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Lot Essay
This work is listed in the unpublished addenda to volume 1 of the Lund Humphries catalogue raisonné as entry 186h and will be included when the volume is reprinted. Also note that LH186 is a related but smaller work with a completely separate edition.
Moore recalled, "At one period before the war, in 1938, I began the most abstract side of my work--the stringed figures. I had gone one day to the Science Museum at South Kensington and had been greatly intrigued by some of the mathematical models; you know, those hyperbolic paraboloids and groins and so on, developed by Lagrange in Paris, that have geometric figures at the ends with coloured threads from one to the other to show what the form between would be. I saw the sculptural possibilities of them and did some. Others like [Naum] Gabo [see lot 286] and Barbara Hepworth have gone on doing it. It wasn't the scientific study of these models but the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and to see one form within another that excited me" (quoted in D. Mitchinson, ed., Henry Moore Sculpture, with Comments by the Artist, London, 1981, p. 81).
Moore recalled, "At one period before the war, in 1938, I began the most abstract side of my work--the stringed figures. I had gone one day to the Science Museum at South Kensington and had been greatly intrigued by some of the mathematical models; you know, those hyperbolic paraboloids and groins and so on, developed by Lagrange in Paris, that have geometric figures at the ends with coloured threads from one to the other to show what the form between would be. I saw the sculptural possibilities of them and did some. Others like [Naum] Gabo [see lot 286] and Barbara Hepworth have gone on doing it. It wasn't the scientific study of these models but the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and to see one form within another that excited me" (quoted in D. Mitchinson, ed., Henry Moore Sculpture, with Comments by the Artist, London, 1981, p. 81).