From the CMA collection notes – “Upright Motive is among a group of totemic vertical sculptures made by Henry Moore in the mid-1950s. Moore himself worked initially in small-scale wax and clay figurines, several of which he selected to be enlarged to human proportions in plaster. These plasters were then worked extensively by the artist before they were cast in bronze so as to achieve surface textures and subtleties of massing appropriate to their newly enlarged scale.

Despite its apparently abstract title, Upright Motive has many allusions—to kouroi (an archaic Greek statue of a young man, standing and often naked), to bones, to columns, to Benin bronzes, and to tribal ancestral figures in wood. Indeed, it is the very resonance of the forms and their associations with the scale and bearing of the human body that gives them their mute poetry. Compressed within a column of form are the gestures of an artist who refused to allow his Upright Motive any gestures of its own.”