Barbara Hepworth was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire. She won a scholarship to study at Leeds School of Art in 1920, where she first met Henry Moore. The following year she was awarded a county major scholarship to study sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London.

She graduated in 1924 and was awarded a further scholarship for one year's study abroad and went to Italy where she stayed for two years. She lived first in Florence and then Rome where she learnt the traditional Italian technique of marble carving. Her first solo exhibition was at the Beaux Art Gallery, London in 1928. As her work moved towards abstraction in the early 1930s, she began associating closely with leading British and European modernists. She was invited to join the internationalist group Abstraction-Création in 1933, and the following year became a member of Unit One, a group of progressive artists and architects based in London (Moore was also a member, as was Ben Nicholson). She married Nicholson in 1938 and they moved to St Ives, Cornwall in 1939.

Hepworth's first retrospective exhibition was held at Temple Newsam, Leeds in 1943, and she represented Britain at the XXV Venice Biennale in 1950. During the 1950s she became increasingly established, receiving several major commissions for public sculpture, including a commission for the Festival of Britain in 1951. She had further retrospectives at Wakefield City Art Gallery in 1951 and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1953. Her international standing was confirmed when she was awarded the Grand Prize.

Her early work was concerned with the human figure, developing through abstraction in the early 1930s into sculpture exploring the relationship between the figure and the landscape. The rosewood carving Rhythmic Form of 1949 has the characteristic of an abstracted standing figure whilst at the same time conveying a sense of rhythm and movement through the carving. It is also pierced with a hole, an essential element in Hepworth's sculpture from 1931 onwards and a device she used for creating abstract form and space which also united the front and back of the work. Other major developments in her work were in her exploration of colour and in the use of strings for sculpture. The bronze sculptures Curved Form (Trevalgan), 1956, and Sea Form (Porthmeor), 1958, both include Cornish place names in their titles. She had begun to use bronze in the mid 1950s, and for the remainder of her career she divided her work between direct carving in wood or stone and creating sculpture to be cast in bronze. The use of bronze also enabled Hepworth to work on an increased scale and during the 1960s she embarked on an ambitious programme of sculpture series and major public commissions. Maquette for Winged Figure, 1957, was to be eventually enlarged for one of her best known and most prominent commissions, for the John Lewis Partnership building on Oxford Street, London, inaugurated in April 1963.

Turning Points: 20th Century British Sculpture, British Council and Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art 2004

Further reading:
Penelope Curtis, Alan G Wilkinson, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1994
Matthew Gale, Chris Stephens,Barbara Hepworth: works in the Tate Gallery Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum St Ives, Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd, London, 1999
David Lewis, Simon Armitage, Jeanette Winterson, Sophie Bowness, Chris Stephens, Barbara Hepworth Centenary, Tate Publishing a division of Tate Enterprises Ltd, London, 2003

www.barbarahepworth.org.uk

Glossary

  • Abstraction

    To abstract means to remove, and in the art sense it means that artist has removed or withheld references to an object, landscape or figure to produce a simplified or schematic work. This method of creating art has led to many critical theories; some theorists considered this the purest form of art: art for art’s sake. Unconcerned as it is with materiality, abstraction is often considered as representing the spiritual.

  • Bronze

    A metal alloy made from copper with up to two-thirds tin, often with other small amounts of other metals. Commonly used in casting. A work cast in bronze is sometimes referred to as 'a bronze'.

  • Cast

    To form material such as molten metal, liquid plaster or liquid plastic into a three-dimensional shape, by pouring into a mould. Also see Lost-wax casting.

  • Contemporary

    Existing or coming into being at the same period; of today or of the present. The term that designates art being made today.

  • Landscape

    Landscape is one of the principle genres of Western art. In early paintings the landscape was a backdrop for the composition, but in the late 17th Century the appreciation of nature for its own sake began with the French and Dutch painters (from whom the term derived). Their treatment of the landscape differed: the French tried to evoke the classical landscape of ancient Greece and Rome in a highly stylised and artificial manner; the Dutch tried to paint the surrounding fields, woods and plains in a more realistic way. As a genre, landscape grew increasing popular, and by the 19th Century had moved away from a classical rendition to a more realistic view of the natural world. Two of the greatest British landscape artists of that time were John Constable and JMW Turner, whose works can be seen in the Tate collection (www.tate.org.uk). There can be no doubt that the evolution of landscape painting played a decisive role in the development of Modernism, culminating in the work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists . Since then its demise has often been predicted and with the rise of abstraction, landscape painting was thought to have degenerated into an amateur pursuit. However, landscape persisted in some form into high abstraction, and has been a recurrent a theme in most of the significant tendencies of the 20th Century. Now manifest in many media, landscape no longer addresses solely the depiction of topography, but encompasses issues of social, environmental and political concern.

  • Sculpture

    A three-dimensional work of art. Such works may be carved, modelled, constructed, or cast. Sculptures can also be described as assemblage, in the round, relief, and made in a huge variety of media. Contemporary practice also includes live elements, as in Gilbert & George 'Living Sculpture' as well as broadcast work, radio or sound sculpture.

See in

  • Art Project