HENRY MOORE remembered the Leeds City Art Gallery as a 'pretty poor affair' in terms of what it offered the student sculptor in 1919-21, when he attended the local art school. Today, thanks in part to the Foundation which he established during his lifetime and further endowed in his Will, the Art Gallery can boast a comprehensive and ever-growing collection of British twentieth-century sculpture, and some of its recent acquisitions are illustrated in this issue on pp.675-76. The standing of the collection has been recognised by the recent allocation to it of Naum Gabo's Constructionin space: soaring of 1929-30 (see cover and p.675), accepted this year by the government in lieu of capital transfer tax from the sculptor's family. 

The Leeds Gallery has a long history of involvement with British modernism, in both painting and sculpture, going back to Frank Rutter, the enlightened curator ap-pointed before the First World War, and to Sir Michael Sadler, Vice Chancellor of the University. Sadler, a con-spicuously adventurous collector in England of contem-porary art (the first owner ofa Kandinsky in this country), supported the Gallery with gifts and encouragement. But his two forays into public commissions for Leeds led to dis-appointments only too familiar. A 1920 scheme for murals by young British artists for the Leeds Town Hall had to be abandoned, partly through hostile local criticism,' and the War Memorial commissioned by Sadler from Eric Gill for the University was unveiled to a deafening outcry of virulent criticism. The climate has changed and persistence has won through. 

In 1982, as part of a thorough-going renovation and re-installation of the old Victorian building on the Headrow, made possible by the Foundation, the Moore Sculpture Gallery was opened in a sympathetic new extension added to the fagade. It has housed since then the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, which aims to promote every aspect of the understanding of the sculpture of the past and present through its collections, exhibitions, publications and conferences, and by building up a library and an archive of sculptors' papers and preparatory materials. In a harmonious arrangement with the city authorities, the Centre's staff and working space have been provided by the Gallery, while the costs of its activities have been largely met by the Henry Moore Foundation. As from mid-1991, however, the Centre's offices will be housed in a new build-ing attached to but independent of the Gallery, designed by Jeremy Dixon to house the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, whose foundation we announced two years ago (Editorial, December 1987) under a now-superseded title. The new extension, linked to the old building by a bridge, will contain two wings of galleries, two floors of offices including the Centre with its archive and library, a book-shop and an open courtyard for large sculpture installations. 

In addition to promoting sculpture of excellence on its own site, the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust's penumbra of activities extends to influence a cluster of outlying centres which are transforming West Yorkshire into the sculptural heart of Great Britain. Already well established at Bretton Hall, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, a plurally funded foundation, is becoming known for its enterprising exhibitions of sculpture in the open air, of which the most recent, of works by Emile Antoine Bourdelle, is reviewed on p.667. At Dean Clough in Halifax, administered and financed by the Trust, a converted mill building is being used for monographic exhibitions of contemporary sculp-ture, in which at least one piece will be the fruits of a residency. Richard Long will be the first of a series of four or five sculptors of international reputation who will work at Dean Clough each year. Earlier this year the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Penone was a working guest of the Trust at Dean Clough, further underlining its cosmopolitan direction. 

Such activities will make Leeds an obvious place for the study of sculpture at university level, and the Trust, in collaboration with the University of Leeds History of Art Department, is in the process of setting up a one-year M.A. course in sculpture intended for both graduate art historians and practitioners. The resident artist scheme, the Gregory Fellowship, will be revived for a young sculptor, and a new Lectureship in twentieth-century sculpture will be advertised. 

Moore himself described sculpture as 'the most difficult of all the arts - most difficult ... to master, most difficult to appreciate'. Why the latter should be the case remains a puzzle, given sculpture's immediacy and totemic power - evident from the taboos and iconoclasm of the past (see p.604). What is palpably true is that, of all the arts, sculpture can least be appreciated at second hand - even with the aid of sophisticated modern methods, such as the inter-active video disc of Moore's work being developed by the BBC and the Tate Gallery, Liverpool. An informed wider audience for sculpture can only come from first-hand study at the highest level. It is for this reason that this Magazine, in collaboration with the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture, is launching an essay prize to encourage object-based research on sculpture, of which details may be found on p.680. 

Such a collaboration is doubly welcome. When Sadler announced the scheme for the Leeds Town Hall decorations, it was agreed that THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE would publish the preliminary designs. Offprints in pamphlet form, paid for by Sadler, were to have been distributed to interested parties. Alas, the idea came to nothing. Nearly seventy years later, it is a pleasure to be involved with Leeds in another more hopeful venture.