Both figures are women; the smaller, in the other’s lap, is perhaps younger—with a pony tail, and a groove through the cranium comparable to similar devices found in the sculpture of Henry Moore. However, the subject matter of Two Figures is certainly secondary to its sculptural values. The emphatic volumes, the striations, the variety of surface in color and texture, the complex interplay of the two figures' limbs and torsos, the voids that reshape themselves as the viewer moves around the work, all offer us the aesthetic satisfactions of vigorous sculptural form. The exposure of the armature on which the clay was originally built tells us that this is an artefact of the sculptor’s hand and craft. To identify here a rhetoric component, that the work may be expressive of the maiming of war victims and the survival of the emotion of love and tenderness between mother and child despite hideous disfigurement (including decapitation!), may be to press "interpretation" too far. In a comparable headless and footless sculpture at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the smaller figure is omitted, depriving the work of the implicit exchange of sentiments between the two women.