Ideas for Sculpture: Four Studies of Reclining Figures, One Half Figure

This sheet—presenting in tiered rows five sculptural ideas for reclining females—richly demonstrates Moore’s ability to work simultaneously in different stylistic modes while remaining true to the central tenets of his sculpture: abstraction and the human body.

Each of the figural forms is rendered by Moore in varying degrees of abstraction. The study at the left in the second tier from the top recalls the sketch-models in clay of 1945–46. This motif is a reprise of the Surrealistic biomorphism of the artist’s work of the mid- to late 1930s.

Its organic, rounded shape is in marked contrast to the mechanistic, geometric imagery of the other sculptural studies on the sheet, although these too have a precedent in Moore’s square form studies from a decade earlier.