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Lot Essay
In speaking about his sculptural ideas and the influence and incorporation of bones, Henry Moore stated:
One of the things I would like to think my sculpture has is a force, is a strength, is a life, a vitality from inside it, so that you have a sense that the form is pressing from inside trying to burst or trying to give off the strength from inside itself, rather than having something which is just shaped from outside and stopped. It's as though you have something trying to make itself come to a shape from inside itself. This is perhaps, what makes me interested in bones as much as the flesh because the bone is the inner structure of all living form (quoted in D. Mitchinson, op. cit, p. 130).
Henry Moore's use of bones as the basis for his sculpture reached a climax in the early 1960s. He spoke about the centrality of bones in the present sculpture:
There are many structural and sculptural principles to be learnt from bones, e.g. that in spite of their lightness they have great strength. Some bones, such as the breast bones of birds, have the lightweight finess of a knife-edge. Finding such a bone led to my using this knife-edge thinness in 1961 in a sculpture Seated Woman: Thin Neck. In this figure the thin neck and head by contrast with the width and bulk of the body, gives more monumentality to the work (quoted in R. Melville, op. cit., pp. 261-262).
This bronze version is cast number 4 out of an edition of 7. There are four other casts in the following public collections: Tate Gallery, London; Toyota Museum of Municipal Art, Japan; Des Moines Arts Centre, Iowa and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle.
One of the things I would like to think my sculpture has is a force, is a strength, is a life, a vitality from inside it, so that you have a sense that the form is pressing from inside trying to burst or trying to give off the strength from inside itself, rather than having something which is just shaped from outside and stopped. It's as though you have something trying to make itself come to a shape from inside itself. This is perhaps, what makes me interested in bones as much as the flesh because the bone is the inner structure of all living form (quoted in D. Mitchinson, op. cit, p. 130).
Henry Moore's use of bones as the basis for his sculpture reached a climax in the early 1960s. He spoke about the centrality of bones in the present sculpture:
There are many structural and sculptural principles to be learnt from bones, e.g. that in spite of their lightness they have great strength. Some bones, such as the breast bones of birds, have the lightweight finess of a knife-edge. Finding such a bone led to my using this knife-edge thinness in 1961 in a sculpture Seated Woman: Thin Neck. In this figure the thin neck and head by contrast with the width and bulk of the body, gives more monumentality to the work (quoted in R. Melville, op. cit., pp. 261-262).
This bronze version is cast number 4 out of an edition of 7. There are four other casts in the following public collections: Tate Gallery, London; Toyota Museum of Municipal Art, Japan; Des Moines Arts Centre, Iowa and the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle.