Henry Moore

Helmet Head: Interior/Exterior Forms’ (1950) belongs to a series of drawings made by Henry
Moore between 1948 and 1950. These drawings mark the beginning of an aesthetic that places outer
protective structures around interior forms – a defining characteristic of Moore’s mature sculptural
work – and reflect the artist’s interest in helmets and armour. Recalling his time as a student at the
Royal College of Art in the 1920s, Moore has stated that: ‘the idea of one form inside another form
may owe some of its incipient beginnings to my interest at one stage when I discovered armour. I
spent many hours in the Wallace Collection, in London, looking at armour’.

Here, the curved outer forms of the helmets represented in the drawing resemble the German
‘Stahlhelm’, or ‘coal scuttle’ helmet, which Moore had seen in action during the First World War
after enlisting in the British Army in 1917. Moore has added ears to the central, green helmet, a
retention of recognisable facial elements that heightens the tension between mechanical and human.

He has further organically mutated the openings of the other helmets to offer an interplay between
the humanised helmet and its interior form. In doing so, Moore echoes the Surrealist notion of the
supposed duplicity between our experience of the outer world and the working of the inner eye of the
mind. Through these drawings, Moore explores variants of the forms that he goes on to make in
bronze in ‘Helmet Head No.1’ (1950), held in the Tate collection, and in lead in ‘Helmet Head No.
2’ (1950), which is held in the collection of the Saatsgalerie Stuttgart.