LULLABY

© The Henry Moore Foundation. All Rights Reserved

LULLABY 1973

Henry Moore (1898 – 1986)

Details

Dimension
64.5 X 51.5 CM
Media
LITHOGRAPH
Accession number
P5158

Summary

W S Auden (1907-1973) was an English poet. His work used traditional verse forms with a fresh and light contemporary language. Moore decided almost from the outset that his lithographs should not be mere illustrations to Auden's poems but should stand as images in their own right, complementing or contrasting with the poetry. Moore summed up his approach:
‘Two people who are very unlike each other can come together over something common to them both; the fact that Auden was a Yorkshireman, as I am, and that Yorkshire landscape has always been a very exciting element in my life, made a strong link between us’.
For many years Moore had owned a drawing by the French pointillist artist Seurat. Seurat created his images from tiny dots that visually gave no outline to an object thus fusing the object into its surroundings. Moore used this technique, describing it as an entirely new way of drawing, using no outlines and fusing together space and form, light, depths and distances into a marvellous and mysterious unity of vision. There was never any question of introducing colour. Moore was always after a printed image identical to the blackness of the drawing, which described something of the bleak industrial landscape and the rugged high moors of Yorkshire. With Auden's death in 1973, the whole project became a tribute to his memory. The portfolio was printed in an edition of 75.

Glossary

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Drawing

    The depiction of shapes and forms on a flat surface chiefly by means of lines although colour and shading may also be included. Materials most commonly used are pencil, ink, crayon, charcoal, chalk and pastel, although other materials, including paint, can be used in combination.

  • Edition

    All copies of a book, print, portfolio, sculpture, etc., issued or produced at one time or from a single set of type. Printed works can be made in an edition of between one and many thousands of copies. With most printing techniques the plate or screen will become worn if very many prints are made, so to maintain quality (and exclusivity) editions of original prints are usually kept below one hundred copies and normally average between thirty and fifty copies. Prints made up of several different plates can be extremely complicated and time-consuming to edition, so in these cases editions are kept low for practical reasons. Sculptural editions are a set of cast sculptures taken from the same mould or master. These editions are usually much lower, consisting of no more than six casts. Though each cast in an edition might have a lower value than a unique piece, it may be a more effective way of offsetting costs of an expensive process such as bronze casting.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Portfolio

    A set of pictures (as drawings, photographs or prints) either bound in book form or loose in a folder. These can be by the same artist or individual works by a selection of artists. The term also refers to the folder which holds the set.

Portfolio