Henry Moore’s “Reclining Figure: Festival” will lead the sculpture section of Christie’s 250th anniversary “Defining British Art” sale in London on June 30. Commissioned by the Arts Council for the Festival of Britain in 1951, the groundbreaking modernist masterpiece will be offered with an estimate of £15-20 million.The 228.5cm long “Reclining Figure: Festival” was produced in an edition of five bronze casts with one artist’s proof. Christie’s set the current world auction record for Moore in 2012 when it sold another cast from the edition for £19,081,250 against an estimate of £3.5 - 5.5 million.Moore said of the work, “it is perhaps my first sculpture where the space and the form are completely dependent in and inseparable from each other. I had reached the stage where I wanted my sculpture to be truly three-dimensional . . . Now the space and the form are so naturally fused that they are one”Cyanne Chutkow, Deputy Chairman, Impressionist & Modern Art, Christie’s said: “Reclining Figure: Festival is one of the great masterpieces of Moore's oeuvre and is arguably his most masterful and elegant sculptural synthesis of form and space. Privately held in an American collection for almost a half century, this work is a testament to the owners’ discerning and sophisticated artistic sensibility.”
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