Henry Moore and the Festival of Britain

Henry Moore was approached by the Arts Council of Great Britain to complete a sculpture for the 1951 Festival of Britain. Sadly, no formal correspondence regarding the invitation to display a work survives in our archive. It is likely that most of the communication on the matter was conducted via telephone calls, as was common with important arrangements in Moore’s office in Hoglands. Telephone conversations saved the artist’s time, and ultimately allowed him to be in the studio for as long as possible.

Initially Moore was asked to contribute a carving, but it was decided that a bronze would be more suitable for an outdoor site. The creation of Moore’s sculpture, later named Reclining Figure: Festival, with its unusual surface decoration of string to define the form, was captured on film by producer John Read during the filming of the 1951 documentary Henry Moore.

Reed’s BBC film is essential viewing for anyone wanting to see the development of a small scale Moore work to a monumental sculpture. From handheld maquette to large plaster, the process of making the armature and layering plaster of Paris with a trowel is shown in detail; the camera shows close-ups of Moore’s hands busy at work. This ground-breaking programme was the very first on British television about a living artist and was first shown on 30 April 1951, just three days before the Festival of Britain was formally opened to the public, in a worldwide radio broadcast by His Majesty King George VI from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral.

After the festival ended, famously, the site was completely cleared. Moore subsequently agreed that further casts could be made of his sculpture, which were duly made and sold, but the original cast of Reclining Figure: Festival eventually came to reside in the public collection of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, where it can still be seen adorning the front entrance of the impressive sandstone building.

Although the Archive have some images of Reclining Figure: Festival in situ on the South Bank site we do not have many. Perhaps because the focus of photographer’s images was on the spectacular buildings, such as the Dome of Discovery and Skylon, Moore’s sculpture was not captured in its site by the main entrance. Unusually, there is also very little press coverage – and nothing we can lay our hands on that confirm that Moore attended the site in person. Since we first issued this Archive Story in 2016, we have discovered this new image during the digitisation of our archive collections, it shows Moore with the plaster for Reclining Figure: Festival circa 1953.