Inscribed ‘Moore’ and stamped with foundry mark ‘H. NOACK BERLIN’.
This is no.515 in the Lund Humphries catalogue of Moore's sculpture; there are three bronze casts. The Tate's bronze was previously on loan to Westminster City Council who placed it on its present site, outside Riverwalk House on the Embankment, in 1968.
Moore has explained how the idea for ‘Locking Piece’ ‘came about from two pebbles which I was playing with and which seemed to fit each other and lock together, and this gave me the idea of making a two-piece sculpture-not that the forms weren't separate, but that they knitted together. I did several plaster maquettes, and eventually one nearest to what the shape of this big one is now, pleased me the most and then I began making the big one.’ The ‘big one’ referred to here is the ‘Working Model for Locking Piece’ 1962, the original plaster of which is in the Moore Collection, Art Gallery of Ontario. However, Moore later gave a slightly different account of the genesis of the sculpture when he said that ‘the germ of the idea originated from a sawn fragment of bone with a socket and joint which was found in the garden’. He also said that the work was ‘the largest and perhaps the most successful of my “fitting-together” sculptures. In fact the two pieces interlock in such a way that they can only be separated if the top piece is lifted and turned at the same time’. Alan Bowness has identified Moore's preoccupation with locking forms as being ‘one general characteristic of the late style.’
Bowness calls ‘Locking Piece’ ‘the first large compact sculpture’, a product of the years 1959 to 1962 in Moore's works which were ‘rich in new sculptural thinking.’
Published in: The Tate Gallery 1978-80: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1981.
Artwork details
Artist: Henry Moore OM, CH 1898–1986
Title: Locking Piece
Date: 1963–4
Medium: Bronze
Dimensions Object: 2920 x 2800 x 2300 mm
Collection: Tate
Acquisition: Presented by the artist 1978