Sometime in the 1930s, sculptor Henry Moore took a stroll through London's Science Museum: “I was fascinated by the mathematical models I saw there,” he said. The models in question — each an array of stretched strings — were made by Fabre de Lagrange, in Paris in 1872, as illustrations of 'descriptive geometry'. The inspiration that Moore took from these remarkable objects into his own work is now explored in an exhibition, Intersections: Henry Moore and Stringed Surfaces, running jointly at the Royal Society and the Science Museum in London, in collaboration with the Henry Moore Foundation and Cambridge's Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

Descriptive geometry was an eighteenth-century invention of the French mathematician Gaspard Monge, who illustrated his work on ruled surfaces using strings stretched over a curved frame. His pupil Théodore Olivier expanded the technique using moveable frames to access a wider variety of geometrical shapes — such as the curves formed in three dimensions by the intersection of two ruled surfaces, which caught the eye of Moore.

Credit: © THE HENRY MOORE FOUNDATION ARCHIVE

The mathematical developments of the late nineteenth century had already found expression in the arts. As co-curator Barry Phipps notes in the exhibition catalogue, “writers such as H. G. Wells and artists like Marcel Duchamp were fascinated with non-Euclidean geometry and the idea of a spatial fourth dimension”; by the 1930s surrealist Man Ray, constructivist Naum Gabo and sculptor Barbara Hepworth were also taking inspiration from mathematical models. But for Moore, “it wasn't the scientific study of these models but the ability to look through the strings as with a bird cage and see one form within the other which excited me.”

From 1937, Moore incorporated stretched strings in numerous works, which still also show his distinctive style for the representation of forms such as heads or figures. Mother and child was a strong theme for Moore, and is represented too in this collection by his Mother and Child 1938, in lead and yellow string and standing 11.9 cm tall (LH 186; reproduced here by permission of the Henry Moore Foundation).