Henry Moore: Monumental Nature at Kew Gardens -- a startling, stunning summer meeting

Here is a fresh, amusing way to see Henry Moore: climb to the top of Kew Gardens' Great Pagoda and look straight down on the pristine white fibreglass "Large Reclining Figure" sunning herself between a Lebanon cedar and the snarling visages of the pagoda's painted carved dragons. With a cleft head, bone instead of legs, and a torso with sharp pincers directed at her own spiky breasts, as if about to bite, this is surrealist Moore at his best -- the nine-metre figure is based on a prewar maquette -- meeting a literal high point of 18th-century chinoiserie. In the distance, Moore's tall, willowy "Large Interior Form" holds its stance with Kew's grand old trees; get close and its glittery pierced bronze catches changing patterns of light and shadow like branches and leaves. Stroll from here to the lake and the massive, rounded, weathered "Sheep Piece" rises before you; this spring its hollows protect a family of goslings. A few paces away, the chunky "Double Oval" is both a walk-in organic form, the bronze surface of striations, indentations and rough planes suggesting rhythms of growth, and an updated version of a Georgian belvedere: the big oval apertures, like all-seeing eyes, frame opposite views, of the Palm House and all the way down Syon Vista to the Thames. "I would rather have a piece of my sculpture put in a landscape, almost any landscape, than in or on the most beautiful building I know," Moore declared, and in many permanent installations -- at his home in Perry Green, Hertfordshire, in Yorkshire Sculpture Park -- his sculptures seem rooted and as enduring as the countryside around them. But Kew Gardens, which this week opened the ambitious, startling, imaginatively installed Henry Moore: Monumental Nature, his largest ever outdoor exhibition, isn't "any landscape": it is the most curated, manicured landscape in Britain. In the open air here Moore, the best-known British 20th-century artist, manages to surprise. Throughout the gardens, the echoing of forms is a visual tease, a game of hide and seek. The jutting narrowing head of "Two Piece Reclining Figure No 2", glimpsed through foliage as you approach the pagoda, fancifully mimics the tower's tapering tip. "Large Totem Head", in fact resembling an outsize seed or pod, peeks out, alien and disturbing, from a thicket opposite the Rhododendron Dell. "Working Model for Spindle Piece" in the Temperate House is an exuberant prickly competitor to the hothouse cacti spiralling around it. The watchful, wary "Upright Motive" group, reminiscent of prehistoric dolmens or stalagmites, are in lively dialogue with the elaborate topiary on the Great Broad Walk Borders: which is more sculpted or more natural, the plants or the bronzes? Some of Moore's sculptures will always resemble small landscapes in themselves: the vast looping bands of "Hill Arches" with its verdigris patina; the type of recumbent woman as a comforting, undulating boulder or cave, eternal as geological strata, in the weathered bronzes "Reclining Mother and Child", "Reclining Woman: Elbow" and "Reclining Figure: Bunched", whose bulbous parts melt into each other. But others, including certain reclining forms, here take on the strange charge of interlopers: they disrupt rather than blend into the setting, in confrontations that illuminate Kew itself as well as Moore. In front of the glasshouses, whose intricate iron traceries are showpieces of 19th-century engineering dashed with nostalgic gothic revival, Moore's sculptures are a modernist slap in the face to high Victorian splendour. Basking before the Temperate House is "Two Piece Reclining Figure: Cut", the body abruptly divided by a slice of empty space, one part sharply angled and vertical, a colossal slab of a back, the other an uneven horizontal form. Two ungainly pieces flank the lovely Palm House pond, the water a ripple of reflections mirroring the graceful curving glass structure: the hefty cliff of "Reclining Figure: Arch Leg", and "Three Piece Sculpture: Vertebrae", a trio of huge interlocking sockets and joints connoting a spine, muscular, tense, uneasy. It was inspired by a bone, though Moore later thought it resembled "some kind of giant animal . . . a whale coming out of the water". Here it looks beached up, bizarre, alongside the lake's fountains and ornaments. As glaring is the encounter between Kew's classical follies and miniature temples and Moore's anticlassical sculptures. Sited by King William's Temple (1837), essentially a war memorial -- iron plaques on the Tuscan porticos commemorate British military victories -- "Draped Reclining Figure" (1952-53) is a passionate anti-heroic statement: Moore's draped figures evolved from his wartime "Shelter" drawings of Londoners bundled in blankets, sketched in Tube stations. The crumpled drapery, he said, was pulled across the bodies "almost like a bandage". He modelled this piece on pre-Columbian chacmool figures which lie on their backs with heads twisted, alert yet still; they symbolised slain warriors making offerings to the gods. "Keep ever prominent the world tradition, the big view of sculpture," Moore told himself. He borrowed from the archaic, from plants, stones, animals, from European modernism -- his spikier sculptures, resonant with palms here, come formally from 1920s Picasso -- and, although he resisted, from classicism: the enigmatic "Large Standing Figure: Knife Edge", posed by the Palm House, was inspired by a bird's breast wing plus the Hellenistic sculpture "Winged Victory of Samothrace". This melange of global appropriations can't help but draw attention to how Kew, too, is a layered physical and intellectual construction based on "world" ambitions: shaped by Enlightenment scientific curiosity and systems of collection and classification, 18th-century ideals of structure and cultivation, 19th-century expanded travel and exploration returning the most diverse species from around the world, all underpinned by imperial assumptions. Its classical architecture and art -- Kew's statuary includes a copy of Verrocchio's "Boy with a Dolphin" and Flora and Sylvanus gazing down from the Temperate House -- emphasise authority and rigour. Kew doesn't need Moore to show this, but seeing his art here, its figurative aspect fervently mimicking nature while its modernist element challenges traditional assumptions of order and beauty, draws attention both to the values on which Kew was built, and to the artist's own early role as a rebel. Over-familiar now, Moore's distortions once shocked: vandals slashed the head from "Recumbent Figure" at MoMA in 1944. An impressive display inside Kew's exhibition galleries recounts Moore's development from the 1930s and, in contrast to the mostly bronze outdoor pieces, explores his material experiments: coiling "Composition"s of cavities and swellings in alabaster and African wonderstone, the fragile torso-like terracotta "Standing Leaf Figure", the Hepworth Wakefield's warm elmwood "Reclining Figure". Inside and out, this is a show of depth and breadth, and will repay repeat visits as it changes with the seasons.