TY - JOUR
AU - Cole, Thomas B.
AB - St Stephen's Green is a public park in the center of Dublin, populated with memorials to famous Irishmen and one standing figure in bronze by Henry Spencer Moore (1898-1986). Moore's figure looks like an assemblage of birds' bones in vaguely human form, with a small stub of a head and a knife-edge torso turning at the hips. Unlike sculptures with more recognizably human features, it is impossible to guess what the figure looks like on its far side. The only way to find out is to walk around it. According to Moore, this is the one great advantage that sculpture has over painting— it can be looked at (and, in the case of Moore's sculptures, must be looked at) from all round. Moore was born in Castleford, West Yorkshire, in England, the son of a pit miner who rose through the ranks to become a mining engineer. As early as the elementary grades, Moore liked to build models with clay and carve shapes out of wood. At Castleford Secondary School, a teacher encouraged him to pursue a career in art, but Moore's parents felt that working with wood and stone was mere manual labor, just the sort of grind his father had worked hard to escape. So Moore became a teacher instead. At the age of 18 he followed his generation into World War I, survived it, and received an ex-serviceman's grant to become the first student of sculpture at the Leeds School of Art. In 1924, he traveled to Italy on a scholarship to study the work of Michelangelo, Giotto di Bondone, and Giovanni Pisano. He then took a teaching post at the Royal College of Art that allowed him to spend most of his time making sculptures. Moore specialized in creating abstract forms with human qualities, such as postures, gestures, or visual relationships to other figures. Most of his figures are reclining or sitting, but some stand upright. Their humanity is expressed in the way their bodies twist and turn, particularly at the shoulders and waist. Many of the reclining forms are rounded or blocky. To emphasize their thickness and mass, Moore put large holes in some of them, allowing space to flow in and around them. The originality and accessibility of his work seems to have had a universal appeal. Through most of the 20th century, there was a steady worldwide demand for Moore's sculptures. Curators placed the smooth forms of his reclining figures out in front of museums and government buildings, and collectors perched his angular totems on bare rocks in the open countryside. Until the 1950s, Moore typically planned his sculptures by making a series of drawings. Drawing a figure helped him to understand its shape and its nature. He would draw a figure many times to get an idea of what the finished work would look like from all sides. However, as Moore's sculptures became larger and less representational, he found it easier to visualize them in the planning stage by making small models in plaster or clay. The more he used models, the fewer drawings he produced, but eventually he returned to drawing for its own sake, to tackle the problem of projecting an illusion of space on a flat page. This challenge is implied in Thirteen Standing Figures (cover ). Henry Spencer Moore (1898-1986), Thirteen Standing Figures, 1958, British. Lithograph. 30.5 × 25.1 cm. Courtesy of Hofstra University Museum (http://www.hofstra.edu/community/museum/index.html), Hempstead, New York; gift of Dr and Mrs Joseph Tucker, HU 79.8. Reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation. In this image, which is a print made from drawings on a lithographic plate, the heads of the figures are unremarkable, but the body cores have character. Their shoulders roll, slump, or shrug, and their hips and buttocks are prominent, jutting, or slack. Some of the figures balance their weight on both feet, and others shift their weight to one foot or the other. With a few squiggles Moore has conveyed an impression of human forms that don't look much like real men and women. They look more like tangles of fishing line than people, and yet, like Moore's sculpture in St Stephen's Green, they have undeniable human qualities. The figures are not well outlined or contoured, but Moore's purpose was to show what they were doing, not how they looked. These drawings are studies of standing posture. The 13 figures have another function, which they share with his sculptures: they appear to occupy space. Moore cast dark shadows at the feet of the figures and used a thin gray ink to shade and cross-hatch the wall behind them. By this method his drawings, like his sculptures, appear to be surrounded by space, and not just objects stuck on paper. It is not possible for a viewer to walk around these figures, but it is possible to imagine how they might appear on the far side. Back to top Article Information
TI - Thirteen Standing Figures
JF - JAMA
DO - 10.1001/jama.2011.412
DA - 2011-04-13
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/american-medical-association/thirteen-standing-figures-iXPiP4Q2n2
SP - 1389
EP - 1389
VL - 305
IS - 14
DP - DeepDyve
ER -