“Drawing from life keeps one visually fit – perhaps acts like water to a plant – and it lessens the danger of repeating oneself and getting into a formula.”

—Henry Moore

Of the many natural forms that informed Henry Moore’s prints and sculptures, bones were among the most influential. His cherished collection of bones – a subsection of what he called his “library of natural forms” – included fragments across the entire animal kingdom, from elephants to birds. His attraction to bones stemmed from the texture and structural complexity they offered, and drawing became a crucial avenue for his “pleasure of looking more intently and intensely” at these sorts of complicated forms. As he said of an elephant skull, “The first day I drew the whole skull to find out its general construction; gradually I became amazed at the complexity of it, and my interest and excitement grew greater each day I worked. By bringing the skull very close to me and drawing various details I found so many contrasts of form and shape that I could begin to see in it great deserts and rocky landscapes, big caves in the sides of hills, great pieces of architecture, columns and dungeons.”

Bone Forms is thus not just a simple sketch, but an example of the artist exploring the visual potential of unconventional three-dimensional shapes. Four forms, drawn as though floating against a foggy ether, their crevices, protrusions and curves illuminated with a subtle glow. It was through initial drawing studies of his library of natural forms that the artist would develop more humanlike, abstracted shapes. By way of Moore’s artful metamorphosis, bones could transform to become the basis for a reclining figure, or a mother embracing her child, highlighting his propensity for seeing these unusual shapes in new and inventive ways.

 “The operative word that unifies art and mathematics is SEEING. More precisely, art and mathematics are both about SEEING RELATIONSHIPS. One can see certain mathematical forms as art forms, and creativity is about seeing from a new viewpoint.”

—Nathaniel (Nat) Friedman

A mathematician, educator, and pioneer in the international art and math movement, Professor Nat Friedman (1938-2020) used his discerning eye for mathematical forms to build a distinctive collection of artwork, favoring dynamic sculptures and prints that blurred the line between figuration and abstraction, as well as positive and negative space. Friedman’s art collection was just one element of a life spent working at the intersection of art and mathematics, founding an international annual conference on the subject as well as a quarterly math art magazine called Hyperseeing. Friedman also developed his own artistic practice, taking his first sculpture class in 1971.

‘Hyperseeing’ was also the term Friedman developed in his scholarship to describe a unique mode of perception that allows the viewer to simulate seeing every side of an artwork at the same time, approximating four-dimensional perspective from a single point of view. This philosophy was notably embodied by the boundary-pushing abstraction of Picasso and the Cubists, who depicted multiple views of a subject together into a singular geometric field. In Friedman’s own theoretical framework, hyperseeing was best exemplified by ‘hypersculptures’: a set of sculptures that present a three-dimensional abstract form from various interesting orientations, allowing one to see multiple views of the form from one viewpoint. As Friedman noted, “In general, experience with hypersculptures also motivates an increased appreciation of sculpture since one learns to look harder and more closely from all angles.”

The British artist Henry Moore knew Friedman personally and shared his nuanced understanding of spatial relationships and the notion of hyperseeing as it relates to art and sculpture. Quoted in an essay by Friedman, Moore once said, “[The sculptor] must strive continually to think of, and use, form in its full spatial completeness… He mentally visualizes a complex form from all round itself; he knows while he looks at one side what the other side is like.”ⁱ Moore’s close attention to perspective is evident in Friedman’s personal collection of the artist’s maquettes and etchings; Moore’s forms seem to turn and rotate by themselves, governed by their unique internal physics. In 1984, as part of their ongoing dialogue, Friedman sent Moore his own sculptural forms, made from wood and shell. Upon receiving them, Moore wrote to Friedman: “I’m delighted to have them and shall keep them around me to study and appreciate them. I really am very pleased – I shall draw them.”

Friedman’s career as an educator embodied a maxim from the artist Eduardo Chillida, one that was oft quoted in Friedman’s own writings: “to look is one thing, to see is another thing.”² Through his various pursuits, Friedman championed art’s potential to help us see, rather than look at, the world around us. Friedman’s collection is a testament to his career-defining passion, offering the rare chance to reexamine the work of artists like Picasso, Chillida, and Moore through the practiced eyes of an art practitioner and mathematician.

 
ⁱNat Friedman, “Hyperseeing, Hypersculptures and Space Curves,” Visual Mathematics, vol.
ⁱⁱEduardo Chillida, Basque Sculptor: Home Vision, 1985, video.