Henry Moore OM, CH, Reclining Figure 1951. Tate. © The Henry Moore Foundation. All Rights Reserved.
14 rooms in Modern and Contemporary British Art
Bacon and Moore’s dynamic figures explore the relationship between form and space
This display sets up a dialogue, and confrontation, between two of Britain’s best-known twentieth-century artists. Working in the aftermath of the Second World War, Moore and Bacon turned to the body to explore the human condition, reinventing traditional materials and techniques for a new age. Their approaches were radically different. Bacon’s figures possess a restless, violent energy, often hemmed in by the sparse interiors they occupy. Moore’s sculptures expand comfortably into their surroundings, reflecting his wish that bodies be ‘so naturally fused that they are one’ with the space they sit in. Yet together their works reveal a shared vocabulary of curved postures and manipulated limbs. Their imagined forms explore the interplay between the body and its surrounding space.
Thanks to newer forms of media, Bacon and Moore’s work reached a wide audience. They were the subject of nationally-broadcast television shows, and weekend newspaper supplements featured images of the artists alongside their work, often printed in colour. These insights into their lives and artistic processes provided new ways to engage with their works.
Both Bacon and Moore embraced the relationship between their audiences and their art, actively considering the way their works would be viewed. Bacon framed his paintings with reflective glass. As we look at his canvases through these frames our reflections merge with the figures in his compositions. Moore created his monumental works for the outdoors, designing them so we could move freely around them. In this display, we encourage you to move around the works. As you encounter them from different angles, we hope you will discover relationships between Bacon’s paintings, Moore’s sculptures and your own body.
Henry Moore OM, CH, Draped Seated Woman 1957–8, cast c.1958–63
Two casts of this monumental female figure have been sited in public urban spaces: one in Wuppertal in Germany, another in the East End of London. London County Council’s policy of placing such work in deprived areas was part of a post-war revival of civil aspirations and social reform.
Gallery label, June 2003
1/8
artworks in Francis Bacon and Henry Moore
Henry Moore OM, CH, Working Model for Unesco Reclining Figure 1957, cast c.1959–61
This sculpture is related to the UNESCO Reclining Figure at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters shown in the photograph above. That work is carved from travertine marble and is unique. This smaller bronze sculpture is in an edition of six. As with his other public sculptures Moore sought to avoid narrative or overt rhetoric. The universal significance attributed to Moore’s sculpture made it particularly appropriate for a global organisation such as UNESCO.
Gallery label, September 2004
2/8
artworks in Francis Bacon and Henry Moore
Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait on Folding Bed 1963
The body is often highly distorted in Bacon’s paintings. In this picture, for example, parts of the head and lower body are almost illegible. Bacon has used texture and visceral colours to describe the flesh, bone and blood of the head. The dribbles and splatters of paint are reminiscent of leaking bodily fluids, bringing attention to the physical material of the body and suggesting violence.
The art historian David Mellor has argued that such pictures share much with Walter Sickert’s Camden Town paintings of prostitutes on beds ‘where gross, abject matter was well to the fore’.
Gallery label, July 2008
3/8
artworks in Francis Bacon and Henry Moore
Francis Bacon, Three Figures and Portrait 1975
Two dynamic figures and bird-like creature are placed within a claustrophobic setting. The three figures are watched over by a portrait. This work is usually seen as an image of suffering. One - and possibly both - of the twisting human figures have been identified as George Dyer, Bacon’s companion, lover and muse. Dyer killed himself in 1971, but Bacon continued to portray him after his death. The bird-like form in the foreground, with its snarling human mouth, has been linked to the Furies, goddesses of vengeance in Greek mythology.
Gallery label, June 2021
4/8
artworks in Francis Bacon and Henry Moore
Henry Moore OM, CH, Reclining Figure 1951
In the late 1940s, the Arts Council invited Moore to submit ideas for a sculpture to be sited at the South Bank site of the Festival of Britain. Although the organising committee suggested a family theme, Moore chose to make this tense, skeletal reclining form. The work on display is the plaster model for the bronze, which was cast in an edition of five.
Gallery label, September 2004
5/8
artworks in Francis Bacon and Henry Moore
Henry Moore OM, CH, Woman 1957–8, cast date unknown
This is one of the largest of Moore's sculptures of a seated female nude, and it was cast in an edition of nine. The original plaster is in the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the curator there, Alan Wilkinson, has described this sculpture as 'one of the most potent images of fertility produced in the 20th century'. He also related it to Moore's early interest in Palaeolithic sculpture, an influence the artist readily acknowledged. Moore wrote of the work: ''Woman' has that startling fullness of the stomach and breasts. The smallness of the head is necessary to emphasize the massiveness of the body - if the head had been any larger it would have ruined the whole idea of the sculpture.'
Gallery label, September 2004
6/8
artworks in Francis Bacon and Henry Moore
Francis Bacon, Triptych August 1972 1972
This work is generally considered one in a series of Black Triptychs which followed the suicide of Bacon’s lover, George Dyer. Dyer appears on the left and Bacon is on the right. The central group is derived from a photograph of wrestlers by Edward Muybridge, but also suggests a more sexual encounter. The seated figures and their coupling are set against black voids and the central flurry has been seen as ‘a life-and death struggle’. The artist’s biographer wrote: ‘What death has not already consumed seeps incontinently out of the figures as their shadows.’
Gallery label, September 2016
7/8
artworks in Francis Bacon and Henry Moore
Henry Moore OM, CH, Reclining Figure: Bunched 1961, cast 1961–2
By the mid-1950s Moore had almost entirely eliminated drawing from his creative process and explored his ideas through small maquettes. These had an intrinsic quality of immediacy or spontaneity and allowed him to imagine the finished product in the round. In order to translate the scale of the work more effectively, he often made larger working models as an intermediate stage between the maquette and the finished sculpture. Moore’s maquettes were typically cast in bronze in editions of up to ten. The sculptor strove for monumentality in his work and tried to imbue the same quality in the small maquettes. He also took a great deal of care with their finish. Some were more polished than others, some darker, some greener. Moore did all the patination himself, treating the bronze with different acids to achieve different effects then working on it by hand, rubbing and wearing it down.
Gallery label, September 2004
8/8
artworks in Francis Bacon and Henry Moore
Art in this room