The Hepworth Pavilion at the Kroller-Muller Museum
It feels a little strange to post about Europe when travel there has shut down, but, well, it looks like I will only be visiting Europe by virtual means in the foreseeable future. I was going to be doing another bicycle trip to Emilia-Romagna this summer, but…
This is another sculpture park I visited last summer, at the Kroller-Muller Museum. Very different from Kloster Schoenthal, but equally fantastic, another one on the list of the best sculpture parks I’ve ever visited. There’s a lot of good sculpture, but the highlight is the Barbara Hepworth pavilion. Hepworth is my favorite female artist and one of my favorite sculptors of all time. I like her drawings, love a lot of her stone sculpture, and I think she made the transition from stone to bronze more gracefully than any other sculptor in history. Everything she did was interesting and high-quality, and I give her a lot of credit for avoiding the late, phoning-it-in phase that Henry Moore went through. I’d seen individual works in a few different museums, but this was my first time seeing a proper collection. Fantastic.
A bonus is that the Hepworth sculptures are displayed in a pavilion designed by Gerrit Rietveld, hero of De Stijl and the Bauhaus. My photos focus on the sculptures, but I love the pavilion and think it’s reason enough to visit Kroller-Muller.
One sculpture in the pavilion is not by Hepworth, this section of tree trunk that’s similar to the one by David Nash at Kloster Schoenthal. Different context and framing, and thus a different meaning, but fascinating comparison. I’d like to know the backstory behind including a single non-Hepworth sculpture in the pavilion, so if anyone knows, please tell me in the comments.
I have photos of some stone sculptures in the sculpture park that I might add while ‘shelter in place’ continues. Stay healthy everyone.
This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2020 at 8:39 am and is filed under sculpture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
