Reclining Figure

Reclining Figure is a wonderful example of one of Moore’s most signature subjects, the female nude, lying outstretched in a horizontal extension. In this particular work, the woman’s pose is marked by paradox: while her form flows in an almost seamless loop, this impression is broken by a severance between her breasts and midsection – likewise, she is at once relaxed into her contact with the base on which she lies, but taught with tension in the angle of her neck. There is something of Picasso’s horse-head from Guernica (1937) and its associated sketches in the ridged uplift of her head: wide-mouthed with tongue extended in an ambiguous scream of pain or pleasure.

There is immense tactility within Reclining Figure: from the buttery tonal depth of the bronze to the hole, so characteristic of Moore’s work and, as he put it, ‘a shape which could have turned into a solid form if I had thought of it the other way around’ (Henry Moore, in A. Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Berkeley, 2002, p. 207), it is a sculpture which bears the mark of human touch. Moore himself emphasises the importance of this: ‘Our own bodies, our own make up, have the greatest influence on art,’ Moore believed. ‘For me everything in the world of form is understood through our own bodies. From our mother’s breast, from our bones, from bumping into things, we learn what is rough and what is smooth. To observe, to understand, to experience the vast variety of space, shape and form in the world, twenty lifetimes would not be enough. There is no end to it’ (ibid., pp. 220-221).