Barbara Hepworth

Dates: b.1903 - d.1975

Gender: Female

Nationality: British

"I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air. How lovely is the horse’s sensitive nose, the dogs moving ears and deep eyes; but to me these are not stone forms and the love of them and the emotion can only be expressed in more abstract terms. Read more…

Biography:

"I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air. How lovely is the horse’s sensitive nose, the dogs moving ears and deep eyes; but to me these are not stone forms and the love of them and the emotion can only be expressed in more abstract terms. I do not want to make a machine that cannot fulfill its essential purpose; but to make exactly the right relation of masses, a living thing in stone, to express my awareness and thought of these things.” (1)

 The British sculptor Barbara Hepworth achieved international prominence with her abstract sculptures. Born into a middle class family Hepworth’s early talent was nurtured, first at the Leeds School of Art, and then at the Royal College of Art where she studied on a County Scholarship until 1924. She met her first husband, the sculptor John Skeaping, whilst travelling in Italy on a West Riding scholarship. On their return to England they held joint exhibitions and along with her friend Henry Moore, Hepworth became a leading member of the new art movement associated with direct carving. Examples of her work during this period such as Torso 1928 (2) are broadly figurative.

 After her amicable divorce from Skeaping in 1933, Hepworth married the artist Ben Nicholson and her style of work moved towards abstraction. The couple travelled widely in Europe, visiting the studios of Brasque, Picasso and Mondrian; they were very much connected with the international avante- garde movement. The abstract sculptures produced by Hepworth in the 1930’s are regarded as among the earliest of their type.  The titles of her work from this period such as, Single form and Pierced Hemisphere describe the simple abstract shapes she created.

 During the war Hepworth moved with her family from London to St Ives, where she would remain for the rest of her life.  Hepworth was influenced by the dramatic landscape of the Cornish coastline. Alan Bowness describes how, “ The movement of tides, pebble and rock formations, and the Cornish moorland landscape all enriched her work. The ancient standing stones and quoits of west Cornwall provided an analogy for her own sculpture, which became increasingly a paradigm for the figure in a landscape and an expression in abstract terms of man's harmonious relationship to his fellows and to the world in which he lives.” (2) However, during the 1940’s Hepworth’s ‘organic abstraction’ was still commercially unpopular and she was often weighed down with anxiety about money.

 The 1950’s marked something of a turning point in Hepworth’s career. Her public profile rose and she was invited to create several important public pieces of art for the Festival of Britain in 1951. Having always worked in either wood or stone she began to experiment with other materials.  Her 1964 work Single Form is an abstract bronze sculpture twenty feet high, which stands in the United Nations Plaza in New York. Her international reputation was further cemented by several large retrospectives of her work at the São Paulo bienal, Brazil, in 1959 and the Tate Gallery in 1968. On her death in 1975 her Trewyn Studio was given to the nation together with a large collection of her work. This now form part of Tate St Ives.

1. Artist quotation from ‘Circle’ 1937; as quoted in “Voicing our visions, -Writings by women artists”, ed. by Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York 1991, p. 279

2. http://www.barbarahepworth.org.uk/about-barbara-hepworth/alan-bowness-li...