Nasher Sculpture Center

Arch forms entered Henry Moore's art with a variety of allusions: architectural, skeletal, biomorphic, and geological. Here there is a particularly strong reference to human or animal bones, especially the pelvic arch. Thus, the work's sturdy, open stance, despite the torso notation in the title, carries an anatomical association with the girth of the hips and the fertility of the pelvic region. Alan Bowness has dated the maquette 1962 (1977, cat. no. 503a). This version was cast in an edition of nine bronzes in 1971. A larger version, measuring 78 ½ inches, dates from 1962-63 and was cast in an edition of six (Bowness, Henry Moore: Sculpture and Drawings, Vol. 3, New York, 1965, cat. no. 503, pls. 159-62). Finally, a series of three bronzes plus one fiberglass cast were executed in a still more monumental scale (approximately 20 feet) in 1969 (Bowness, 1977, cat. no. 503b, and Wilkinson, 1979, cat. no. 160). In its two large-scale incarnations, this was the first sculpture by Moore that invited one to walk through it, thus establishing a different means of experiencing its three-dimensionality.