Upright Motive No. 8 from the collection of One Columbia for Arts and Culture

Upright Motive No. 8, c.1955-1956

Bronze

Location: Main Street District

From the CMA collection notes – “Upright Motive is among a group of totemic vertical sculptures made by Henry Moore in the mid-1950s. Moore himself worked initially in small-scale wax and clay figurines, several of which he selected to be enlarged to human proportions in plaster. These plasters were then worked extensively by the artist before they were cast in bronze so as to achieve surface textures and subtleties of massing appropriate to their newly enlarged scale.

Despite its apparently abstract title, Upright Motive has many allusions—to kouroi (an archaic Greek statue of a young man, standing and often naked), to bones, to columns, to Benin bronzes, and to tribal ancestral figures in wood. Indeed, it is the very resonance of the forms and their associations with the scale and bearing of the human body that gives them their mute poetry. Compressed within a column of form are the gestures of an artist who refused to allow his Upright Motive any gestures of its own.”

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From One Columbia for Arts and Culture

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About the artist

Henry Moore

1898-1986

Henry Spencer Moore (30 July 1898 – 31 August 1986) was an English sculptor and artist. He was best known for his semi-abstract monumental bronze sculptures, which are located around the world as public works of art. His forms are usually abstractions of the human figure, typically depicting mother-and-child or reclining figures.

“By the late 1940s, Moore was a worldwide celebrity; he was the voice of British sculpture, and of British modernism in general.”

Additional Details

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A Martyr to Free Speech in South Carolina, 1905

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About the artist

Henry Moore