THE Henry Moore Institute, the first centre in Europe devoted to the display, study and research of sculpture of all periods and nationalities, opens on 22 April in Leeds. After pounds 5 million worth of work, a Grade II listed building - three adjoining early-Victorian wool merchants' houses - has been converted into a 20,000-square-foot arts centre with a reference library, two reading-rooms, an archive on Moore, Gill and other sculptors since 1860 and a multi-media interactive video disc with which vistors can create video-essays.

Dame Elisabeth Frink has been awarded the Royal Society of British Sculptors' Gold Medal for 'Distinguished Services to Sculpture'.

IN 1939 Peggy Guggenheim, the prolific American art collector, pronounced that there should be a museum of modern art in London because the Tate was not doing its job properly and she would be taking her collection elsewhere.

The Hayward Gallery's 'The Art of Ancient Mexico' quickly establishes itself as one of the better hung exhibitions in London at the moment. Six fertility goddesses on tall plinths preside sternly over the opening gallery, which also includes a 3ft-long stone phallus from the Museo Nacional de Antropologia in Mexico City. This daunting object was discovered a century ago in the plaza of a small Mexican town called Yahualica, where it played its part in an archaic local custom said to have involved a lot of flowers and a complicated fertility dance.

IT WAS a curious setting in which to decide the future of one of Britain's most fascinating artistic legacies.

THE DIRECTOR of the Tate Gallery said yesterday that plans to build a pounds 4m visitors' centre in the grounds of Henry Moore's home in Hertfordshire were 'irresponsible'.

The scaly surface of an ancient Mexican sculpted figure of Xipe-Totec, a fertility god, is supposed to suggest the flayed skin of a sacrificial human victim. (A reminder, it seems, of the ceremonies in which priests honouring the gods wore the skins like capes until they tightened and burst in the sun.) Such gory facts tend to overwhelm any artistic considerations, but the figure is one of many included in a major exhibition on Ancient Mexican art - opening at the Hayward Gallery, London, on 17 September. Not surprisingly the organisers are playing down the civilisation's barbarism.

PLANS to build a pounds 4m visitors' centre in the grounds of Henry Moore's Hertfordshire home would not create 'a Disneyland with statues', a public inquiry was told yesterday, writes John Arlidge.

THE FUTURE of one of Britain's most important artistic legacies will be decided at a public inquiry starting today in a small village hall in Hertfordshire.

AT ONE point in the exhibition you come across, in a display case, a box of little specimens. There are seashells, cones, seed pods, nuts. And it looks like the answer to the rest of the work. This is, so to speak, the sculptor's dictionary. It contains the essential elements which are taken up, generalised, and carved in marble very many times their natural size.

The Henry Moore Foundation has dropped its appeal over the refusal to permit the building of a sculpture gallery at the artist's home, Perry Green, in Hertfordshire. However, it will continue its fight to build a study centre.

THE Secretary of State for National Heritage, David Mellor, has been asked to spot-list the studios, gardens and sculptures in the hamlet of Perry Green, Hertfordshire, where Henry Moore lived and worked for almost 50 years. The Henry Moore Foundation has plans to add a study centre, a small visitors' centre and a sculpture gallery at Perry Green designed by the architects Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones. The case for listing has been submitted by Stephen Levrant, an architect, and Jack Warshaw, a planner. Writing in this month's Art Review, Mr Levrant says: 'Perry Green should remain available as Moore created it.'