Henry Moore

Irving Galleries Fine Arts, Palm Beach
Acquired from the above in 2005

Alan Bowness & Herbert Read, eds., Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1955-64, vol. 4, London, 1965, no. 441, illustration of another cast p. 38
William Grohmann, The Art of Henry Moore, London, 1960, illustration of another cast p. 189
Herbert Read, Henry Moore, A Study of his Life and Work, New York, 1965, illustration of another cast pl. 203
Ionel Jianou, Henry Moore, Paris, 1968, illustration of another cast pl. 69
Robert Melville, Henry Moore, Sculptures and Drawings 1921-1969, London, 1970, no. 572, illustration of another cast
Giulio Carlo Argan, Henry Moore Sculpture, London, 1981, no. 235, illustration of another cast p. 151
Alan Bowness, ed., Henry Moore, Sculpture and Drawings 1955-64, vol. 3, London, 1986, no. 441, illustrations of another cast p. 38 & pl. 75

The work has an attractive variegated green and medium brown patina. There are minor surface accretions to the right figure. There is some rubbing to the patina and minor surface scratches but otherwise in very good original condition.
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Three Motives Against Wall No. 1 is an exceptional example from Henry Moore’s mid-1950s series, Upright Motives, which included a number of large, bronze, and often site-specific sculptures suggestive of the female form. Throughout this series, Moore grappled with the relation of that form to a linear architectural surrounding – later in his career, while recalling a commission for this series in Milan, he remembered how he “visited the site and a lone Lombard poplar growing behind the building [convinced him] that a vertical work would act as the correct counterfoil to the horizontal rhythm of the building” (quoted in David Mitchinson, Henry Moore, With Comments by the Artist, London, 1981, p. 134). Moore explored this relationship between figure and ground at length, producing about a dozen sculptures on a smaller scale, including Three Motives Against Wall No. 1, which juxtapose figures against a flat architectural backdrop.

In connecting organic and architectural forms, this sculpture appears to act as a study for larger commissions, evidence of Moore’s struggle to relate the two seemingly contradictory elements. He explained this struggle in noting how he “would rather have a piece of sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in, or on the most beautiful building…” (in David Sylvester, ed., Sculpture and Drawings by Henry Moore, exhibition catalogue, Tate Gallery, London 1951, p. 4). That Moore’s sculptures stand in public spaces the world over is evidence of his mastery of this complex personal and professional concern. On the psychological power on the series, John Russell writes: “[He has the] ability to draw upon the limitless repertory of images which lies stored-up in the unconscious mind of every one of us. At a time for instance, when anthropology and the analysis of dreams have alike had much to offer to the student of our race, the ‘Upright Motives’ of 1955-56 speak to us at many levels of consciousness and thrust down toward recollections as yet undredged from the deeps of memory” (in Henry Moore (exhibition catalogue), M. Knoedler & Co., Inc., New York, 1962, n.p.).