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拍品专文
Standing at almost fourteen feet tall, Bronze Form is one of Henry Moore’s final monumental sculptures, realized in the last months of the famed British sculptor’s life. A refined, semi-abstract study of volume, the sculpture is directly related to Moore’s enormous Large Figure in a Shelter of 1985-1986 (Lund Humphries, no. 652c), a cast of which was later installed in Guernica, the Basque town that was infamously bombed to ruins during the Spanish Civil War. In Bronze Form, Moore hones in on the sinuous central element of the larger tripartite configuration seen in Large Figure in a Shelter, allowing it to break free of the thick shelter that surrounds it to become an autonomous, freestanding sculpture in its own right. Combining several ideas and concepts that occupied Moore repeatedly throughout his long career, Bronze Form is a powerful testament to the artist’s enduring spirit of invention.
The roots of Bronze Form and Large Figure in a Shelter lay in Moore’s acclaimed Helmet Head series, which had initially been inspired by the artist’s studies of the diverse array of armor held in both The Victoria and Albert Museum and The Wallace Collection in London. Across this suite of table-top sized sculptures, Moore focused on the interplay between internal and external forms—namely the manner in which a protective “helmet” encased another, more delicate, organic form within. In the mid-1970s, Moore returned to the subject after a twenty year hiatus, creating Helmet Head No. 6 (Lund Humphries, no. 651) which presented a variation on the original concept, opening up one side of the sculpture entirely. This work would form the basis for both Large Figure in a Shelter and Bronze Form, providing the core forms that Moore would go on to explore in large, imposing proportions.
The powerful dynamism of the central element of Helmet Head No. 6 is translated almost exactly in Bronze Form, transitioning from smooth, sweeping curves and protrusions, to a sharply inclined, flat face on one side, to create a rich internal sense of contrast and tension. Moore repeatedly drew inspiration for his forms from objects he found in nature, and believed asymmetry and irregularity to be important indicators of organic, generative energy. His studio was filled with a vast array of such material, with rows of fossils, shells, fragments of driftwood and small animal bones filling the cabinets that lined the walls of his workspace. Fascinated by the ways in which these objects had been molded and shaped by nature—either by the elements or evolution—he studied and sketched them at length, rotating their forms and examining them from a multitude of angles. Moore appears to have derived this intriguing shape from a small piece of flint, which he re-interpreted and developed across the series of maquettes for Helmet Head No. 6, enhancing certain details, refining the transitions from convex to concave contours, and adding certain elements as he worked and reworked the malleable material with his hands.
As Moore scaled these forms up to monumental height, first in plaster and then in large blocks of polystyrene that could be easily carved and moved, this element took on a new sense of architectonic presence, leading Moore to reassess its potential as an autonomous sculpture. He initially carved the form in granite, creating Stone Form in 1984 (Lund Humphries, no. 652b), before subsequently deciding to scale the piece up again in bronze, casting an edition of six, plus one artist’s copy. The result is an impressively powerful, dynamic composition, its form appearing at once natural and inorganic, as it stands imposingly within the landscape.
The present example of Bronze Form is designated 0⁄6 and was acquired for the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in 1988, where it was installed outdoors in the grounds of the museum, allowing the play of sunlight and reflections from the surrounding landscape to animate its surface. Other examples of the sculpture are held in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Ho Am Art Museum in Seoul, the Wellington Botanic Garden in New Zealand, and the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan.
The roots of Bronze Form and Large Figure in a Shelter lay in Moore’s acclaimed Helmet Head series, which had initially been inspired by the artist’s studies of the diverse array of armor held in both The Victoria and Albert Museum and The Wallace Collection in London. Across this suite of table-top sized sculptures, Moore focused on the interplay between internal and external forms—namely the manner in which a protective “helmet” encased another, more delicate, organic form within. In the mid-1970s, Moore returned to the subject after a twenty year hiatus, creating Helmet Head No. 6 (Lund Humphries, no. 651) which presented a variation on the original concept, opening up one side of the sculpture entirely. This work would form the basis for both Large Figure in a Shelter and Bronze Form, providing the core forms that Moore would go on to explore in large, imposing proportions.
The powerful dynamism of the central element of Helmet Head No. 6 is translated almost exactly in Bronze Form, transitioning from smooth, sweeping curves and protrusions, to a sharply inclined, flat face on one side, to create a rich internal sense of contrast and tension. Moore repeatedly drew inspiration for his forms from objects he found in nature, and believed asymmetry and irregularity to be important indicators of organic, generative energy. His studio was filled with a vast array of such material, with rows of fossils, shells, fragments of driftwood and small animal bones filling the cabinets that lined the walls of his workspace. Fascinated by the ways in which these objects had been molded and shaped by nature—either by the elements or evolution—he studied and sketched them at length, rotating their forms and examining them from a multitude of angles. Moore appears to have derived this intriguing shape from a small piece of flint, which he re-interpreted and developed across the series of maquettes for Helmet Head No. 6, enhancing certain details, refining the transitions from convex to concave contours, and adding certain elements as he worked and reworked the malleable material with his hands.
As Moore scaled these forms up to monumental height, first in plaster and then in large blocks of polystyrene that could be easily carved and moved, this element took on a new sense of architectonic presence, leading Moore to reassess its potential as an autonomous sculpture. He initially carved the form in granite, creating Stone Form in 1984 (Lund Humphries, no. 652b), before subsequently deciding to scale the piece up again in bronze, casting an edition of six, plus one artist’s copy. The result is an impressively powerful, dynamic composition, its form appearing at once natural and inorganic, as it stands imposingly within the landscape.
The present example of Bronze Form is designated 0⁄6 and was acquired for the Kawamura Memorial DIC Museum of Art in 1988, where it was installed outdoors in the grounds of the museum, allowing the play of sunlight and reflections from the surrounding landscape to animate its surface. Other examples of the sculpture are held in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Ho Am Art Museum in Seoul, the Wellington Botanic Garden in New Zealand, and the Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan.