Gardens of Artful Delights

LONDON — Two major outdoor sculpture exhibitions here — one of which is headed to New York this spring — are bringing an exhilarating focus to two celebrated landscapes. First, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has mounted “Moore at Kew.” With 28 sculptures, it is the largest outdoor exhibition of Henry Moore’s work ever seen in London — and it will arrive at the New York Botanical Garden on May 24. Second, on the historic grounds of Chatsworth, the home of the duke of Devonshire in Derbyshire, Sotheby’s organized “Beyond Limits,” a two-month international exhibition of 23 modern and contemporary sculptures, including five that were commissioned by Sotheby’s, all of which are part of an ongoing private sale. Seeing these shows in sequence demonstrates the lingering influence of Moore’s humanistic and organic forms created for the open air.At Kew, a landscape designed in the 18th century, the Moores are placed deep within glades of specimen trees and along prominent vistas. They surround Kew’s majestic glass houses and a reflecting pond. Spread out in an arc between the two public entrances, each sculpture is isolated in its own setting, giving ample space and privacy to contemplate the monumental forms under daylight that captures every nuance of patina and textured surfaces.An accompanying exhibition in Kew’s Nash Conservatory offered a succinct view of Moore’s modeling and carving techniques. It also included his maquettes, inspired by his collected bits and pieces of shells, petrified wood, flint stones, clay fragments, and animal bones. While curator of the Henry Moore Foundation, Anita Feldman, emphasizes in her catalogue essay that the sculptures on view, from Moore’s postwar period, were intended to be sited in the landscape — primarily his own grounds in Hertfordshire — they also represented the themes that had always engaged him: interlocking or internal/external forms, totemic uprights, and mother-and-child and reclining figures. By working out of doors, Moore was challenged, he wrote, “into making a sculpture that has some reality to it — like the reality of nature around it.”A wealth of reclining figures offers a study of these abstract and fractured forms that even with the fewest body parts at various angles convey Moore’s view of women huddling in the underground station air raid shelters during World War II.And while other sculptors learned about drapery from the classical Greeks, Moore sketched the thin blankets covering the supine mothers protecting their children during long nights. Though monumental in size, “Draped Reclining Mother and Baby” and “Draped Reclining Woman,” outside Kew’s Palm House, possess all the delicacy and texture of his shelter drawings.Among other massive but seductive sculptures, “Large Two Forms” and “Double Oval,” frame the landscape through rounded apertures, not unlike Chinese moon gates, a view suddenly obliterated as one shifts position. So strong is the presence of all these sculptures at Kew that their collective imprint will remain indelibly in the mind’s eye on future visits to the garden after the show is gone. And in some sense, all those Moores outside modernist buildings in cities will seem lost without the foil of a lush landscape.As one of the preeminent country houses in England, Chatsworth possesses 105 acres of gardens, a 1702 cascade, and a surrounding park laid out in the 1760s by Capability Brown. In the 19th century, the head gardener Joseph Paxton designed the Great Conservatory and other glass houses there, leading to his ultimate engineering feat, the 1851 Crystal Palace in London. Chatsworth’s unfertilized lawns, a treasure trove of wildflowers and weeds, are protected by a local planning board, and sections were removed temporarily for the exhibit.The present duke of Devonshire, who is vice chairman of Sotheby’s Holdings, has continued the tradition of building his own family’s extensive collection of art. He believes outdoor sculpture is less intimidating than art in a museum. “People don’t lower their voices when they are expressing a positive or negative opinion,” he said in an interview.Indeed, Sotheby’s annual sculpture show, which originated in Florida, has gained more international appeal since its move to Chatsworth. The setting contrasts contemporary work against green enclosures and classical garden statuary. It has also attracted hundreds of local schoolteachers and their students. As if in exchange, the duke has found that by hosting the Sotheby’s exhibits, he has become braver with his own selections, he said, citing his commission of Welsh artist David Nash to create a site-specific sculpture from a great dead tree at Chatsworth.A brisk walk takes the visitor to the far extremes of the garden, where strong autumnal color vies for brilliance with the final blooms of the season. In a perfect siting, Aristide Maillol’s “L’Air,” suspended gracefully on the bank of Canal Pond, facing the single jet of the Emperor’s Fountain, recalls “The River” at water’s edge in the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art. In a wooded clearing above the pond, Barbara Hepworth’s “Three Obliques (Walk In),” with a feeling of Moore, is like a triple bronze moon gate, while François-Xavier Lalanne’s “Vache Paysage (Le Grand)” nearby is a witty bronze cow whose cutout torso frames a view of the classical house. Like Hepworth, Anish Kapoor’s “Levitation II,” a rounded mass of polished granite that reflects the landscape, suggests Moore’s monumental solidity.One of the commissions, “Harumaki Bench” by Fernando and Humberto Campana, with Gaudiesque swirls of colorful felt, carpet, and rubber in a stainless-steel frame, sits comfortably in Paxton’s one remaining glass house, called the Conservative Wall. And Manolo Valdés’s bronze “Infanta Margarita,” inspired by Velásquez at the Prado, is impressively regal against a colonnade and columnar yews. Ju Ming’s massive bronze sculpture, “Tai-Chi Series: Preparation for Underarm Strike,” is juxtaposed with a garden statue of a man in an appropriately athletic pose.Sotheby’s also commissioned Zaha Hadid’s “Belu,” a streamlined fiberglass bench with drawers, and Michal Rovner’s “Makom,” an enclosed structure built with stones from the remains of old houses in Israel. These have been fitted together without adjusting their sizes; and peering inside, one sees against the stone a video of ghostly spirits, one imagines, of former inhabitants.In the entrance courtyard, Damien Hirst’s 35-foot-high “The Virgin Mother” in bronze is a mother and child of another stripe. Inspired by the stance of Edgar Degas’s “Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen,” “The Virgin Mother” shows a right side of the body with exposed organs and skeletal and muscular framework, plus a child cradled in the uterus. It is a striking finale.“Moore at Kew,” the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, London, until March 30; www.kew.org. Between May 24 and November 2, 2008, at the New York Botanical Garden; “Beyond Limits,” Sotheby’s at Chatsworth, England, until November 4.

Gardens of Artful Delights

Gardens of Artful Delights

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