![]() She made it in Italy having travelled there alone, aged 21, after studying in Leeds and at the Royal College of Art in London. Photograph: Manchester City Galleriesĭoves (Group) is Barbara Hepworth’s earliest surviving stone-carving. Doves (Group) (1927)ĭoves (Group), in Parian marble, was made when Hepworth was newly married and seeking a ‘personal harmony’ with her material. If that were the case then the six pieces of sculpture here look a little like a short biography in wood and stone. When she looked back on her life towards the end of it, Hepworth suggested that it seemed to her that “the years seem to fall naturally into six divisions”. She revolutionised the possibilities of carving by insisting on complex interiors to her work, as well as smooth exteriors, overcoming personal tragedy through her art. In the years after that, until her untimely death in a house fire in St Ives, apparently caused by falling asleep with a cigarette, aged 72, Hepworth pursued a singular vision that sought always to find underlying harmonies in the postwar world. Even during the second world war, it was as if she was running a think tank with a view to creating ideals that fed into the world.” All the time though, Stephens suggests, “she was this international figure thinking what the world might be, not just a woman living in Cornwall making sculpture inspired by the sea. The original move to St Ives was more like a desperate evacuation, and for many years afterwards Hepworth fought for the time and space to pursue her vocation. She was the mother of four by the time war came (including five-year-old triplets with Nicholson). The exhibition will show how that idealism and political engagement was challenged both by the war and by the demands of Hepworth’s personal life. Hers is not aspiring to be grounded and worldly it is utopian, in search of perfect forms.” “A lot of his work is dark and about trauma and so on. “If she and Moore had not been from the same county and about the same age then I don’t think they would ever have been compared to each other,” Stephens says. Though she is sometimes viewed in relation to male artists of the period, in particular Nicholson and Henry Moore (her Yorkshire contemporary), Hepworth’s career insists on her standing alone. They came together in response to the advance of nationalism, initially through letters and journals and then literally, as everyone flees Europe and ends up in Hampstead for a while.” That movement in the 30s was about freeing art from everyday reality. ![]() “One of the reasons we called the exhibition Sculpture for a Modern World,” Stephens tells me, “was that it was not just modern sculpture Hepworth was engaged with, but modern thought. When she established her home and studio in Hampstead, London with painter Ben Nicholson before the war, they quickly became the focus of a group of artists that included Piet Mondrian and Naum Gabo, as well as visiting Picasso and Constantin Brancusi in France. Right from when she first visited Italy in her early 20s, Stephens suggests, Hepworth was near the forefront of European modernism. ![]() The Hepworth gallery museums in Wakefield and in St Ives are wonderful homages to her life and practice, but in rooting her so comprehensively in the place she grew up and in the place where she lived and died, visitors are perhaps in danger of denying Barbara Hepworth her due in the pantheon of international 20th-century art.Īt least that is the view of Chris Stephens, lead curator of modern British art at the Tate and the driving force behind the Hepworth show that will open at Tate Britain this month. In the time since then, arguably Britain’s greatest woman artist has been claimed both by her native Yorkshire and her adoptive Cornwall. ![]() It has been nearly 50 years since there has been a full retrospective of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture and drawings in London. ![]()
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