotta, in 1922. ‘One room after another caught my enthusiasm’, Moore later recalled. ‘In my most formative years, nine-tenths of my understanding and learning about sculpture came from the British Museum’ (H. Moore, Henry Moore at the British Museum, London, 1981, p. 7).
Among the works that left a lasting impression was what Moore described as a ‘lovely tender carving of a girl’s head, no bigger than one’s thumbnail’, encountered in the Museum’s Palaeolithic gallery (A. Bowness (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture 1921-48, London, 1988, vol. 1, p. xxxvi). Now recognised as the earliest known portrait of a woman, carved from mammoth tusk, the object embodied for Moore a sculptural ideal in which expression could be achieved through extreme economy of means - an insight that would remain central to his artistic idiom.
Moore’s close study of Egyptian portrait heads, pre-Columbian carvings and African masks informed a belief in formal unity, expressive restraint and abstraction as a reflection of inner life. These principles are palpable in Head of a Girl, lending the sculpture its quiet intensity and marking it as a work in which Moore’s early engagement with the art of the past is distilled into a poised and self-contained modern form.
In Head of a Girl, these sources converge with the modernism of Moore’s contemporaries Amedeo Modigliani and Constantin Brâncuși, whose pursuit of smooth, essential forms and the abstraction of the human figure resonates in Moore’s subtle treatment of the face. A cast was exhibited at the XVII Venice Biennale, situating the work within an international avant-garde context at a pivotal moment in Moore’s early career.
As Penelope Curtis has observed, this is ‘an un-Moore-like Moore’, (P. Curtis, Celebrating Moore, London, 2006, p. 81), revealing an artist negotiating between naturalism and stylisation, modelling and abstraction. Conceived before Moore’s move towards Surrealism and deep abstraction in the 1930s, the sculpture nonetheless anticipates the psychological intensity and formal purity that would come to define his mature treatments of the head and reclining figure.
Modest in scale yet rich in implication, Head of a Girl occupies a key position in Moore’s œuvre - an early work in which competing influences are held in productive tension. At once ancient and modern, introspective yet formally assured, it captures Moore at a moment of profound discovery, revealing the earliest stirrings of ideas that would go on to redefine the language of twentieth-century sculpture.