Small is Beautiful; The Art of Sculpture includes five works from the Collection of the Family of Harry A. Brooks. Brooks, a close friend of Henry Moore, had a long and distinguished career in the New York art world. Having served in the US Army during the Second World War, when he was awarded the Bronze Star and Army Commendation Ribbon, Brooks embarked upon his career as an art dealer, joining E. Coe Kerr Gallery in New York, before moving to Knoedler & Co., where he worked for 21 years. In 1968 Brooks joined Wildenstein & Co. as Vice President and later President, before retiring in 1990. A graduate from Princeton University, he served on the Board of Directors at the University's Art Museum, as well as at the Nassau County Museum of Art in Roslyn, NY. Brooks passed away on 2 June 2000, aged 87.

‘From the very beginning the reclining figure has been my main theme. The first one I made was around 1924, and probably more than half of my sculptures since then have been reclining figures’ (Moore quoted in A.G. Wilkinson (ed.), Henry Moore: Writings and Conversations, Los Angeles, 2002, p. 212).

Conceived in 1960 Two Piece Reclining Figure: Maquette No. 1 is an example of one of the most prominent themes in Henry Moore’s career: the reclining figure. Moore had an ‘absolute obsession’ with the reclining figure, using it as a site of endless experimentation and innovation. Moore explained, ‘The vital thing for an artist is to have a subject that allows [him] to try out all kinds of formal ideas – things that he doesn’t yet know about for certain but wants to experiment with, as Cézanne did in his Bathers series…The subject-matter is given. It’s settled for you, and you know it and like it, so that within it, within the subject that you’ve done a dozen times before, you are free to invent a completely new form-idea’ (Moore quoted in C. Lichtenstern, Henry Moore: Work-Theory-Impact, London, 2008, p. 95).

For Moore, the enduring appeal of the reclining figure lay in the endless formal and spatial possibilities. This symbiotic relationship between form and space was one of Moore’s central and most enduring sculptural innovations, offering infinite views through and around the sculpture. Moore stressed the importance of such relationship, stating, ‘You can’t understand space without being able to understand form and to understand form you must be able to understand space’ (quoted in ibid., p. 105).

From the 1960s Moore became fascinated with the possibilities of separating the elements of a reclining figure. Moore relished in such a technique realising that he could unify his figure with the landscape to a greater effect. Two Piece Reclining Figure: Maquette No. 1 is one of the finest examples of this practice with the abstracted figure morphing into the landscape, her forms emulating the rolling hills of his native Hertfordshire. Alan Wilkinson reiterates, ‘One of Moore’s greatest contributions to the language of twentieth century sculpture has been the use of the human figure as the metaphor for landscape’ (quoted in Henry Moore’s Reclining Women, National Gallery of Canada Annual Bulletin, Vol. 1, 1977-1978).