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拍品專文
Conceived in 1939 and cast in 1968, Stringed Figure stands as one of the most intellectually daring and visually arresting works within the prolific oeuvre of Henry Moore. Whilst celebrated for his monumental bronzes and his enduring reinvention of the reclining figure, his engagement with string, marks a decisive and probing moment in his sculptural thinking. In the present work, Moore does not simply explore the possibilities of a new material, but investigates the very conditions under which sculpture occupies and activates space.
‘Undoubtedly the source of my stringed figures was the Science Museum... I was fascinated by the mathematical models I saw there, which had been made to illustrate the difference of the form that is half-way between a square and a circle… 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 which excited me’
- Henry Moore
The genesis of the stringed sculptures can be traced to Moore’s student years at the Royal College of Art. During this period, he made repeated visits to the Science Museum, where he encountered a collection of mathematical models made of taut threads stretched across brass armatures. Designed to demonstrate principles of descriptive geometry, these pedagogical objects mapped the transformation of one geometric form into another. Moore later explained that his interest was not scientific but perceptual.
Whilst earlier in the 1930s Moore briefly explored Surrealism in his work - evident in the form of Stringed Figure - by the late 1930s, Moore was living and working in Hampstead amid a dynamic circle of avant-garde artists, including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Russian émigré Naum Gabo. Gabo’s Constructivist practice explored the articulation of volume through line, often employing string or wire to describe space without solid mass. While Moore would have been aware of these investigations, his approach diverged in crucial ways. Gabo sought to dematerialise sculpture, to dissolve it into spatial vectors and transparent structures. Moore, by contrast, never relinquished the corporeal weight and tactility of form. Instead of replacing mass with line, he staged a confrontation between them.
In Stringed Figure, this confrontation is immediate and sensuous. The bronze body is polished, curvilinear, and stout, its asymmetrical contours recalling the biomorphic vitality that characterises so much of Moore’s work. Cavities pierce the form, opening it to the surrounding air. Across these voids stretches a web of taut red strings, each precisely anchored and geometrically exact. The contrast is both visual and tactile: the smooth, cool surface of bronze set against the vivid colour and fibrous tension of the threads. The bronze swells and yields; the strings cut, bind, and measure.
The sculpture’s power resides in this dynamic opposition. The solid bronze is palpably organic, suggestive of bone, shell, or eroded stone, while the strings assert a rational, linear order. Suspended across open cavities, they neither fill the void nor leave it untouched. Instead, they define its limits. As the critic David Sylvester observed, that space ‘remains visible, but its limits are now defined on all sides, it is a form in air’ (D. Sylvester, ‘The Evolution of Henry Moore’s Sculpture: I’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 90, no. 543, June 1948, p.164). The void becomes activated: bound yet transparent, structured yet permeable. What might otherwise read as absence assumes the status of presence.
Crucially, this presence is not static. As the viewer’s gaze moves, the strings generate shifting visual rhythms. Sets of lines overlap and separate, producing optical vibrations within the contained space. The eye traces their taut trajectories, only to be drawn back to the swelling contours of the bronze. In this interplay of volume and line, mass and void, Moore creates a perceptual tension that can never be resolved from a single vantage point. He transforms negative space into a sculptural protagonist, sharpening awareness of what is habitually overlooked: the invisible architecture that structures our perception of form.
Conceived at the eve of the Second World War, Stringed Figure was cast in 1968, at a moment when Moore had achieved international acclaim and was engaged in major public commissions across Europe and America. The later casting reanimates a crucial pre-war inquiry – an investigation into making negative space legible and rendering interior voids visible. Stringed Figure occupies a turning point in Moore’s development: it looks back to a period of experimental intensity while anticipating the increasingly open, pierced forms of his post-war sculpture. Ultimately, the work crystallises Moore’s enduring fascination with the tension between mass and emptiness, structure and suspension, standing as a testament to his ability to make the unseen powerfully, almost physically, felt.
‘Undoubtedly the source of my stringed figures was the Science Museum... I was fascinated by the mathematical models I saw there, which had been made to illustrate the difference of the form that is half-way between a square and a circle… 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 which excited me’
- Henry Moore
The genesis of the stringed sculptures can be traced to Moore’s student years at the Royal College of Art. During this period, he made repeated visits to the Science Museum, where he encountered a collection of mathematical models made of taut threads stretched across brass armatures. Designed to demonstrate principles of descriptive geometry, these pedagogical objects mapped the transformation of one geometric form into another. Moore later explained that his interest was not scientific but perceptual.
Whilst earlier in the 1930s Moore briefly explored Surrealism in his work - evident in the form of Stringed Figure - by the late 1930s, Moore was living and working in Hampstead amid a dynamic circle of avant-garde artists, including Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson, and Russian émigré Naum Gabo. Gabo’s Constructivist practice explored the articulation of volume through line, often employing string or wire to describe space without solid mass. While Moore would have been aware of these investigations, his approach diverged in crucial ways. Gabo sought to dematerialise sculpture, to dissolve it into spatial vectors and transparent structures. Moore, by contrast, never relinquished the corporeal weight and tactility of form. Instead of replacing mass with line, he staged a confrontation between them.
In Stringed Figure, this confrontation is immediate and sensuous. The bronze body is polished, curvilinear, and stout, its asymmetrical contours recalling the biomorphic vitality that characterises so much of Moore’s work. Cavities pierce the form, opening it to the surrounding air. Across these voids stretches a web of taut red strings, each precisely anchored and geometrically exact. The contrast is both visual and tactile: the smooth, cool surface of bronze set against the vivid colour and fibrous tension of the threads. The bronze swells and yields; the strings cut, bind, and measure.
The sculpture’s power resides in this dynamic opposition. The solid bronze is palpably organic, suggestive of bone, shell, or eroded stone, while the strings assert a rational, linear order. Suspended across open cavities, they neither fill the void nor leave it untouched. Instead, they define its limits. As the critic David Sylvester observed, that space ‘remains visible, but its limits are now defined on all sides, it is a form in air’ (D. Sylvester, ‘The Evolution of Henry Moore’s Sculpture: I’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 90, no. 543, June 1948, p.164). The void becomes activated: bound yet transparent, structured yet permeable. What might otherwise read as absence assumes the status of presence.
Crucially, this presence is not static. As the viewer’s gaze moves, the strings generate shifting visual rhythms. Sets of lines overlap and separate, producing optical vibrations within the contained space. The eye traces their taut trajectories, only to be drawn back to the swelling contours of the bronze. In this interplay of volume and line, mass and void, Moore creates a perceptual tension that can never be resolved from a single vantage point. He transforms negative space into a sculptural protagonist, sharpening awareness of what is habitually overlooked: the invisible architecture that structures our perception of form.
Conceived at the eve of the Second World War, Stringed Figure was cast in 1968, at a moment when Moore had achieved international acclaim and was engaged in major public commissions across Europe and America. The later casting reanimates a crucial pre-war inquiry – an investigation into making negative space legible and rendering interior voids visible. Stringed Figure occupies a turning point in Moore’s development: it looks back to a period of experimental intensity while anticipating the increasingly open, pierced forms of his post-war sculpture. Ultimately, the work crystallises Moore’s enduring fascination with the tension between mass and emptiness, structure and suspension, standing as a testament to his ability to make the unseen powerfully, almost physically, felt.