Sculpture: The Heroic Bather

Manhattan's new Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts is also meant to be a showcase for the visual arts. One plaza is already filled with a computerized, illuminated fountain. To adorn another, the center's designers sought a "heroic" sculpture to break up the geometric, travertine-and glass-sided space between four buildings. They picked Britain's monumental Henry Moore (TIME cover, Sept. 21, 1959) to fill the tall order. Last week the largest Moore sculpture ever made arrived—a two-piece bronze whose shells are cast as thin as a paperback whodunit, yet still weigh nine tons. There it lay, surrounded by mystery and a pair of slat-sided crates.

The crates were soon pried away to reveal the two sections of what Moore called Reclining Figure, wallowing high and dry like a pair of sunburnt whales. The setting would have made Michelangelo turn green with envy: a tree-dotted promenade designed for people bound for cultural experiences. Said Moore, 67, on hand to supervise the installation: "I like the idea of the space being surrounded by controlled building." The bronze will sit, unpedestaled, as the centerpiece of a 120-ft. by 80-ft. reflecting pool, surrounded by the elevations of the late Eero Saarinen's Vivian Beaumont Theater, Max Abramovitz' Philharmonic Hall, Wallace K. Harrison's Metropolitan Opera House and Pietro Belluschi's yet-to-be-built structure for the Juilliard School of Music. "I didn't want my piece to stand there like a wooden soldier," says Moore.

She won't. Some 16 ft. high at the tallest point, the two pieces represent the rounded rump and upright torso of a semireclining figure. Typically Moore-ish, she abstractly lounges in the reflecting pool, mingling the domestic grace of a nude in her bath with the powerful, primitive presence of a goddess disturbed from sleep by Leonard Bernstein. Manhattan's mightiest piece of modern sculpture was wrestled into place pretty much the way marbles were muscled into place in Michelangelo's day. Grunting workmen wedged the huge metallic shapes onto rollers, eased them down wood beams, hoisted them upright with block and tackle. Meanwhile, the foreman from West Berlin's Hermann Noack foundry, which cast the behemoth bather, scrubbed down her metal flanks with a hand brush to remove the grime of travel.

The Moore was paid for out of the Albert A. List Foundation's million-dollar grant to the center for art works, but the artist considered that the best payment was not having to personify such a subject as "Justice, Virtue or something like that." Instead, he was able to enliven a great geometric space with a human form in bronze—the kind of intense life in art that the voids of architecture demand.