HENRY MOORE | Two People Looking at a Sculpture - rectoFigure Studies - verso

Curt Valentin, New York (acquired by 1946)
George E. Dix
Private Collection, Austria
Berkeley Square Gallery, London (acquired by 1997)
Frans Jacobs Fine Arts, Amsterdam
Acquired by the present owner in 2005

Curt Valentin, The Drawings of Henry Moore, New York, 1946, illustrated pl. 20
Ann Garrould (ed.), Henry Moore: Complete Drawings, London, 2001, vol. 3, no. AG 42.117, illustrated p. 146

Executed on cream wove paper, not laid down, attached to the mount with four strips of conservator's tape on each corner, and floating in the mount. The sheet is sealed between two sheets of glass and has not been examined out of its frame, as the edges are clearly visible within. The upper edge of the sheet is deckled, and is gently undulating due to application of medium. This work is in overall very good condition.
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As a consummate and innovative draughtsman, Henry Moore used his drawings, especially during the war years when he could not sculpt, to study the structure of objects and investigate the nature of their forms, charting various possibilities and investigating new shapes. As Moore himself explained: ‘Drawing is the expression and the explanation of the shape of a solid object … an attempt to understand the full three dimensionality of the human figure, to learn about the object one is drawing, and to present it on the flat surface of the paper’ (quoted in Alan Wilkinson, The Drawings of Henry Moore, 1977, p. 12). As such, many of his drawings were preliminary to sculptures, used as ‘a means of generating ideas for sculptures, tapping oneself for the initial idea; and as a way of sorting out ideas and developing them’ (Henry Moore, ‘The Sculptor Speaks’, The Listener, 18th August 1937). The present double-sided work exemplifies the highly important technical and stylistic developments Moore achieved as result of his expanded drawing practice. During the Second World War, Moore executed some of his most celebrated and certainly his most publicly recognized achievements as a draughtsman: the Shelter and Coal-Mine drawings executed in the London Underground and the pits at Castleford in Yorkshire. In the present work, we see a combination of extraordinarily detailed studies of Moore's most celebrated themes; reclining forms are juxtaposed with a study of a mother and child and in the upper right groups of spectators examine sculptures in various positions in an internal setting reminiscent of the narrow tunneled alleys of the underground. The combined scenes of sculptures and people, explore the relationship between internal and external forms. Moore’s hollow forms are at once both abstract and figurative.

The first owner of this drawing was Curt Valentin, the German art dealer known for representing some of the most important modern artists including Alexander Calder, Marino Marini and Jacques Lipchitz in addition to representing Moore. As a German-Jewish art dealer, Valentin fled war-torn Germany and in 1937 emigrated to the United States where he opened Buchholz Gallery in New York City.