Henry Moore

Pacific Heights Gallery, San Francisco 

Acquavella Galleries, New York (acquired from the above in 2003)

Acquired from the above in 2003

John Hedgecoe & Henry Moore, Henry Moore, London, 1968, illustrations of another cast pp. 322-324

Henry Moore, 80th Birthday Exhibition (exhibition catalogue), Bradford Art Galleries and Museums, Cartwright Hall & Lister Park, Bradford, 1978, illustration of another cast n.p. 

Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, 1955-64, London, 1986, vol. III, no. 439, illustration of another cast pls. 52-55

Henry Moore & John Hedgecoe, Henry Moore. My Ideas, Inspiration and Life as an Artist, London, 1986, no. 36, illustration of another cast p. 202

Bacon/Moore: Flesh and Bone (exhibition catalogue), The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2013-14, illustration of another cast n.p. 

Henry Moore Back to a Land (exhibition catalogue), Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, 2015, illustration in color of another cast p. 82

The present works belongs to a series of sculptures depicting monumentally proportioned seated women that Moore produced in the late 1950s. Of the present work, Moore remarked: “Woman and Seated Woman [1957] both have the big form that I like my women to have.… Woman has that startling fullness of the stomach and the breasts. The smallness of the head is necessary to emphasize the massiveness of the body...The face and particularly the neck are more like a hard column than the soft goitred female neck” (J. Hedgecoe, Henry Spencer Moore, London, 1968, p. 326). Moore’s first recorded interest in ancient fertility idols is evidenced by several drawings and studies from 1926 of the Venus of Grimaldi, which was on display at the time in the British Museum. Similar to Woman, the Venus of Grimaldi possesses truncated extremities and an exaggerated roundness of form that suggests fecundity and birth.

Phillip King, the British sculptor who served as an assistant to Moore in the late 1950s, described Moore’s careful consideration of the figural form: “I do remember him talking about the head, and the twist of the head being the most important aspect of a figure for him. I noticed that he would work on that as the crucial part of the figure…I think it was particularly so in [Woman] where the feet are dangling loose in space. It looks as though she is looking out at the side with a rather alert look” (quoted in D. Mitchinson, ed., Celebrating Moore: Works from the Collection of the Henry Moore Foundation, London, 1998, p. 256). Of his profound interest in the female form, Moore commented: “Right from the beginning I have been more interested in the female form than in the male. Nearly all my drawings and virtually all my sculptures are based on the female form.... If the head had been any larger it would have ruined the whole idea of the sculpture.... Woman emphasizes fertility like the Paleolithic Venuses in which the roundness and fullness of form is exaggerated” (quoted in D. Mitchinson, Henry Moore: Sculpture with Comments by the Artist, London, 1981, p. 147).

The bronze version of Woman was cast in an edition of eight plus one artist copy. Seven of these bronzes were cast by Noack Foundry in Berlin. When Moore transferred the edition to Noack, it was initially slated as an edition of four but later extended to six plus the artist’s proof. Other casts are located at The Israel Museum (on permanent loan from the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto) in Jerusalem, the Portland Art Museum in Oregon, the Tate Britain in London, and the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna. A full-scale plaster model for this work is owned by the Art Gallery of Toronto. The present work is one of only two remaining bronzes in private hands.