Abstraction and Surrealism: The 1930s

The 1930s represent Moore's most radical and inventive phase. Building on his interest in non-European art and the avant-garde sculpture of Brancusi and Epstein, Moore pushed his art into new territory. During regular trips to Paris in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he met Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, André Breton, and others working in the surrealist vein. Their interest in the workings of the unconscious, in what lay beyond the constraints of logic and reason, opened up new avenues of formal expression for Moore. He now exhibited in surrealist circles in London, Paris, and New York. "Beauty, in the later Greek or Roman sense," he noted, "is not the aim of my sculpture."

Figurative work increasingly gave way to more abstract forms. The sculpture that moved Moore most was strong, self-supporting, and fully realized in three dimensions, "giving off something of the energy of great mountains," he observed. In formal and thematic terms Moore's work remained a synthesis--the product of keen observation and intellect wound around a core of personal experience and private obsession. His creative process was driven by the assimilation of disparate visual ideas. He collected stones, twigs, bones, and shells, using them as creative points of departure. He pierced volumes with holes, tunneling out heavy masses to explore form within form. As seen in Reclining Figure, Moore was also interested in the creative tensions between figuration and abstraction, working in a style the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson in 1935 called "biomorphism." Good art, Moore asserted, contains elements both abstract and surrealist, classical and romantic: "Order and surprise, intellect and imagination, conscious and unconscious. Both sides of the artist's personality must play their part."

In the late 1930s, geometric elements entered his work. Sculptures such as Stringed Figure were inspired by mathematical models Moore had seen at the Science Museum in London. Indebted to surrealism's play with ambiguity and transformation, his stringed sculptures allowed Moore to play linearity against mass, color against material. Such play was key to another recurrent theme: the interactions of internal and external forms.