Giants Amid the Blooms
AS summer approaches and the euro and pound remain mightier than the dollar, New York City seems to have been recolonized by Europeans over the last few weeks. But one group of visitors that arrived recently from Britain for a brief change of scenery did not travel the normal way, slogging through the purgatory of airport customs. Most of them arrived at Port Elizabeth in New Jersey in the holds of cargo ships. And at least one made its way into the Bronx strapped to a low flatbed truck so big that it had to wait until the middle of the night to cross the George Washington Bridge, stopping traffic with its greenish biomorphic bulk, like something bound for a government lab at Area 51.
The city is no stranger to these kinds of tourists, having hosted its share over the last few decades. But the New York Botanical Garden’s “Moore in America” exhibition, which opens Saturday with 18 of Henry Moore’s big, beloved bronzes (and two more in fiberglass), is the largest outdoor collection of his work in a single location ever presented in New York, or anywhere else in the country. And it serves as the garden’s announcement — after it dipped in its toes with a crowd-pleasing show of Dale Chihuly glass works in 2006 — of its intention to venture more ambitiously into the art world as a way of opening people’s eyes to the garden not simply as a nice, blossomy place to spend a summer afternoon but also as a museum in itself, one of flora.
“It opens up the gardens to new audiences who might not be all that into plants or into gardening but who are into human creativity,” said Todd Forrest, the garden’s vice president for horticulture, riding one recent sunny morning on the back of a golf cart as Moores were being trucked into place all across the garden’s 250 acres.
“And by bringing in art, we show them that the garden — that these kinds of gardens — are in themselves works of art,” he continued. “They’ve been designed and constructed and conserved in much the same spirit.”
In choosing Moore, one of the most revered and familiar sculptors of the 20th century, the garden may be taking few risks. But Mr. Forrest and officials at the Henry Moore Foundation, in rural Hertfordshire north of London, said that the landscape, with its combination of highly choreographed planting, natural schist formations and native forest, was such an ideal fit for the work that it seemed the logical choice for the garden’s first ambitious exhibition.
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