Through the gargantuan windows of an art deco villa suffused with natural light on the slopes of central Athens, the monumental sculptures of Henry Moore stand like sentinels to a modern age. It is a setting of which the great 20th-century British sculptor would have undoubtedly approved.

Against a backdrop of trees and the purist austerity of the white interiors of the Gagosian gallery, Moore’s works are attracting an audience hungry to pay homage to the man who declared that visiting the Acropolis was “the greatest thrill I’ve ever had”.

“The response was been incredibly enthusiastic,” says Christina Papadopoulou, the gallery’s director. “We’ve had a constant flow of people every day. Schools, museum groups, you name it, have visited.”

Few artists of the calibre of Moore have been as affected by Greece or as influenced by its antique art and prehistoric Cycladic civilisation. The Yorkshireman’s experience of a landscape of ancient marbles and temples seen under the country’s fabled light paved the way towards a dramatic shift in his work.

Moore was fascinated by Greek mythology from an early age, but it wasn’t until 1951, when he was in his early 50s, that he made his one and only visit to the country.

As the last stop of a mammoth exhibition that had toured the continent, the artist travelled to Athens to oversee the installation of his bronzes in a show organised by the British Council at the capital’s neo-classical Zappeion Hall.

Barely two years after Greece’s bloody civil war, the visit got off to an inauspicious start. Conservative critics, harbouring little appreciation for modern art or the avant garde, said the sculptures had no place under the bright Attic skies and, if anything, resembled “petrified rocks”.

“They have a slightly curved shape and motion but lack all proportion,” the Estia newspaper proclaimed on its front page. “They also lack noses, ears, hands and feet … why are they being shown in the city of Athena and Phidias where inevitably the Attic sun and light mercilessly expose their absurdity?”

The Akropolis said they “look as if they have been torn from the dark caverns of his country’s coalmines”.

But the display was also an extraordinary success – attracting more people on its first day than the entirety of its six-week run in Paris.

After visiting the archaeological sites of Delphi, Olympia and Mycenae, Moore was changed in ways that he had not foreseen. Previously, his stone and wood carvings had been inspired mostly by African and Mesoamerican art. Now his attention turned to classical Greek antiquity and the use of drapery to define form, which allowed him to convey a greater sense of movement in bronzes produced on a larger scale.

“In Greece, he saw wonderful examples of how architecture and sculpture could coexist,” said Godfrey Worsdale, the director of the Henry Moore Foundation, which co-organised this year’s exhibition, ensuring that Falling Warrior and other key sculptures in Moore’s “dialogue with Greek art” were included.

The impact of the sunlight on treasures that Moore had previously only read about had a strong effect on his output, says Worsdale. “His visit to Greece had a profound and decisive influence on the direction his work then took.” “It was very discernible.”

Reminiscing about his Hellenic sojourn a decade later, the artist would describe his experiences as revelatory. “I felt I understood the whole idea of Greece much, much more completely than ever before.

“The Greek landscape was another revelation to me: that stark, stony quality with the feeling that the sea may be around the next corner. I can understand why they were sculptors.”

Rarely has an exhibition explored the influence of Greece on an artist whose output was both prodigious and multi-faceted. Throughout a prolific career, almost until his death in 1986, Moore drew, sculpted, worked with textiles and produced prints with fervour. But in Greece, more than 70 years ago, he also helped break conventions.

“Even now, there are people here who can vividly remember his works going on display at the Zappeion,” says Elizabeth Plessa, an art historian who chronicled the commotion the 1951 exhibition caused when she co-curated a show of the Briton’s work on the island of Andros 24 years ago. “Nothing like it had ever been seen here before. It was received as a shock wave but there were young artists who saw the sculptures as confirmation of everything they doubted about establishment art and welcomed it enthusiastically.”

Sculptors who had just graduated from the Athens School of Fine Arts and never before been exposed to such boldness in art converged on the Zappeion – the site last week of the sellout international trade fair, Art Athina, in a country now enjoying a booming art scene.

Now, for a new generation that come to see the first show of Moore’s works in Greece in 20 years, the appeal of his bronzes lie in their “purity and freshness”, says Papadopoulou. “It has been very personal for Greeks to explore this link between their country and one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th century.”

“The younger generation clearly feel a need to experience both modern and contemporary art. You see it in all the new artist-run spaces and smaller galleries here,” she adds.

Moore has been described as Britain’s first truly international artist. In today’s world, which the sculptor might not recognise, he, like other 20th-century literary and artistic titans, has – perhaps unwittingly – helped reinforce Anglo-Greek ties. This may be particularly apt at a time when Britain’s new Labour government appears committed to a diplomatic reset with Europe.

Among those attending the show’s opening was the UK ambassador to Greece, Matthew Lodge, who later told the Observer that, outside the business of government, it was figures such as Moore who had “played a very significant part in creating the foundations for the modern relations our two countries enjoy today”.