The first life-size reclining figure and the greatest work of Henry Moore’s prodigious oeuvre, Reclining Figure: Festival stands as a testament to the artist’s defining role in the history of Modern sculpture. Originally created for the era-defining Festival of Britain in 1951, Moore's Reclining Figure shocked audiences with its radical definition of space and interpretation of the human figure, transforming the very concept of Modern sculpture and forever altering the direction of the artist's career.
“I think [Reclining Figure: Festival] is the first sculpture in which I succeeded in making form and space sculpturally inseparable."
Now synonymous with both British Art and Modern sculpture, Henry Moore reached the pinnacle of his career in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Known though he was for the catalytic New York exhibitions in the 1940s—the first at Curt Valentin’s Buchholz Gallery in 1943, which then led to his retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 1946—Moore further solidified his international profile with the Venice Biennale of 1948 (see fig. 1).
As the first biennial since the Second World War, the 1948 show was more than a niche event for the culturally-minded; the return of this bi-annual display marked the first of its kind since the Second World War, announcing a momentous return to cooperation and creation in the wake of fascist-wrought destruction. It was at this global inflection point and international moment of reckoning that Henry Moore was awarded the International Sculpture Prize for his optimistic and deeply humanist presentation at the British Pavilion.
The buoying spirit of Moore’s achievement, and thereby that of Great Britain’s, was carried forward into the 1948 London Olympic Games, which too embodied the ever-burning flame of hope against a backdrop of long-smoldering wreckage. Within this context of apprehensive optimism, the concept of the “Festival of Britain” was born.
Planned for the summer of 1951, the festival would take place on the newly redesigned South Bank and mark the centenary of the 1851 Great Exhibition. Narrower in scope (but certainly not ambition) as compared to the preceding world's fair, the event of 1951 was designed to uplift the national mood by embodying the spirit of British resilience and creativity. Moreover, it was intended to broadcast the country’s achievements in the past century and project a new and prosperous vision for its future—or, in a more critical light, envisioned as a large-scale propaganda campaign.
In contrast to the “Austerity Games”—as the 1948 Olympics were dubbed for their lack of new materials and facilities—the Festival of London would prove “a tonic for the nation.” Satellite events were planned across the country highlighting feats of art, architecture, industry and design. Cleared of its old warehouses, low-income housing and bombed-out buildings, a 27-acre area along the Thames was entirely redeveloped, transforming London's South Bank into the fair's epicenter and boasting an array of decidedly modern structures and walkways (see fig. 2).
A monumental feat of engineering and civic planning, the Festival was largely met with enthusiasm and approval; average citizens considered it an optimistic, country-wide diversion and artists and designers praised the event for its opportunity to test new ideas in a large-scale public forum and drive contemporary tastes. Others, however, like conservative opposition leader Winston Churchill viewed the entire spectacle as “socialism in three dimensions,” with some sources even citing him as a gleeful force behind the site's later demolition.
It is estimated that of the 49 million inhabitants of Great Britain, about half participated in the Festival of Britain in some way. The 8.5 million visitors who ultimately attended the South Bank Exhibition were treated to such wonders as the Royal Festival Hall, a new 2,900-seat concert hall; the Dome of Discovery, then the largest dome in the world; Telekinema, a 400-seat state-of-the-art cinema, the Skylon, a futuristic, Brancusian-shaped tower suspended in part by tension cables, and at the heart of the exhibition, Moore's latest sculptural marvel.
"Certain of my works are more important to me than others and I tend to look on them as keys to a particular period... I can quickly pick out...the 1951 Festival Reclining Figure."
As the foremost British artist, Henry Moore was asked by the newly formed Arts Council of Great Britain to complete one of his renowned family group works in the vein of the event’s theme of “Discovery.” What was presented in 1951, however, was a wholly new and radical conception—a sort of fantastical biomorphic reclining figure which played on the dichotomy of presence and absence.
The Exhibition was divided into two segments, the so-called Upstream and Downstream Circuits, each dedicated to the subjects of “The Land” and “The People,” respectively. It was within the Upstream Circuit’s subset display of “The Land of Britain” where Henry Moore exhibited his career-defining commission, now known as Reclining Figure: Festival (see fig. 3).
“I knew that the South Bank would only be its temporary home, so I didn’t worry about where it was placed. If I had studied a Festival site too carefully, the figure might never have been at home anywhere else. As it was, I made the figure, then found the best position I could. I was simply concerned with making a sculpture in the round.”
With its topographical recesses and abstracted attenuation of the human body, Moore’s pioneering Reclining Figure: Festival proved a uniquely poetic encapsulation of the era. Having evolved out of his repeated explorations of the recumbent form since the 1920s, Reclining Figure: Festival marked a crowning achievement in the artist's quest for balance, both in terms of its intrinsic qualities and the extrinsic context. Moore intentionally paid little mind to the intended site for his work, aiming instead to create a sculpture which would be at home in any environment and viewable from all angles.
With the Festival’s millions of visitors, however, came innumerable opinions of Moore’s masterpiece. Conservative critics vilified the artist for his daring abstraction, some equating the sculpture to skeletons or bodies ravaged by war; others lauded Moore for his innovative interpretation, seeing the work as a celebration of humanity's survival.
Critic Francis Watson concluded that Moore’s sculpture was “superbly weighted and balanced,” showing “Moore’s mastery of the equal use of space and mass and the unimpaired and unexploited vitality of our most celebrated (and perhaps busiest) sculptor” (Francis Watson, “Art at the South Bank Exhibition,” Listener, 10 May 1951, p. 766). And despite his misgivings about the form’s relation to the figure, the preeminent critic of Modernism David Sylvester wrote: "Reclining Figure has been worked out with superb logic and resourcefulness as a configuration of masses and voids, and the tunnel which cuts a passage through its length is the most ingenious variant of this idea that Moore has devised” (David Sylvester, “Festival Sculpture,” Studio, September, 1951, p. 74).
"When the cloud of war has passed, [the artists] in whom the spirit of modernism is embodied…will re-emerge eager to rebuild the shattered world."
Appointed as an official war artist in 1940, Moore had garnered national acclaim with his famed Shelter Drawings which captured huddled masses of civilians taking refuge in the London Underground during the Blitz (see fig. 4). These drawings would soon evolve into the artist's exploration of the reclining figure, leading to such masterful culminations as the present sculptural form (see fig. 5).
Decades later, art historian Michael Bird would declare that with his presentation of Reclining Figure: Festival at the 1951 Festival, “Moore’s humanism was somehow both personal and generalized; it simultaneously expressed modernity and appealed to the public’s more traditional tastes." He continues, "After the war, those same qualities spoke equally to a yearning to recover the consoling continuities of Deep Britain—the intactness of the unbombed hills and megaliths—and the recognition of a new landscape, coloured by fears and uncertainties, for which the past provided no map. Moore’s work seemed to fulfil Herbert Read’s prediction, that when ‘the cloud of war has passed’, the artists ‘in whom the spirit of modernism is embodied…will re-emerge eager to rebuild the shattered world’” (Michael Bird, This is Tomorrow, London, 2022, p. 205).
"Everything that Moore touches has a living presence."
In his preface to the 1960 Henry Moore: Sculpture exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Brian Robertson distilled the very essence of the artist's body of work, declaring that "Moore has chosen to express his sense of the tragedy and essential nobility of life, as he feels it, in a long series of archetypal images which transcend life... And yet his archetypal images, for all their passing reference to art, are filled with life: everything that Moore touches has a living presence" (quoted in Exh. Cat., Oxford, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeaology, Moore and Bacon, Flesh and Bone, 2013-14, p. 24).
Unfazed by the Council’s specifications and emboldened by an innate assurance of his new direction, Moore crafted the greatest work of his career. His nascent vision was documented in his early drawings, eventually evolving to his plaster maquettes and bronze working models before finding resolution in the powerful form of the present work (see figs. 6-8).
Sensing the monumentality of his impending achievement, Moore worked with filmmaker John Read and the BBC to document every phase of the execution of Reclining Figure: Festival. Recorded between October 1950 and March 1951, Read’s film was the first of a living artist ever made in Britain and helped solidify Moore’s reputation as among the greatest sculptors of Modern history. It was first broadcast on April 30, 1951, coinciding with the opening of the Festival as well as the artist’s first ever retrospective at the Tate, and opened to great critical acclaim (see fig. 9).
JOHN READ'S HENRY MOORE DOCUMENTARY, 1951
John Read’s Documentary on Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure: Festival, 1951
This documentary exposed a wide audience to the mastery of Moore’s practice, revealing the multi-faceted nature of his work from his varied carving and modeling methods, to the innovative incorporation of string in the design of the Reclining Figure: Festival plaster, later translated into lissome webs along the surface of the bronze. The nature of video also served to highlight the three-dimensional balance of space and form which Moore sought to perfect in the present work. The camera turns gracefully around the elegant curves of the bronze and captures the seemingly limitless fluidity of the figure. With this watershed documentary of Britain's foremost living artist, Read not only solidifying Moore's status in the artistic canon, but gave rise to a new genre of filmmaking. Read would subsequently devote four additional films to the artist.
“The Festival Reclining Figure is perhaps my first sculpture where the space and form are completely dependent on and inseparable from each other. I had reached the stage where I wanted my sculpture to be truly three-dimensional. In my earliest use of holes in sculpture, the holes were features in themselves. Now the space and the form are so naturally fused they are one.”
From his earliest days as a student at the Royal College of Art, Moore eschewed the influence of most Classical sculpture and the careful transcription of form into stone via pointing machine. Instead, Moore favored the organic forms of the Cycladic and Pre-Columbian civilizations, whose solidity and stylization the artist emulated in his directly carved works. "I liked the different mental approach involved—the fact that you begin with the block and have to find the sculpture that’s inside it" (Henry Moore quoted in Alan Wilkinson, ed., Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, London, 2002, p. 47).
With the execution of Reclining Figure: Festival, however, Moore reached a turning point in his practice. During the conception of this monumental work—aptly known as Genesis (Reclining Figure) early on—the artist fully realized the flexibility of plaster in its ability to be both modeled and carved in different states, playing on the method of 'direct carving' while also allowing for an enhanced sense of fluidity of form (see fig. 11).
From this catalytic moment in his career, Moore was able to translate his carefully equilibrated large-format figures into the more permanent material of bronze, in doing soon, attaining a balance of solidity and lightness less readily achieved in stone or wood.
Such a synthesis of the human figure—one equally balanced by motion and stasis, matter and void, tradition and progression—was largely influenced by the works of the Renaissance master Michelangelo (see fig. 10).
"I'd taken a peculiar obsessive interest in [Michelangelo], though I didn't know what his work was like until I won a traveling scholarship and went to Italy. And then I saw he had such ability that beside him any sculptor must feel as a miler would knowing someone had once run a three‐minute mile" (Henry Moore quoted in conversation with David Sylvester, in "The Genius of Michelangelo," The New York Times, New York, 8 May 1964, section SM, p. 16).
There is one quality I find in all the artists I admire most – men like Masaccio, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne. I mean a disturbing element, a distortion, giving evidence of a struggle of some sort... Art and life are made up of conflicts."
"In a work like the 'Night,' there's a grandeur of gesture and scale that for me is what great sculpture is. The reason I can't look at Bernini, or even Donatello, beside him is his tremendous monumentality, his over‐lifesize vision. What sculpture should have for me is this monumentality rather than details that are sensitive...One still admires 'Night.' I mean, this is still an unbelievable pose. The whole attitude of the figure, the grandeur, the magnificence of the conception is still a wonderful thing" (ibid).
Beholding Moore's Reclining Figure: Festival, it is evident that Moore too achieved a strikingly similar magnificence with his Reclining Figure's revolutionary spatial harmonies and commanding sense of presence. From this point onward, Moore’s large reclining figures would push the boundaries of figuration, his forms opening up to reveal a new radical sense of space. As he stated, "It would have held one back to go on carving [in stone or wood]... My desire to understand space made the change to bronze necessary. One should not be dominated by the material” (Henry Moore quoted in Alan Bowness, Henry Moore: Complete Sculpture, vol. 4, London, 1977, p. 12).
A magnum opus of his career, the present form forever etched Moore's name into the annals of art history. The legacy of his own tradition, in turn, may be found in a younger generation of artists, in the case of Bruce Nauman—who directly referenced the British master in his own work— and even amongst Moore's peers, as seen in the haunting dysmorphic figuration of Francis Bacon (see fig. 12). The piercing juxtaposition of the two artists, each fascinated with the matter of the body in their own way, was perhaps nowhere better illustrated than in the 2013 Bacon/ Moore: Flesh and Bone exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum. Highlighting the indelible affinity of the two artists despite their varied media and differing styles, the exhibition revealed a common tenet of each man, that every movement of the brush or the hand works to reveal the innate core of the figure, culminating in its ultimate formation and release. The delicate balances of motion and stasis, mass and void, and tragedy and elegance in Moore's Reclining Figure are too at the heart of works like Bacon's Lying Figure in a Mirror—itself inspired by Michelangelo's Leda and the Swan.
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Tate, LondonPlaster and string on a wood base
length: 90 in. 228.5 cm.
This primary plaster was executed in 1951 in response to the Arts Council of Great Britain’s commission for the Festival of Britain. The edition of bronzes was cast from this plaster, which itself was gifted by the artist to the Tate in 1978.
ARTWORK © THE HENRY MOORE FOUNDATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, DACS 2022 / WWW.HENRY-MOORE.ORG
In addition to the two plasters of Reclining Figure: Festival (the original at the Tate and another at the Art Gallery of Ontario), there are five other bronze casts of the form, each executed by the Gaskin foundary in an edition size notably smaller than the artist's typical 9+1 artist's proof. Two of these casts include the bronze originally displayed at the 1951 Festival of Britain, now at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and another in the collection of the Centre Pompidou, Paris in Paris.
While Moore gifted such bronze casts and plasters to institutions and sold other casts to private collectors shortly after their execution, the artist hand-selected the present bronze for his personal collection. Both in Moore’s lifetime and thereafter in the collection of his beloved daughter Mary, this cast was maintained with unparalleled care and attention, largely remaining indoors when not on loan to some of the artist’s most significant exhibitions including the Bradford Art Galleries and Museum’s 1978 Henry Moore 80th Birthday Exhibition, the Palacio de Velázquez 1981 retrospective, the Dallas Museum of Art’s 2001 Henry Moore Sculpting the 20th Century show and the 2002 Foundation Maeght retrospective, among others.
With its exquisite surface detail, rich patina and impeccable provenance directly from the artist’s family, the present cast is among the finest examples of the Reclining Figure: Festival form in existence. As one of the only casts in private hands never before offered at auction, Reclining Figure: Festival is the finest British sculpture ever before seen on the market, this cast in particular marking an unprecedented moment in the history of Modern art.
