Henry Moore

Kasahara Gallery, Osaka (acquired from the artist)

Acquired from the above in 1990

Henry Moore in Israel, Sculpture, Drawings and Graphics (exhibition catalogue), Horace Richter Gallery Tel-Aviv University, Israel, 1982, no. 5, illustration of another cast pp.18-19

Henry Moore, 85th Birthday Exhibition (exhibition catalogue), Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1983, no. 27, illustration of another cast in color p. 56
 
Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Complete Sculpture, Sculpture 1949-54, London, 1986, vol. 2, no. 296a, illustration of another cast p. 35

In the early 1950s Moore executed several versions of the image of two upright forms, one nestled inside the other, the larger shape gently curved around the smaller one, sheltering it from the outside world. Taking one of them – the two-meter high Upright Internal/External Form – Moore used the plaster of the internal form, and executed it in a bronze edition as a sculpture in its own right – the present work. The figures are highly abstracted and stylized, yet strongly suggestive of human form, and therefore related to the theme of mother and child, which Moore was intensely exploring since the birth of his daughter in 1946. While the sculptures containing both the internal and external form have an overall oval, more enclosed shape, Interior Form, having been liberated from its shelter, reveals a more expressive, angular form.

Deborah Emont-Scott wrote about this motif in Moore’s sculptural work: "Moore’s initial interest in the internal/external form was realised in a mid-1930s series of drawings of a malangan figure from New Ireland, Oceania. Moore wrote: '… the carvings of New Ireland have, besides their vicious kind of vitality, a unique spatial sense, a bird-in-a-cage form.' Through the decades, Moore turned from the vertical stance of his internal/external forms to renderings of this motif in a horizontal position, which now became a reclining figure. In this highly abstracted sculpture, the internal and external sections look more like a landscape element than a human figure" (D. Mitchinson, ed., Celebrating Moore: Works from the Collection of The Henry Moore Foundation, London, 1998, p. 298).

According to the Henry Moore Foundation, Interior Form was cast in an edition of seven plus one artist's proof.