Reclining Figure

Moore described two sides of his personality – the ‘tough’ and the ‘tender’ – that were conveyed through different styles in his work. [1] He believed the former was epitomised in his Surrealist tendencies with a spiky aesthetic, and the latter by his classically inspired rounded figures. After the Second World War the ‘tough’ seems to have had a resurgence in works such as the 1945 Reclining Figure, although he was simultaneously making such classical works as the Madonna and Child and carved draped reclining figures.

The antithetical reclining figures that Moore was making almost concurrently demonstrate how he was able to rejuvenate the theme throughout his career in endless variations. In fact the majority of his figurative sculptures are reclining. The reclining figure had obvious antecedents in classical art and throughout art history, and had undergone a recent resurgence in the bathing scenes of Cézanne and Picasso, whom Moore vocally admired. Moore is typically connected to these artists through his more classical works depicting women with rounded bodies. [2] However, the more fragmented reclining figure, represented here, has its precedent in a more Cubist Picasso, as well as in Giacometti’s skeletal figures.

Reclining Figure may foreshadow the generation of British sculptures that followed Moore who became known as the Geometry of Fear artists, including Reg Butler (1913–1981), Lynn Chadwick (1914–2003), Geoffrey Clarke (1924–2014) and Bernard Meadows (1915–2005). Their work was characterised by a slender anatomy with angular geometric forms. The contrast of the wiry arms in the present sculpture with the sloping block of metal suggests in particular Lynn Chadwick’s cloaked figures, in which the cloak acted as an additional support for the figure, which otherwise stood on two spindly legs.

Read More