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David Cohen

A remarkable evocation in full colour of the exhibition of Moore's late monumental bronzes held in the Bagatelle gardens, Paris, in 1992.

Over the years there have been many exhibitions of Moore's work in cities and museums around the world, which attest to the universal appeal of his sculpture. The exhibition at the Bagatelle was unique: a magical combination of Moore's monumental works set down in a park within a great city of the arts. Moore had a lifelong association with Paris, which began with a visit in 1922 while he was a student, and his sculpture was exhibited there repeatedly during his lifetime.

The true significance of the Bagatelle gardens exhibition and of this publication lies in the exceptional nature of Moore's late monumental bronzes, and his views on the siting of his sculpture. In 1958 Henry Moore began to work on a very large scale, creating works of sculpture that break the confines of the indoor museum gallery and demand to be seen out-of-doors. He continued to make these large-scale works until he was well into his eighties.

Moore liked to see his work in nature, placing it in the landscape around his home in the English countryside. This setting - with its space and changing natural light - emphasised for him the enduring and harmonious relationship of man to the natural world, one of the fundamentals of his sculpture.

The Bagatelle gardens in Paris provided the perfect site for an exhibition of Moore's monumental bronzes. Laid out in the nineteenth century by an Englishman, Lord Seymour, the Bagatelle presents a unique combination of natural English landscape and formal gardens. The large sweeps of lawn against a backdrop of water and trees, with vistas naturally determined by the paths and undulations in the landscape, provided individual sites for the sculptures, each work having been carefully selected to fit into a particular part of the landscape.
'Moore in the Bagatelle Gardens' presents fifty stunning photographs by Michael Muller, one of Moore's assistants, capturing the magical atmosphere of the exhibition. David Cohen's introductory essay discusses particular works in the Paris show in relation to Moore's ideas about sculpture and the open air. A magnificent visual record of a unique exhibition, which explores an intriguing solution for the presentation of twentieth-century sculpture in public places.