Situated at a crossroads in Moore’s life, the present work draws on Moore’s stalwart position as part of the British modernist movement, while demonstrating ideas that characterize the mature, monumental style of his later career.

In the same year as this work’s creation, 1940, Henry Moore moved to Much Hadam in Hertfordshire when a bomb fell on his studio, during the blitz of London. Until this point in his career, Moore had been situated in Hampstead, and had become interwoven within the networks of British modernism: he had held teaching posts at the Royal College of Art and Chelsea School of Art; he had been a member of the Seven and Five society, a group whose members included Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, and would push the boundaries of the avant-garde in Britain for decades to come. In these years, Moore also took regular trips to Paris to engage with developments in European Art. Such engagements with European modernism are demonstrable in the present work’s creative sketching, experimentalism, and reimagining of the human form, seemingly in conversation with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti and Joan Miro.

While drawing upon these earlier influences, Standing Figures was created at an important time for drawing in Moore’s career. In 1940, this work was executed concurrently with Moore’s Shelter Drawings, a series of drawings and sketches of Moore’s experiences of sheltering on the London Underground during the Blitz. Capturing the terror and human spirit of the time, the series of drawings led to Moore’s appointment as an official war artist, and national recognition from a show of his shelter drawings at the National Gallery in 1942.

The present work’s superlative draftsmanship demonstrates why Moore was receiving national acclaim. Using rhythmic and energetic cross-hatching to create a sense of relief and shade, Moore carves out six unique monolithic forms which gradually melt into their surroundings, blurring the boundaries between the internal and the external. These ideas of the interaction between the internal and external interested Moore, and would become realized in various sculptures, such as the embryonic sculpture inside another sculpture in Upright Internal/External Form and through the various cavities in his Reclining Figure: External Form.

What makes the present work so fascinating, however, is that while these forms feel monolithic, static and sculptural, this is offset in the tension created by their anthropomorphic, organic nature, which feels fluid and dynamic. Taking inspiration from nature was an idea deeply rooted in Moore’s practice; many of his sculptures have references to bones, leaves and animals. He wrote in 1968 that