Barbara Hepworth
Barbara Hepworth, Construction I, 1965.
Oil and pencil on gesso-prepared board, 883 x 1010 mm.
The Ingram Collection of Modern British Art. Barbara Hepworth © Bowness, 2020
(Included with permission).
Alongside Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore, Hepworth is considered to be one of the most important figures in abstract art in Britain. She lived in Cornwall for over 30 years and its landscape was one of the most important influences of her work.
She achieved great success in her lifetime, but Hepworth was also patronised as a female and provincial artist. In 2015 with the opening of a Tate Britain retrospective, an Independent critic wrote, “it is time to acknowledge her place in the first rank of sculpture”
Hepworth wrote: "Perhaps what one wants to say is formed in childhood and the rest of one's life is spent trying to say it."
"You don't look back along time, but look through it, like water. Sometimes this comes to the surface, sometimes that, sometimes nothing. Nothing goes away."
Hepworth, who had four children, talked about the happy balance between being both mother and artist: “I loved the family and everything to do with them. I loved the environment and the cooking. I used to cook and go into my studio.” Necessarily, she had to have what she called “methods of working”: “If I was in the middle of a work and the oven burned or the children called for me, I used to make an arrangement with music, records or poetry, so that when I went back to the studio, I picked up where I left off.”
Motherhood was a recurring theme for Hepworth, who created Mother and Child (1934) a small abstract sculpture in pink Ancaster stone when she and her fellow artist Ben Nicholson were expecting what turned out to be triplets. She visualises mother and child as two independent bodies, set apart but intimately linked, the offspring nestling into a slight hollow in its parent’s stomach. The surface of the stone is smooth, its edges rounded, evoking the naturalness of birth and the vulnerability of both mother and infant. The result is a tender sculpture that attests to the bond that endures long after birth.
When Hepworth and Nicholson met they had both been married to other people, and Hepworth had one son. They married following Nicholson’s divorce from Winifred Nicholson, another brilliant artist. With Nicholson Hepworth gave birth to triplets, and she argued: “A woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children, nor by nursing children with measles (even in triplicate) – one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day; even a single half hour, so that the images grow in ones mind.
“I rarely make drawings for a particular sculpture,” wrote Hepworth in 1946. “I do, however, spend whole periods of time entirely in drawing when I search for forms and rhythms and curvatures for my own satisfaction.”
Sources:
Material for this has been drawn from a seminar on Barbara Hepworth at The Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge.
A fascinating blog on her was written by Jeanette Winterson in 2015, probably stimulated by the Tate Exhibition.
The lifestyle brand “Toast” wrote about the Hepworth, Wakefield.