The Art Newspaper

Moore at the Kremlin

21 Feb 12 – 9 May 12

moscow. “In a sense this show represents a further thawing in British-Russian relations,” says Anita Feldman, the curator of the Henry Moore Foundation and an exhibition of the sculptor’s work at the Kremlin Museum.

Cultural relations between the two countries turned frosty with the 2007 closure of all British Council offices outside Moscow after the assassination in London of the former security agent Alexander Litvinenko.

For this exhibition, the Moscow office of the British Council has developed an educational programme around the show.

The museum is located at the heart of Russia’s seat of power, which is currently engulfed in a crisis of legitimacy over alleged vote-rigging in the country’s recent parliamentary elections.

“We’re all very aware that the political climate is a background,” says Feldman, “but the Kremlin is just like any other museum, in that everyone wants to see the works in safety.

The politics haven’t infiltrated that.” Taking over the Kremlin’s Assumption Belltower and the cathedral in the Patriarch’s Palace, the retrospective is the Kremlin Museum’s first modern art exhibition.

“Elena Gagarina [the daughter of astronaut Yuri Gagarin], the museum’s director, is looking at British modern art and discussing the possibility of staging Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson exhibitions in the future,” says Feldman.

The foundation has already collaborated with Gagarina on a Moore exhibition at Moscow’s Pushkin Museum in 1991, “right at the time of the coup”.

This show features 60 sculptures, 22 drawings and three tapestries rarely seen outside the artist’s former home in Perry Green, Hertfordshire.

“There are, in fact, two exhibitions that look at Moore in two different ways, but they’re considered as one,” she says.

The bulk of the show surveys major works that explore Moore’s central themes, including surrealism, the reclining figure, mother and child, and the influence of nature.

“At the end of that experience you have a good idea of what Moore’s work was about,” she says. The second part of the show, which is located in the crypt of the nearby cathedral, delves into our experience of sculpture.

“You don’t want to walk into a crypt and see Perspex squares,” she says, so the space is filled with works that visitors can walk around and peer through. n Julia Michalska Categories: Modern (1900-1945)

• Monanism, Australia
• British Design 1948-2012: Innovation in the Modern Age, United Kingdom
• 7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Germany
• Owen Jones: Islamic Design, Discovery and Vision, United Arab Emirates
• This Will Have Been: Art, Love and Politics in the 1980s, USA

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