# Moore and Hepworth return to Washington’s renewed Hirshhorn garden Canonical article: https://arthistory.news/news/moore-and-hepworth-return-to-washington-s-renewed-hirshhorn-garden-bcf66992-c8c4-427e-9686-5f73bcf4dc31 By ArtHistory.News Published: 2026-10-31T07:12:48.340Z Henry Moore’s King and Queen have resumed their watch over Washington. The seated bronze couple, made in 1952-53, are among the familiar figures returning to view as the Hirshhorn Museum’s sculpture garden reopens on 31 October after a four-year transformation by the Japanese artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. For admirers of British sculpture, there is considerable reason to look beyond the new commissions accompanying the reopening. Five works by Moore and two by Barbara Hepworth occupy the garden’s eastern galleries, where the museum’s historic collection has been brought together in a setting of planting, stone walls and newly opened views. Their presence reflects the collecting interests and personal relationships of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, whose gifts established the museum’s holdings. King and Queen makes an especially apt returning presence. There is something both ceremonial and disarmingly ordinary about Moore’s pair: two figures sharing a bench, their upright posture lending an air of authority to bodies that remain curiously vulnerable. Their stillness offers a counterweight to the movement of visitors around them. In a city crowded with monuments to named individuals, these anonymous sovereigns invite a less prescribed encounter. Sugimoto’s scheme gives the collection more room within the same 1.3-acre site. Around 60 works will be shown across the garden and plaza, a substantial increase on the previous installation. Dry-stacked stone walls divide the landscape, while almost 30,000 new plants and trees promise changing backgrounds and greater shade. The project also restores the underground passage connecting the garden with the museum plaza, bringing together parts of the campus that had long been separated. It is the latest chapter in a landscape that has never stood entirely still. Gordon Bunshaft’s garden opened with the museum in 1974; Lester Collins softened its austere character in a redesign completed in 1981. Sugimoto, commissioned in 2019, has retained elements of that history while introducing his own architectural language. Wider entrances, ramps and additional seating are intended to make the sunken garden easier to enter and more inviting to linger in. For Moore and Hepworth, that invitation to linger matters. Sculpture asks the viewer to move: a gap closes, a silhouette changes, one volume slips behind another. Planting and daylight introduce further variations that no fixed gallery installation can quite reproduce. The renewed garden offers an opportunity to approach these familiar names through the physical experience of their work, away from the compressed narratives of a museum wall. Elsewhere, the reinstallation makes a more explicit intervention. Rodin’s Burghers of Calais has been placed close to ground level, allowing visitors to meet its exhausted figures without the distancing effect of a high pedestal. The Hirshhorn’s bronze was cast in 1953-59 from the composition developed in 1884-89. Here, the arrangement follows Rodin’s wish for an encounter on something nearer to equal terms. New work will occupy the western side, where Yoshitomo Nara’s Sentinels of Stillness inaugurates a programme of changing presentations. That leaves the historic sculpture with a distinct place in the garden’s expanded programme. Moore and Hepworth return as part of a collection whose setting has been reconsidered around the simple, demanding business of looking. ## Illustrations Henry Moore, King and Queen, bronze, 1952-1953 Rick Coulby / Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden [Image source](). ## Sources - [ArtHistory.News editor: ArtHistory.News editor]() ## Related records - [Barbara Hepworth]() - [Henry Moore]() Please cite the canonical article URL above. Image credits and reproduction rights remain with their respective holders.