Word: kew
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Primal may not be the word to describe the well-groomed landscapes at Kew, the Royal Botanic Gardens on the outskirts of central London, but the backdrop of grassy slopes and monumental trees turns out to be just the right fit for Moore's work, which can seem both powerfully natural and shrewdly cultivated. For "Moore at Kew," the vast show that opened there in September and remains through the end of March, 27 of his large bronzes and one massive figure in white fiberglass have been set to advantage all around Kew's elegant acreage. Silhouetted against Kew...
This is the rare exhibition at which visitors are actually permitted to run their hands along the sculpture. Since Moore's swelling forms fairly beg to be touched, on a busy afternoon Kew can look like an artworld petting zoo. He's still a crowd favorite. But even before he died in 1986, at the age of 88, Moore's reputation had its ups and downs. There was a time when he symbolized modern art for a whole generation. In the years right after World War II, his work epitomized a kind of modernist humanism for an era that...
...biomorphic forms of Surrealist sculpture and painting, detached them from associations of shock or disgust, and reconciled them to the long traditions of the human figure. Even his first more or less Surrealist work, a small stone sculpture from 1932 called Composition - which is not in the show at Kew - is one that Moore developed out of sketches of a child nursing at a woman's breast. Compare it to the grotesque exaggerations of Picasso's 1928 Bather (Metamorphosis 1), a work that Moore knew and which Composition appears to draw from, and you can see the road not taken...
...surprise - the show at Kew is a reminder of Moore's enduring credibility. It has its share of Moore at his most middlebrow: the white fiberglass version of Large Reclining Figure that Moore ordered up in 1984 - a bloviating enlargement of what had been a suave little totem when he first fashioned it in 1938 in gratifying dark lead - belongs at an airport. But set against the greenery of Kew, his way of conflating the curves of the human body with the swells of landscape is effective again. And his two- and three-part reclining figures, like Reclining Figure: Arch...
...conviction, offered a chatty letter. Frank Harris, author of the social and erotic confession My Life and Loves (which had not yet been legally published in the U.S.), got the biographical treatment. The mood lightened with a couple dozen limericks, familiar to centuries of frat boys. The harlot from Kew, the man from Stamboul and the fellow from Kent all made guest appearances, but not, alas, the hermit named Dave...