Monographic exhibitions have been a fixture of the art world for so long that it’s easy to forget the important role they play in maintaining an artist in the cultural conversation, not just by repeatedly displaying their work, but by the new scholarship and fresh insights they often present. Picasso and Matisse are but two artists who have retained a powerful hold on the public imagination in large part because of the groundbreaking exhibitions of their work that have been organized over the last several decades.

Neither has Henry Moore wanted for exhibitions. Even now, nearly twenty-five years after the sculptor’s death in 1986 at the age of 88, one can be fairly confident that, at any given time, somewhere in the world a new show of his work has just opened, or is about to. Yet, sadly, one also gets the impression that Moore is much less of a must-see in the eyes of the public than he once was. A 2002 retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington was deserted the day I visited. Another indication is that he is the target of postmodernist art gags, such as Infestation Piece by Simon Starling, the British conceptual artist and 2005 Turner Prize winner. In 2006, Mr. Starling cast an actual-size replica of one of Moore’s most powerful sculptures, the 1954 Warrior with Shield, and submerged it in Lake Ontario for six months, where it became encrusted with mussels. The replica, mussels and all, is