Henry Moore

Curt Valentin, New York (acquired by 1951)
Private Collection, United States
Acquired from the above by the present owner

San Francisco, The California Palace of the Legion of Honor, Six British Artists, 1950 (titled as Three Fates)

Ann Garrould (ed.), Henry Moore, Complete Drawings 1940-49, London, 2001, vol. III, no. AG 48.24, HMF 2496, illustrated p. 283 

Executed on cream laid paper, laid down on paper. The edges of the sheet are deckled and the sheet is time stained. There is a paper loss (approx 2mm) to the left of the upper edge. There are three vertical repaired tears running along the upper edge (the longest approx 10cm), of which the rightmost tear conjoins horizontally to the central one. There are two further repaired tears to the centre of the right edge and a further repaired tear to the edge on the left of the leftmost figure's elbow. In addition there is an area (3 by 6cm) at the extreme lower left corner which has been extensively repaired. There are a few other small repaired tears elsewhere to the perimenter of the work. Otherwise, this work is in fairly good condition.
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The image of the three Moirai, the white robed incarnations of destiny who spin out between them the thread of each man’s fate, is one that has always loomed large in Western artistic culture. Often represented as cold, remorseless and unfeeling old women, the three spinners had the awesome power of determining the actions of individuals either for good or evil and, most famously, controlling the length of each human life. Echoes of their sinister associations with the craft of spinning have long endured, from the myth of Arachne, who foolishly challenged the gods and was transformed into a spider, to Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, cursed to continually weave images of a world she can never look directly at, and the inherent danger of the spinning wheel in fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty and Rumpelstiltskin. However, the subjects of Henry Moore’s Three women winding wool are more akin to those which populate the domestic scenes that preoccupied him during this period than the threatening witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

After the birth of his much longed for daughter in 1946, Moore became increasingly focussed on family groups and scenes of peaceful domesticity in his work, and his three spinners, with their quiet facial expressions and plump, full figures, draw out their wool between them without any sign of the ominous shears which would complete their trio. Moore uses the drapery of the white robes to define their naturalistic female bodies, and on their exposed arms and faces demonstrates his two-way sectional technique, described by the artist as using line ‘both down the form as well as around it, without the use of light and shade modelling’ (Alan G. Wilkinson, The Drawings of Henry Moore (exhibition catalogue), The Tate Gallery, London 1977, p. 16). Although he began employing this style of giving volume to the areas of flesh within the outline of his figures in the 1930s, it was not until the mid-1940s when it became fully developed, and the present work demonstrates how the technique gives an impressive sculptural quality to his drawings, a nod to the classical nature of his subject matter.

In spite of their apparent harmlessness, Moore’s three figures winding wool do not emerge from a world of serenity. World War II had brought anxiety and uncertainty to an artist who was aware that the stone and wood he required for his carvings was soon to become scarce, and with the closure of the Chelsea Art School, he would no longer receive an income from his teaching. Kenneth Clark, the then director of the National Gallery, eventually persuaded Moore to become an official war artist, and upon the outbreak of the Blitz in September 1940 he spent many nights sketching those who gathered for safety on the platforms of the underground stations in Central London. The present work bears more than a passing similarity to Shelter Drawing: Three Fates (1941, Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, AG 41.80), which depicts the same three women, huddled in the claustrophobic darkness of a shelter, passing the time by knitting, the constant threat of the bombers in juxtaposition with the banality of the long wait for the all clear to sound. Once the authorities began to install bunk beds and formalise the night-time use of the underground shelters, Moore lost his interest in the subject, and instead was sent by the War Artist’s Advisory Committee to sketch miners at work in the pits, excused from national service. These experiences, alongside the sadness brought on in his personal life by a number of miscarriages suffered by his wife, Irena, before his daughter’s birth, must have brought the vulnerability of human existence to the forefront of his imagination and made the image of the three fates - the thin thread of life stretched out before them – a particularly poignant one for him.

The present work inspired a further coloured drawing later in 1948 (Private Collection, UK, AG 48.27), which was chosen by Moore and his wife in 1980 as one of ten works commissioned by the Henry Moore Foundation to be recreated in tapestry. The tapestry was woven by Pat Taylor and Fiona Abercrombie over eighteen months, a particularly apt subject for such a project.