Mother and Child by Henry Moore

Thinking Through Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)’s “The Origin of the Work of Art”

Henry Moore’s Mother and Child stands not as an image of tenderness, but as an elemental relation, a primordial unfolding of Being-with. Heidegger would see in it a clearing where origin and protection, exposure and enclosure occur simultaneously.

The forms are abstracted, nearly eroded—no facial features, limbs stylized into curves. But this reduction is not impoverishment. It is Being distilled: the mother is the sheltering ground, the child the emergence of presence. Heidegger, who often speaks of dwelling as care, would find in this sculpture a presencing of the ontological condition of belonging.

The earth—wood, stone, or bronze—retains its density. Moore’s surfaces do not erase matter—they reveal it through form. The world that arises is not social but archetypal: a world where Being begins not in individuality, but in relation, in being-held.

There is no sentimentality. The child does not cling; the mother does not caress. Yet being-with is there. Heidegger would say this work shows not the story of a mother and child, but how Being first gives itself: as one held by another, as form that shelters, even in its fragmentariness.

In Moore’s Mother and Child, the truth of ontological nearness—not explained, not dramatized—stands forth, in voids, in stone, in silence.