Earth, Sky, and Sculpture

Just 60 miles north of New York City, set in a beautiful valley of the Hudson Highlands, are 500 acres of open fields, intimate woodlands, and rolling hills that form an outdoor museum unequaled anywhere in the world. The Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, is a unique setting for modern sculpture. The natural beauty of the landscape - continually enhanced, sculpted, and nurtured - is home to an ever-evolving collection of important works of modern art. Here the sculpture of such modern masters as Magdalena Abakanowicz, Alexander Calder, Mark di Suvero, Andy Goldsworthy, Alexander Liberman, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, Isamu Noguchi, George Rickey, Richard Serra, David Smith, Kenneth Snelson, and Ursula von Rydingsvard find surroundings equal to their heroic presence.

"Earth, Sky, and Sculpture" is at once a glorious celebration of natural beauty and a wide-ranging survey of the impressive international developments in sculpture since the advent of Modernism. What becomes extraordinarily clear is that most twentieth-century sculpture is seen at its best not in closed galleries but outdoors, under the sky. Works such as Isamu Noguchi's stone "Momo Taro" and David Smith's stainless-steel "XI Books III Apples" respond to changing light and weather as if they were alive.

The magnificent photographs of Jerry L. Thompson capture the landscape and the works of art in summer and snow, at sunrise and dusk, glistening in the rain and shimmering in the mist. The interplay between works of sculpture and billowing clouds, fields of spring flowers, and green golden, and scarlet foliage adds dimension to the experience of sculpture only equaled by many visits to the Storm King Art Center itself.

Essays by H. Peter Stern, chairman and president of Storm King; Peter Bienstock, specialist in land conservation and open space preservation; Irving Lavin, renowned art historian; and Joan Pachner, curator, enhance our appreciation of the land itself and of the Art Center's important collection.