“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.... Woman emphasizes fertility like the Paleolithic Venuses in which the roundness and fullness of form is exaggerated.”
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” (quoted in John 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 (see figs. 1 & 2).
RIGHT: Fig. 2 Grimaldi Venus (Venus of Menton), soapstone, circa 22,000-17,000 B.C.E., Musée d’Archéologie Nationale et Domaine, St-Germain-en-Laye
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 David 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 David 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. It was initially slated as an edition of four but later extended. 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, the Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig in Vienna, the British Council, London, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Palm Springs Art Museum. A full-scale plaster model for this work is owned by the Art Gallery of Toronto (see below). The present work is one of only two remaining bronzes in private hands.
Around the World: Henry Moore’s Woman
