Tag Archives: Henry Moore

Time Travelers exhibit at Ark Arts Center

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Henry Moore, Eight Reclining Figures No. 1, 1966, ink and watercolor on paper,

If an artist from the Treasures of Kenwood House exhibition were to time travel to the twentieth century, he would no doubt be shocked at the revolutions that had transformed the art of his native Britain, Netherlands, or Flanders (now part of Belgium).

Abstract and surreal art seems to break with nearly every precept of classically-based seventeenth- and eighteenth-century art. Yet the twentieth-century artists whose works have been selected from the Arts Center’s collection for this exhibition did not turn completely from their past.

In the 1980s, Dutch artist Anneke van Brussel (born 1949) drew asparagus in much the same naturalistic manner as seventeenth-century Dutch still life artists. The powerful British realist painter Lucian Freud (1922 – 2011) created an intimate figure drawing inspired by the work of eighteenth-century French artist Antoine Watteau (1684 – 1721). The British modernist sculptor Henry Moore (1898 – 1986) looked back even farther in his series of lithographs portraying the ancient British monument known as Stonehenge. Moore’s many reclining figures, sculpted and drawn, reflect both classical Greek and Roman figural sculpture and ancient Mayan stone carvings.

The great traditions of drawing, painting and sculpting human figures, animals, still lifes, and landscapes take on different guises from year to year, but they are never forgotten. The past provides the solid ground from which visions of the future take wing.

The exhibit runs through August 4.

Sculpture Sunday: Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge

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Little Rock’s most famous piece of public art is Henry Moore’s 1961 creation Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge, which is known locally as “The Henry Moore Sculpture.”  The original model was created in 1961; this sculpture was cast in 1976 and purchased in June 1978 by the Little Rock Metrocentre Improvement District. The purchase price was $185,000 — a princely sum at the time but now a bargain for a Henry Moore sculpture.

A committee consisting of Townsend Wolfe (then the director and chief curator of the Arkansas Arts Center), James Dyke and Dr. Virginia Rembert actually traveled to England to meet with Moore about the sculpture.

It was originally placed at the intersection of Capitol and Main as the centerpiece of the pedestrian mall. When the final segment was reopened to vehicular traffic, it was put at its current location of the southeast corner of Capitol and Louisiana.