Henry Moore and the Severed Mother
The psoas speaks of what the twentieth century destroyed and what we have yet to get back.
Henry Moore’s art spoke through the body itself, shifting from the grounded strength of his early pre-war figures to the narrow and twisted forms of the post-war years. Isolated, hollowed, buckled, often bandaged, these later sculptures sit uneasily — carrying a tension in the lower torso, circling, not quite naming but perceiving.
The psoas.
In his early work, Moore’s figures carried the weight of connection — mother, child, and earth as one. They were life-giving, heroic, almost monumental in their solidity. The mother stood for the earth, and through her we felt ourselves continuous with ground, soil, and source. His Family Groups expressed optimism that strength came from unity: parents and children sharing weight, the body as kin and continuity.
But the wars changed everything. After the trauma of two global conflicts, Moore’s figures grew anxious and fractured. The monumental softened into the bandaged. Limbs no longer rested in wholeness but folded, buckled, and withdrew into themselves. The body no longer expressed union with the earth — it bore the imprint of separation. The family, too, shifted in his sculpture.
The hopeful clusters of parents and children gave way to solitary pairs, stiff and estranged, bound more by proximity than by shared ground.
It is not hard to see the soldier’s wife or daughter in these post-war forms — women who carried the misery of tending to men returned with arms, legs, or half their faces blown away. The anguish belonged to both, but the long weight of care often fell hardest on women. They did not cause these wars. They did not choose them. Yet they paid for them, twice over: first in the men taken, and then in the broken men returned.
And this is the sharpest betrayal. The creativity of women — to nurture, to sustain, to give life — was met with destruction. A jealous slap in the face of what women bring into the world. Men made war; women picked up the fragments.
The 20th century wasn’t just marked by wars — it was an age of severance, when joy drained away and our connection to the source was cut. This is why our hips are still tight: the body carries not only duty and grief but the severance of an age that mistook destruction for progress. And the psoas remembers it.
Moore intuited this fracture in the body. What he cast in bronze is what the psoas carries in flesh. The left psoas — the muscle of intervention — knows what should have happened but didn’t. It holds the thwarted contribution, the refusal to be heard. It is the body’s protest: this should never have been allowed.
The right psoas — the muscle of obligation — stiffens in forced duty, conscripted into carrying what was never its choice to carry. Picking up the pieces and wearing the misery of the broken men who returned. Together they form the locked hips of history, the burden borne silently through generations.
My own grandmother carried that burden so literally that she broke her hips three times. She lived through both world wars, through enforced duty and thwarted voice, and her body gave way at the fulcrum where those forces meet.
This is why Moore’s work still unsettles. It is not simply sculpture. It is prophecy in form. It is the body made to remember what the mind tries to forget. Families fractured. Mothers bandaged. Humans severed from source.
Moore’s figures show what the body still knows. In his bronzes we glimpse what the psoas has held in flesh for generations: the thwarted knowing of the left side, and the forced obligation of the right.
The two essays that follow explorehow the body remembers history in its own language, and why our hips remain tight with stories we never chose to inherit.
About the Author:
Catherine Broué is a systems physiologist. After two decades in ICU and dialysis, she turned to the deeper question of real health, guided by mentors and the insights of Bohr and Buteyko. Her work centres on the body’s true regulators — breath and the central nervous system — and the return to parasympathetic dominance.