Recasting Global Modernities and the Making of Shared Worlds: New Perspectives through Henry Moore

This paper examines Henry Moore’s adoption of plastics as a lens through which to reconsider the relationship between postwar modernity, material innovation, and contemporary conservation. Drawing on archival research, Moore’s own writings, oral history, catalogue records, and first-hand knowledge of the Henry Moore Foundation collection, it traces the introduction of expanded polystyrene and fibreglass into Moore’s studio and their role in transforming the production of large scale sculpture. Originally embraced for their lightness, versatility, and efficiency, these industrial materials enabled new approaches to modelling, fabrication, transport, and exhibition. Through surviving sculptures, studio artefacts, and unused expanded polystyrene retained within the Foundation’s collection, the paper follows the material life of these plastics beyond the studio, examining their ageing, degradation, and the complex conservation challenges they present today. The paper argues that the changing status of plastics mirrors a broader reassessment of post-war modernity itself. Materials once celebrated as symbols of technological progress and industrial optimism are now recognised as inherently unstable, environmentally problematic, and dependent upon ongoing stewardship. By connecting studio practice with contemporary conservation, the paper demonstrates how Moore’s material experimentation continues to shape both the interpretation and preservation of his work, offering a new perspective on the evolving legacy of modern sculpture.

Dai Roberts is an artist and sculpture technician based at the Henry Moore Foundation, where he works with the conservation, care and installation of modern and contemporary sculpture. His research explores the relationships between material processes, studio practice and technological change, with particular interests in modern materials, digital fabrication and the evolving role of the sculptor’s studio. Alongside his technical practice, Dai develops his own sculptural and interdisciplinary work, examining systems, perception and material transformation.

Henry Moore’s Working Model for Three Piece No. 3: Vertebrae (1968) has been on view in the Nasher Sculpture Center (NSC) garden since its founding in 2003. In anticipation of the inaugural exhibition, attempts were made to restore the luminous surface achieved in the foundry as acquired by NSC founders, Raymond and Patsy Nasher in 1968. Once a nuanced, transparent patina when first presented to the Nashers, the work was repatinated in the early 2000s. After over twenty years installed outdoors at NSC, the work required patina work again. Summarizing the technical aspects of the twice-performed treatment completed in 2025, this presentation will untangle how indelible memories of an artwork’s appearance can be better navigated. When treatments occur rarely, and visible change is slow but significant, a restoration may be jarring. From foundry to private residence to a museum setting, and countless photographs in existence, a conservation treatment can challenge the established memories of many. Due to the disparate tone of foundry repairs contrasted against the alloy selected for the sculptural elements, a tried and successful combination of concealing patina chemicals was chosen to address anomalies while returning the warm tones to Vertebrae. In treating this sculpture, it was discovered that past challenges with retaining even surface tone were not unfounded: a shocking overnight reaction between the patina chemicals and the repairs made for a colorful learning experience before treatment concluded.

Claire Taggart is the conservator at Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. Prior to taking this role in 2019, she was the Samuel H. Kress Fellow in contemporary art conservation at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. She holds an MS from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. Pre-program, Claire interned at the Chinati and Judd Foundations in Marfa, Texas, where she cemented her interest in modern and contemporary sculpture. While a graduate student, Claire enjoyed placements at Dallas Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Rosa Lowinger & Associates, and Tate.

This paper examines the material and conceptual parallels between Henry Moore’s engagement with landscape as a generative force in sculpture and the pre-industrial practice of loam moulding – a casting technique in which the mould itself is built directly from earth, sand, and organic binders rather than from the rigid pattern-making processes of modern foundry practice. Drawing on the author’s experience as a fine art founder working in bronze, aluminium, and cast iron – including work cast for the Henry Moore Foundation – the paper argues that loam moulding offers a distinctive lens through which to understand Moore’s landscape abstractions. Where Moore’s reclining figures and organic forms emerged from an observed dialogue between the human body and the land, loam moulding enacts an analogous material dialogue between molten metal and the earth that contains it. The mould is not a neutral vessel but an active participant in the form, introducing surface textures, thermal gradients, and material contingencies that shape the final work in ways that rigid investment or sand moulding cannot replicate. The paper situates this argument within the broader history of pre-industrial casting traditions – including bell-founding, cannon-casting, and architectural ironwork – and their relationship to landscape, locality, and material culture. It considers how the decline of loam moulding, now classified on the Heritage Crafts Association Red List of endangered crafts, represents not merely a technical loss but a severance of the material connection between sculpture and the earth that Moore’s work so powerfully evokes. The author’s ongoing practice-based research provides a contemporary counterpoint: sculptural forms generated by tracing observed landscape profiles – horizon lines, geological strata, topographic contours – and sweeping these around a point or striking them lengthways to produce forms through the same rotational and linear principles that underpin traditional loam moulding. Iron casting is intrinsic to this practice, connecting the work directly to the material traditions the paper examines.

Stephen Coles is a practising fine art founder and sculptor based in North Dorset, running a specialist foundry working in bronze, aluminium, and iron. He holds an MFA in Fine Art Sculpture from Alfred University, New York (awarded with distinction), where he subsequently taught foundry practice at graduate level.

When John Latham began his 1975-76 APG placement at the Scottish Office, he was asked from which perspective he would be looking at Scotland. Pointing at a map of the country he responded ‘this one’. The distanced view offers a wider context for observation but also an implicit temporal dimension. Distance, both physically and metaphorically allows us to consider the effect of history on location and project possible futures. ‘Context is Half the Work’ was the central axiom of Artist Placement Group. Founded by Barbara Steveni in 1966, with Latham a founder member, the two having met at Chelsea with Henry Moore as their tutor. Steveni’s groundbreaking idea was to take artists out of the gallery and into society. Early placements in industry shifted to UK government departments and, through Joseph Beuys, into the West German government. At the Scottish Office, Latham proposed a series of radical interventions into the landscape and social space, including a community TV network, a tidal power station for renewable electricity, a sea fish farm, and ecological preservation of industrial waste bing sites, remains of Scotland’s 19th century shale oil extraction industry as ‘derelict land art’ – a project so fundamental, his ashes were scattered at the Niddrie Woman bing in West Lothian. Latham’s radical yet remarkably prescient proposals questioned prevalent thinking on social, economic and ecological matters. APG directly influenced David Harding in founding the Environmental Art course in Glasgow and are increasingly understood to presage socially engaged art. My paper will explore Latham’s proposed projects, the ecological, political and international dialogues into which they were situated, and discuss the continued impact of APG’s ‘contextual’ thinking on contemporary art.

Gareth Bell-Jones a curator based in London and the director of Flat Time House, the former Peckham home of post-war conceptual artist John Latham. Since 2015, Bell-Jones has developed the exhibition programme, publishing, residencies, partnerships, research and education outcomes. From 2010-14 he was a curator at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridgeshire and tutor in Curating Contemporary Art at RCA. He has taught widely including Courtauld, Carnegie Mellon, Sandberg Instituut and Yale. Recent independent projects include the Barbara Steveni solo exhibition I Find Myself for Modern Art Oxford and Void Art Centre, Derry, 2025/26 and editing the accompanying catalogue.

This paper looks at Moore’s sculpture in its dialogue with the archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes’ 1951 A Land. Hawkes’ poetic exploration of the British Isles in their geology and natural history famously includes illustrations by the artist. With the exhibition site of Kew gardens in mind, I will sketch out the context of Imperial Ecology in Britain in the first half of the 20th century through which, as environmental historian Peder Anker has argued, the discipline of Ecology emerged. The encounter between Moore and Hawkes, I will argue, is indicative of another story, in which avant-garde modern and surrealist approaches troubled ecological perspectives focused on environmental management in the context of Empire. In contrast to often mechanistic representations of landscape and ecosystems that emerged through the British Ecological Society, experimental, poetic representations by Hawkes along with Moore, evoke an underdetermined, marvellous ecological world.

Anna Reid is an environmental humanities scholar and art historian with a research focus on 19th and 20th century local and global British landscape contexts. She is Senior Lecturer, History of Art at the University of Leeds. The relationship between Surrealism and Ecology in global British contexts is the focus of current work including contributions to Surrealism and Ecology, published by Vernon Press, and Forbidden Territories: 100 Years of Surreal Landscapes, published by Thames & Hudson. In recent years Reid has undertaken fellowships with Cambridge Visual Culture, ArtHx (Princeton University) investigating the Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism and The Paul Mellon Centre.

In March 1925, during the Italian study tour, Henry Moore wrote to William Rothenstein: “I have a great desire – almost an ache for the sight of a tree that can be called a tree – for a tree with a trunk.” Read alongside the notebooks produced during the same period, this statement invites a reconsideration of the significance of Moore’s Italian journey. Traditionally understood as an opportunity to engage with the great masters of the Trecento and Early Renaissance, it also marks the moment when Moore extended the same analytical gaze he applied to works of art to the organic structures of the natural world. An examination of Moore’s notebooks and drawings reveals that, in 1925, he produced his first drawings devoted exclusively to tree trunks and branches, treating them as autonomous subjects of investigation. Like his copies after the Old Masters, these studies isolate and analyse formal qualities – the texture of bark, knots, bifurcations, and twisting trunks – as sculptural problems rather than naturalistic motifs. Drawing thus becomes a cognitive tool through which Moore investigates works of art and natural forms alike, seeking their underlying structures and principles of formal organisation. Drawing on the 1925 notebooks, Moore’s correspondence, and the tree studies of the 1970s and 1980s, this paper argues that the Italian journey shaped a method of observation that informed his sculptural practice throughout his career. It proposes that arboreal forms should be considered alongside bones, stones, and shells as a significant component of Moore’s material ecologies and sculptural imagination.

Emanuele Greco has been adjunct lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Florence. He holds a PhD in Art History and has been a research fellow at the University of Florence and a postdoctoral fellow at the Stiftung Arp in Berlin. His research focuses on twentieth-century Italian art, modern sculpture, art criticism, and exhibition history, with particular attention to artists such as Henry Moore, Hans Arp, Alberto Viani, Francesco Somaini, and Giorgio de Chirico. He has curated exhibitions at leading institutions, including the Gallerie degli Uffizi and Museo Novecento in Florence, and has published essays in numerous Italian and international scholarly journals.

Viktor Shklovsky coined the term ostranenie to describe defamiliarisation as a critical methodology: to make the quotidian unheimlich (uncanny), and more demanding of its audience. Defamiliarisation, he proposed, is also the purpose of art, resisting habitualisation by prolonging our perceptions of and engagement with our environment. This paper discusses techniques of ostranenie in relation to Henry Moore’s practice. Principal among Moore’s methods was the use of scaling (the activity of changing the size and proportions of an object). Rachel Wells proposes the “elimination of distance” was a motive for Moore’s haptic approach, to ‘see in the round’ hand-sized assemblages and found objects, implying Herbert Read’s description of the “touch space” of sculpture originating with the amulet. Wells suggests the increasing ‘bigness’ of his scaled-up sculptures paradoxically enabled a parallel experience for the viewers, who (temporarily) can occupy the negative spaces and encounter the surfaces up-close, analogous to an ‘architectural object’. Moore had an abiding concern with ‘monumentality’, conceived as an aesthetic quality ambiguously independent of the work’s physical dimensions. The meaning of monumentality and its relationship with modernism was the subject of live debate for British architecture. Moore expressed antipathy towards built architecture, which he saw as competing with and diminishing sculpture. However, in some of his drawings and photographs developing formal ideas, he depicted them occupying unsettling spaces – either emphasising their crowded proximity in claustrophobic interiors, or seen in isolation, against open landscapes, both of which sought to eliminate the middle ground – undercutting the cultivated perception of the ‘homely’ artist.

Dr Sebastian Messer is an architect-artist-researcher-practitioner at Northumbria University, England. His research interests concern creative practice as a distinctive type of knowledge, using spatial and visual thinking as a mode of inquiry and as the means of its communication and dissemination. His work draws on his background in architectural practice and education to consider how we create and communicate meaning through the dialectic between form/matter and architectural or ‘bounded’ space (raumgestaltung). His work explores this physically (in 3D) through installation and sculpture, representationally (in 2D), and theoretically, through mapping and diagramming (2D) and in text (linearly).

Giovanni Aloi is an author, educator, and curator specialising in the representation of nature and the environment in art. Aloi is the Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture and co-editor of the ‘Art after Nature’ book series published by University of Minnesota Press. He is the author and editor of many books on art and nature including Art & Animals (2011), Speculative Taxidermy (2018), Why Look at Plants? The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art (2018), Botanical Speculations (2018), Lucian Freud Herbarium (2019), and Estado Vegetal (2023) Vegetal Entwinements (2023), Estado Vegetal (2023), Botanical Revolutions (2025), and Lawn (2025). Aloi has contributed to NPR, PBS, and BBC TV and radio programs, served as an academic adviser for many institutions and has curated exhibitions in the USA and abroad – among others, Earthly Observatory (2022) for the SAIC galleries, Lucian Freud Plant Portraits for the Garden Museum in London (2023), and Materialities (2025) for the Driehaus Museum in Chicago. He lectures on modern and contemporary art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

The ambivalence of modernist artists towards the use of photographic reference material deserves further study. For an early 20th century sculptor to openly use photographs for reference purposes perhaps sat uncomfortably alongside modernist methods such as direct observation, truth to materials and abstract formalism.  As Rodin remarked, ‘it is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies.’ On this issue, the work of Henry Moore provides an interesting case study. A keen photographer from the early 1930s, the sculptor openly used photographs to record the development and plan the siting of his own sculpture. Moore’s cultivation of his professional image through photographs of himself at work has also been well researched. But he also sometimes used photographs as reference material for the subjects of his art, either sourced from publications or taken in the course of his work. Such imagery supported the development of both 2D and 3D artefacts, but he rarely discussed this aspect of his working method. Admiration for the Chacmool Mexican sculpture was not inspired by study at the British Museum, but from a published photograph. Some Shelter Drawings included figures based on newspaper photographs. At Wheldale Colliery, Moore worked closely with Reuben Saidman to create press photos which also helped him to develop the finished coalmining drawings. And in 1956, his own photographs of body casts in Pompei influenced Reclining Figure, LH 402. This paper will investigate the range of methods by which Moore incorporated reference photography into the modernist sculptor’s creative methodology.

Chris Owen is an independent art historian, affiliated to Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. From 1994, he was Head of Critical Studies at Leeds College of Art & Design, before becoming Assistant Principal. After a period as Assistant Dean at the University of Derby, he retired from Anglia Ruskin University as Head of the Cambridge School of Art in 2019.  Chris has published on the history and pedagogy of art and design education, and on the history of modern British art. He is the author of Drawing in the Dark: Henry Moore’s Coalmining Commission, published by Lund Humphries in 2022.

Post-war British cultural reconstruction revived the modernist ambition to reconnect fine art with everyday design and democratise aesthetic experience through mass production. Yet, dominant museum conventions and art-historical narratives continued to treat artworks as autonomous, exhibited, and visual, while treating everyday objects as heteronomous, lived, and multisensory. How does the circulation of an artefact across these categories reshape its aesthetic reception and the forms of recipient participation through which its meaning is produced? Focusing on Henry Moore’s Barbed Wire (c. 1946), a textile design conceived for commercial manufacture, the paper traces the design from printed rayon and garments made from it to cinematic and museum contexts. Through a comparative object and spatial analysis, it brings Wolfgang Kemp’s art-historical reception aesthetics into dialogue with Donald Norman’s design theory, both of which understand artefacts as realised through recipient participation, whether by the viewer or the user. The paper examines a sequence of reversals: a barrier designed to prevent bodily passage becomes soft fabric worn against and animated by the body; cinema translates tactile and proprioceptive engagement into mediated visual experience; and, finally, the museum vitrine renders the garment visible yet inaccessible, reinstating the barrier the textile had materially undone. The paper argues that analysing Barbed Wire through the twin optics of art and design reveals how forms of recipient participation are reconfigured in the production of aesthetic meaning across shifting material, spatial, and institutional contexts, and offers a transferable method for analysing modern art beyond its visual modes of display and reception.

Inbal Strauss is a researcher examining the politics of aesthetic production and reception. Originally trained in product design and fine art, she completed her AHRC-funded DPhil ‘Form Unfollows Function: Subversions of Functionality in Modern Art’ at Oxford University. In 2026–27, she will be a Visiting Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Foundation and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre, researching Moore’s textile designs and the democratisation of modernist art. She previously held fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Ashmolean Museum. Recent publications appeared in Sillages Critiques (2024) and Activating Fluxus, Expanding Conservation (2026).

Despite the enormous material difficulties faced by the occupying powers in immediate post-war Germany, culture was quickly recognised as an important means of rebuilding relations with the defeated nation. In the British zone for example the first British Information Centres were established in March 1946, providing access to English-language literature, and in larger cities with facilities for film screenings, lectures and documentary exhibitions. While the role of literature and film in British occupation policy has been subject to academic study, there is as yet no detailed consideration of the role played by British fine art during these years. This paper seeks to explore how the works of Henry Moore were utilised in the immediate post-war period to reconstruct the relationship between Britain and West Germany. Research conducted to date – among others in the British Council and German museum archives – has revealed Moore’s prominent role in this process. The first evidence of a visual art display in a British Information Centre for example came in March 1948 with an exhibition of Henry Moore reproductions. The first solo exhibition organised by the British Council in Germany was of the work of Henry Moore, staged between Hamburg and Düsseldorf in 1950. And the first post-war acquisition of a British work by a German museum was again by Moore, purchased by the West Berlin National Gallery following an exhibition at the Berlin Festival in September 1951. This paper seeks to explore the specific role played by Moore’s works in these crucial immediate post-war years.

Lucy Wasensteiner is Junior Professor in the Art History Department at the University of Bonn. She specialises in German modernism, art under National Socialism, provenance research and post-war British art. Her current research project explores British art in the two Germanies between 1945 and 1989 and its role in reconstructing relations between the countries. She is a member of the Bonn Centre for Reconciliation Studies. Her recent publications include Sites of Interchange: Modernism, Politics and Culture between Britain and Germany (2022), Thinking Provenance, Thinking Restitution (2026) and Modern German Art in an Expanded Field: Art, Politics and Memory (forthcoming).

The period of 2011 to 2013 represents a precarious episode in the history of London’s Henry Moores. Within months the ownership of two previous landmarks of the capital, the artist’s Draped Seated Figure (1957-58, bronze, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, known as ‘Old Flo’) and Knife Edge Two-Piece (1962-65, bronze, Parliamentary Art Collection) became subject of dispute, both having passed between reorganised government departments over decades. Whilst Knife Edge Two-Piece remained in situ beside the Palace of Westminster, Draped Seated Figure, having narrowly escaped sale, was relocated to Cabot Square in Canary Wharf in 2015. Draped Seated Figure was purchased by London County Council in 1962 for Stifford Estate in Stepney, one of several works Moore sold to the city authorities for social building developments. The predominantly residential character of the Stifford Estate contrasts with the figure’s new Cabot Square environs. As well as the homes in the area, the work now shares its site with a host of retail outlets and is a short walk away from Canary Wharf Station. Visitors can also view Draped Seated Figure as part of the district’s outdoor art trail, the largest in London. Draped Seated Figure’s relocation reflects both changes in the city and the patronage of public art in the UK. It also provokes questions about the work’s meaning in a multi-use setting compared to the shared residential space of the Stifford Estate. Despite Moore’s extensive discussion of his public art, he rarely generalised about the demands that types of public space made on his work and seldom adapted his large-scale sculpture for commissions after the 1950s. This paper asks whether Stifford provided significant possibilities for Draped Seated Figure’s meaning and how these might be built upon at Canary Wharf.

Tom Laver is an MA candidate in History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London and Digital Collections Assistant at the Henry Moore Foundation, where his duties include helping maintain Moore’s catalogue raisonné database. He previously worked at Southampton City Art Gallery, the National Gallery, London and Towner, Eastbourne.

Though Henry Moore never travelled to the Arab world, his work arrived there by several routes at once, resonating more deeply than distance would suggest. Moore’s oeuvre draws on Ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian forms, the exact repertoire Mahmoud Mukhtar in Egypt and Jewad Selim in Iraq mobilised as cultural heritage, to articulate a sophisticated visual language for their post-independence nations. Moore reached for the same forms in search of a universal modernism, unmoored from any national project, and the divergence was not merely due to distance: Selim trained under Moore at the Slade, and Gamal el-Sagini encountered his work in Paris, a shared vocabulary put to a different political use. This paper follows Moore’s circulation through the Arabic press, principally in Egypt, but also in Kuwait, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, where photographs, criticism, and reportage built a public reception of their own. Many articles dwell on his fascination with ancient and non-Western art; framing him as an artist who bypassed sterile European academicism to reconnect with a raw, universal, human impulse. My first encounter with Moore was not in a museum but on Jeddah’s corniche, where three of his sculptures were bought directly from the artist in the 1970s, acquired, Mayor Farsi argued, because his abstraction, unlike a figurative Western sculptor’s, could occupy Muslim public space without transgressing norms around representational statuary. This paper argues that Moore’s Arab reception – forged through press circulation, artistic lineages, and public acquisitions – recast his universal modernism as an adaptable visual language that negotiated both post-colonial artistic identity and the complexities of public space.

Nadine Nour el Din is a writer, art historian and curator whose work focuses on the arts and cultural production of the Arab world and wider region. She holds an MA in History of Art from The Courtauld, an MA in Arts Management and Cultural Policy from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BA in Visual Arts from the American University in Cairo.

Sebastiano Barassi is Head of Henry Moore Collections & Programmes at the Henry Moore Foundation in Hertfordshire, where he regularly curates exhibitions and contributes to publications about Henry Moore and 20th-century sculpture.

With Moore’s international reputation at its zenith in the 1960s, Australia’s state and national institutions vied to prove their cultural sophistication by commissioning ever larger public works from the British master. Following the National Gallery of Victoria’s purchase in 1960 of Moore’s large bronze Draped seated figure (1958), the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) purchased in 1969 the first cast of Moore’s Two piece reclining figure no. 9 (1968) for the new National Library of Australia in Kanberri/Canberra. This paper examines the terms of this latter commission, particularly the involvement of the library’s architect, Walter Bunning, and his plans for a “contemporary classical” temple for Australia’s literary heritage, as well as the network of cultural and political figures involved in the sculpture’s acquisition. It considers the Moore purchase alongside two concurrent NCDC acquisitions of work by Barbara Hepworth and Arnaldo Pomodoro, which together reinforced Commonwealth ties and deference to Italian sculptural heritage, and the subsequent afterlives of Moore’s work—particularly its impact on contemporary artists in the Kanberri/Canberra region. Finally, taking a decolonising lens, it considers the implications of Moore’s work being positioned on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin with the Captain Cook Memorial Jet (also designed by the Bunning Madden architectural firm) within clear sight of the sculpture. How was this orchestration of Australian national institution, Imperialist memorial, and modern British sculpture understood at the time of its unveiling, in 1970, and how does it continue to reverberate amid calls to redress the wrongs of Australia’s colonial past?

Jane Eckett is a lecturer in art history and art curatorship at the University of Melbourne whose publications on modernist sculpture include Centre Five: bridging the gap (McClelland, 2022) and “Barbara Hepworth in Australia” in Barbara Hepworth: in equilibrium (Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2022). She recently guest edited a special issue of ARTMargins 14.3 (October 2025) on decolonising art colonies and co-edited the forthcoming monograph: The Abbey Art Centre in postwar London, 1946–1956 (Routledge, 2026). As a 2026 Henry Moore Visiting Research Fellow, she is currently researching Moore’s exchanges with Australian artists.

In August 1975, Jeddah’s mayor Mohamed Said Farsi wrote to Henry Moore, hoping to acquire “marble works” for a city he was transforming into an unprecedented open-air collection of sculptures for public space. Four Moore bronze sculptures were eventually acquired between 1975 and 1982, part of a beautification programme that would ultimately bring more than 500 artworks to Jeddah’s streets, roundabouts, and corniche. This paper traces the biographical trajectory of one of these works, Three-Piece Reclining Figure No.1, using the gaps in the Henry Moore Foundation’s own archives – where no record could be found of how or when the sculpture reached Jeddah – as a starting point for reconstructing its global circulation. Drawing on archival research at the Henry Moore Foundation and fieldwork observations in Jeddah, I follow the sculpture from a documented absence in the archive to a physical absence in situ, where one of its three bronze elements has silently disappeared from public view. Read alongside a second Moore work acquired in the same years, Oval with Points – relocated, restored, and now prominently displayed near the site for which it was first intended – the two cases propose questions that lie between “lives not-well-lived” and “lives well-lived,” extending Igor Kopytoff’s biographical approach to objects. Together, they show how Moore’s sculptures, dispersed across a rapidly built metropolis, became legible less as individual artworks than as fragments of a single monumental gesture: Farsi’s vision of a city as collection.

Anahi Alviso Marino is an independent scholar and researcher. She holds a PhD in political science from Sorbonne University-Paris 1 and the University of Lausanne, and an MA in Middle Eastern and Asian languages and cultures from Columbia University in New York City. Her current work examines monuments, art in public space, and urban memory, following objects and artists across cities, archives, and institutions to understand how the making and un-making of monumental artworks intersect city-making and politics of memory across the Arabian Peninsula. In 2023, she was a researcher in residency at the Henry Moore Foundation and Archives, and she conducted fieldwork in Saudi Arabia in 2025. Based in Jordan, she is currently finishing a monograph on art and politics in Yemen and between 2026 and 2028, she will be the Research-Creation Lead at Al-‘Ula Urban Observatory (CEFREPA/Villa Hegra).

In 1938, the Egyptian painter and critic Ramsīs Yūnān concluded his inaugural monograph, Ghāyat al-rasām al-ʿaṣarī (The Modern Painter’s Aim) by quoting Henry Moore’s similarly titled 1934 essay “The Sculptor’s Aim,’ arguing that although abstraction was central to modernism, so too was the ‘psychological, human element.’ He invoked Moore to illustrate his theory of ‘subjective realism’ that called for a return to the external world beyond Cubism’s formalism through the expression of inner psychological experience and collective suffering, drawing on Freudian thought and Surrealism. Later, as a leading member of the Egyptian avant-garde group al-Fann wa-l-Ḥurriyya (Art and Freedom), Yūnān exhibited paintings that recall Moore’s stringed, truncated, and recumbent figures. This paper offers the first dedicated study of Egyptian avant-garde’s engagement with Moore between 1938 and 1945, ending with Moore’s inclusion in the Contemporary British Art exhibition in Cairo. I first examine Moore’s debt towards Pharaonic Egyptian and other archaic sources, before tracing how his ideas entered Cairo’s avant-garde scene through transnational and often Surrealist networks including Amy Nimr, Rātib Ṣiddīq, and Roland Penrose. I then focus on Yūnān’s Reclining Woman (1944) series and La Nature appelle le vide (1944), where Moore’s forms are recontextualised within an Egyptian mythological and material landscape. Rather than viewing modernism radiating from metropolitan centers to the colonial periphery, this paper proposes a reciprocal relationship in which Moore’s work acquires new form through Egyptian modernism, what Yūnān calls ‘cultural resonance.’

Christiane Gontarek received an MPhil in History of Art with distinction from the University of Cambridge in 2026, funded by the Richard Edwards MPhil Studentship. Their dissertation, “Long Live Degenerate Art”: Dreaming with al-munḥaṭṭ in Art and Freedom, 1938-1952, which won the MPhil Highest Distinction Award, examined the Egyptian group’s recuperation of visionary dimensions of psychoanalysis and Sufism. Christiane has worked for cultural institutions including La Maison Dora Maar, Dalloul Art Foundation, Clark Art Institute, and Williams College Museum of Art. They previously earned a BA with highest honours in Arabic and Art History & Practice from Williams College.

This paper positions Henry Moore’s site-specific UNESCO Reclining Figure within the long history of a visuality of ‘peace and international understanding’, as shaped by the United Nations (UN) and its educational agencies. With the launch of the 17 UNSDGs (UN Sustainable Development Goals) in 2015, new interdisciplinary frameworks and visual communication campaigns have emerged, shaping discourses of universal action. UNSDG16 (‘peace, justice and strong institutions’) exemplifies what the UN stands for and its longstanding attempts since 1945 to forge an epistemology and aesthetic akin to what philosopher Nelson Goodman called ‘ways of worldmaking’ (1978). Such visions have been challenged, considering the tough competition with the more expansive dramatic representations of war and conflict (Bourke, 2017). This tension had troubled Moore, while experimenting with forms and materials for the commission to place a sculpture at the courtyard of the UNESCO building, upon its inauguration in 1958. As Moore reflected a couple of years after its completion, he “wanted to avoid any kind of allegorical interpretation that is now trite” (cited in Wilkinson, 2002). His concern with the afterlife of this specific work resonates with wider debates from then and now about artistic interpretations of peace by internationalist institutions, often contested by geopolitical forces. I propose the concept of the ‘afterimage’ to reflect on the contexts and legacies of Moore’s monumental work for UNESCO in the age of UNSDG16.

Dr Katerina Loukopoulou is a Senior Academic Developer at Middlesex University London, currently investigating the correlation between pedagogies and visualities of sustainability. A former Henry Moore Foundation Post-doctoral Fellow, Katerina has researched and published on the making of Henry Moore into a public icon through the media of film and television. For this paper, she is drawing on archival research, conducted at the Henry Moore Foundation, the United Nations and UNESCO, the latter funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant on a project about peace documentaries.

Dr Lauren Walden is a Senior Research Fellow in Contemporary Chinese Art at Birmingham City University, UK. Accessing primary sources in Chinese, French and Spanish, her thesis identified a ‘Cosmopolitan Surrealism’, addressing tensions between universality and cultural specificity whilst cementing the empirical importance of photography in relation to Surrealism’s global expanse. She has published two monographs on Chinese Surrealism, establishing a new sub-field of study. Through modelling ‘historico-intrinsic relations’, Walden asserts Surrealism is the avant-garde movement that chimes most with traditional Chinese thought whilst concurrently deployed to dialectically reconcile opposing forces: colonialism and cosmopolitanism (pre-revolution), collective revolution and individual subjectivity (Maoist era) then communism and capitalism (post-socialist). Walden also has research interests in Taiwanese Surrealism and Surrealism and AI. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the Leverhulme Trust, Centre for Creative Photography Arizona, Henry Moore Foundation and Fondation Giacometti.