Seated Mother and Child. 1980.
Gouache and chalks.
Lower left signed and dated. On blotting paper. 22.5 x 17.2 cm (8.8 x 6.7 in), the full sheet. [CH].
More works from the Dr. Maier-Mohr Collection are offered in our Evening Sale on Friday, June 7, 2024, as well as in our Modern Art Day Sale on Saturday, June 8, 2024 (see catalog “Dr. Theo Maier-Mohr - A Private Collection”).
• The relationship between mother and child is a key theme that Henry Moore treats almost obsessively.
• From the 1920s until the end of his life, Moore explored this motif in works ranging from highly figurative to completely abstract.
• He explored both the human aspect of the mother and child relationship and the spatial relationship between large and small forms.
• In addition to the sculptural works, the drawings with their sculptural approach to the human form, occupy an extremely important artistic position in his oeuvre.
• This drawing has been in the same German private collection for almost 40 years.

The work is documented at the Henry Moore Foundation, Hertfordshire, with the number HMF 80 (75).

PROVENANCE: Fischer Fine Art Ltd., London.
Dr. Theo Maier-Mohr Collection (acquired from the above in 1985).
Ever since family-owned.

EXHIBITION: Henry Moore. Recent Work, Fischer Fine Art, London, Junie-July 1980, cat. no. 18 (ilu.).
Salzburg 1981, cat. no. 26.

LITERATURE: Ann Garrould, Henry Moore. Complete Drawings, vol. 5 (1977-1981), London and Much Hadham 1994, no. AG 80.125 (illu. in black and white).

"From very early on I had an obsession with the mother and child theme. It has been a universal theme from the beginning of time and some of the earliest sculptures we've found from the Neolithic Age are of a mother and child. I discovered, when drawing, I could turn every little scribble, blot or smudge into a mother and child. So that I was conditioned, as it were, to see it in everything. I suppose it could be explained as a 'mother complex'."
Henry Moore, in: John Hedgecoe and Henry Moore, Henry Moore, New York 1968, p. 61.