Barbara Hepworth, 1903-1975

By Alice Lindman

There is a struggle to find a word that encompasses Dame Barbara Hepworth’s career more suitably than ‘harmony’. Hepworth explored the harmonious equilibrium between art, nature, and society, a balance which became increasingly important with the increasing complexity of the artist’s life and the world around her.

Born on 10th January 1903, Hepworth found success at an early age, attaining a scholarship to study at the Leeds School of Art at the age of 17. Shortly thereafter the artist began to study at the Royal College of Art in London. However, it was not until Hepworth travelled to Florence on a West Riding Travel Scholarship that the artist discovered the craft of direct carving, the practice of carving directly onto the surface of wood or stone rather than utilising a clay model. Reading the marks left by the artist upon her sculptures is reading the language of her artistic psyche – her chisel the vessel for her vocalisation. Hepworth aimed to doctrine truth to her sculptures by respecting the nature of her materials, utilising the natural properties of texture, form, and colour of the stone or wood to enhance her artistic expression.

Doves (Group) (1927) exemplifies the artist’s initial adoption of direct carving. Produced during her time in Italy, the sculpture – her earliest surviving stone sculpture – symbolises Hepworth’s marriage to John Skeaping. Although her marriage to Skeaping only lasted 8 years, Doves remains as testament to the love which once existed. Hepworth’s years in Italy thus helped solidify her artistic presence, the artist herself stating that “all the carvings were an effort to find a personal accord with the stones or wood which I was carving,” her ultimate goal being to achieve “personal harmony with the material.”

Hepworth returned to London in 1927, setting up a studio in Hampstead. It was here that the artist’s involvement with European modernism was shaped by her interactions with artists closely in touch with the work of Picasso and Brancusi. Hepworth eventually met Ben Nicholson, their love blossoming into marriage in 1938. Their relationship was an instrument in their art. Nicholson found inspiration in Hepworth’s profile, while Hepworth increasingly incorporated her husband’s idealised abstractions. Hepworth herself saw this period as a shift in her career, and after having given birth to triplets in 1934, the artist recalled that “the only fresh influence had been the arrival of the children”. Her art saw a decrease in naturalism and placed more focus upon the formal properties of texture and weight in a search for “some absolute essence in sculptural terms giving the quality of human relationships”.

The arrival of 1939 brought with it the catastrophe of the Second World War to Britain. Artists were forced to flee metropolitan London, and Hepworth sought refuge in St Ives, Cornwall, where she would reside for the rest of her life. The war oppressed the evolution of Hepworth’s art. For three years, Hepworth did not carve at all, unable to find the means, time, or motivation. The artist instead turned to drawing, finding comfort in hollow spaces, filling interior spaces with colour and string-like elements. Her work epitomised mathematical harmony. It was not until the end of the war that Hepworth was able to return to the art of carving. Hepworth’s art became littered with images of nature. Rather than being a spectator of the landscape, she wanted to become one with it. Hepworth fell into a depression following her separation from Nicholson and the death of her first son Paul in the 1950s. Yet nature was her salvation and the artist literally dove into Nigerian guarea wood, the tunnelling symbolising the act of mining through her grief.

By the end of the 1950s Hepworth was an internationally renowned artist. In 1961, Dame Barbara was commissioned to create a memorial in honour of secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld. The work, Single Form (1964), was to be placed outside the United Nations Secretariat in New York, a quest which would become the pinnacle of her career. The grandness of this piece demonstrated the grandness of her artistic presence. Hepworth tragically died in an accidental fire in her home in St Ives in 1975, aged 72 and today, her work stands as visual reminder of the artist’s valuable contribution to the evolution of sculptural art and continues to be a source of inspiration for many across the globe.

Bibliography

Adams, Tim. “Barbara Hepworth: A Life Told in Six Works.” The Guardian, June 7, 2015, sec. Art and design. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/07/barbara-hepworth-life-in-six-works-tate-retrospective-exhibition-sculpture-for-a-modern-world.

“Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975 .” Tate. Published 2013. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/dame-barbara-hepworth-1274.

“Artist Barbara Hepworth - the Hepworth Wakefield.” The Hepworth Wakefield Published 2013. https://hepworthwakefield.org/artist/barbara-hepworth/.