Mexicolore logoMexicolore name

Article suitable for older students

Find out more

Henry Moore and ancient Mexico

9th Aug 2024

Henry Moore and ancient Mexico

Excerpt from Barbara Braun book on Pre-Columbian Art

Some 15 years ago we uploaded a brief piece on the work of Henry Moore (follow link below...) and his fascination with what he called the ‘simple, monumental grandeur [and] massive weightiness’ of Aztec carvings, as well as other ancient Mesoamerican styles - Olmec, Mezcala, Teotihuacán, Toltec and Huastec - which have many of the same characteristics. Here’s a second entry, quoting from the chapter on Moore in the splendid book by Barbara Braun Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World, and focusing on Moore’s first fully fully three-dimensional sculpture, the 1922 Mother and Child (on the right in this picture). Braun calls Moore ‘the modern artist most closely identified with Pre-Columbian sculpture’...

Mother and Child was inspired by the stone figure of the Aztec god of pleasure Xochipilli, on display in the British Museum (pic 1). Braun writes: ‘Aztec sculptures retain a unitary, cubic shape - heightened in this pose by the framing-arm position. The blocky mass is subdivided into large curving planes that subsume all unnecessary detail. Everything incidental - anatomical features, decoration, protruding parts - is eliminated or subordinated to the whole; symbolic information is conveyed through incision or low relief; chin, nose, eyes, ears, hair are carved with little depth so as not to disturb the compact outline of the mass. The heavy, hard, solid character of the block of stone is a dominant feature of these sculptures, and is heightened by the bareness of their surfaces, whether raw and textured or smooth and highly polished.’

However, ‘certain crucial elements of Moore’s sculpture deviate from this Aztec model. For one thing, the mother’s face derives not from Aztec but from Mezcala-style stone carving [from Guerrero]...’ He has adapted ‘the plastic conventions of Aztec figural sculpture, as well as certain of its expressive traits: the head turned at an angle to the major axis (subtly altering the essential symmetry), gestural hands, attached base. At the same time he ignored their native meaning, most conspicuously by transforming the image’s gender from male to female and articulating a favourite personal theme: the protective mother with her child... another alien element involves the baby figure, whose peculiar configuration and conjunction with its mother was also inspired by previously unidentified [Olmec] Pre-Columbian sources...’
’Mother and Child, the more compelling and larger of the two sculptures, was begun in 1924 and completed in 1925... The work reverses Moore’s usual enclosing-mother motif by having the child in turn envelop the mother’s head and thereby recalls were-jaguar-baby headdresses worn by Olmec figures.’

Source/quotes:-
• Pre-Columbian Art and the Post-Columbian World: Ancient American Sources of Modern Art by Barbara Braun, Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York, 1993, pp. 94-101.

Picture sources:-
• Main: photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Pic 1: © The Trustees of the British Museum
• Pic 2: photo by Brian Condie, downloaded from https://www.pinterest.ca/pin/817684876084724067/.

‘Henry Moore’s reclining figures’

Comments (0)

Henry Moore and ancient Mexico

Excerpt from Barbara Braun book on Pre-Columbian Art

More Aztec Inspiration