Anatomical accuracy had long been sacrificed on the high altar of Moore’s modernistic assimilation of neo-primitivism. The sculptor’s reaction against the academic was aided by the presence of drapery on the figure, a device that from the Italianate stylisation of the Shelter Drawing series (1940s) onwards cloaked excessive bodily detail. The reclining pose, too, contributed to a sublimation of figurative fidelity in which the recumbent human form took on the guise of landscape. Alan Bowness has described this 1981 piece as one where “the mother’s body is extended like a range of hills, into the hollows of which the child can shelter. The baby is treated with great delicacy and formal restraint, as if Moore’s tenderness prevented him abstracting further.” 1 The upper profile of the figure indeed resembles the kind of undulating moorland that Moore encountered as a child in his native Yorkshire. As in social and industrial topography, where human sellement nestles within sheltered valleys, the child lies within the lowered maternal arm. Bowness again confirms how “the notion of shelter and containment is at the heart of the mother and child sculptures.” The metamorphic figure/landscape dichotomy recurring throughout Moore’s work is usually a product of the reclining, as opposed to upright, pose. From the early reclining elm carvings to the large reclining bronzes like the 8 foot piece in Seoul, Korea and Phoenix,Arizona Moore could indulge in scale to promote landscape associations within the otherwise timeless and classic subject of the recumbent figure. Alan Bowness p.7. Lund Humphries 1999.

11.5 x 20.8 x 10 cms
P.O.A.