David Hare was an American heir to the Surrealist tradition brought to New York in the early 1940s by European émigré artists. According to the artist, Moon Cage is neither abstract nor representational. In approaching the work from any angle, one encounters the ambiguity described by the artist in the powerful suggestions of a window, a moon, and a human figure. The central configuration, which is literally drawn in space, is created by the union of four steel rods welded around a central rod. This form both supports and is pierced by two framing rectangles that intersect at right angles at its core. These frames are at once windows that open into space and the bars of an enclosing cage. The configuration is held aloft by the stem of a crescent-shaped abstract form, which may be the moon referred to in the title. This form rhymes with a smaller crescent at the top of the sculpture, from which a line falls gracefully into the space below the frame of the cage and unites the piece by mediating between the empty space at the base of the work and the complex, elongated structure above it.