![]() This was most effectively carried out with the plasters for Reclining Figure: Festival 1951 (fig.1) and Three Quarter Figure: Lines, 1980 (fig.2). ![]() These lines would then follow the undulations of the figure’s form, mapping its contours like an environmental survey. In other maquettes sectional lines, which more frequently appear in Moore’s drawings as a means of delineating form, are attempted in plaster, drawn directly onto the plaster to indicate the ridges that would be incised into a mould for the bronze enlargement. Occasionally Moore would make pencil drawings on the found object or the plaster in order to realise its transformation. Photo: Michel Muller, Henry Moore Foundation Archiveįocusing on the plasters reveals a fuller understanding of Moore’s working methods, in particular his use of this medium to transform found objects such as flint and bone directly into figures, questioning the relationship of man’s existence to the natural world. The vast majority of Moore’s plaster maquettes, where he tested out ideas, were never enlarged or cast in bronze, and despite their inventiveness, the plasters remain unrecorded in the six-volume catalogue raisonné of the artist’s sculpture. Moore himself was acutely aware of the psychological and aesthetic changes occurring in his sculptures once cast from plaster to bronze, and a number were only created in plaster. This often provides the sculpture with a more intense and disturbing quality, especially those plasters made in the immediate post-war era when artists like Moore were exploring tense and angular forms in his treatment of the figure. In plaster a sculpture’s surfaces can appear scarred – each incised line clearly marked – unlike the subtle patination of the bronzes with more unified surfaces. Their inherent fragility can allow more questioning of the vulnerability of the subjects depicted (in Moore’s case, mother and child, reclining figures, fallen warriors). They convey an immediacy unlike the bronzes, which are a stage removed. Yet these are the very objects that the artist created, textured with a variety of household tools and sometimes hand coloured. Until recently plasters made by sculptors have been seen as a means to an end rather than as works of art in their own right. ![]()
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