Artist of the day, October 11: Barbara Hepworth, British sculptor

Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth  (1903 – 1975) was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. She was one of the few female artists of her generation to achieve international prominence. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.

Barbara Hepworth distinguished herself as a world-recognized sculptor in a period where female artists were rare. She evolved her ideas and her work as an influential part of an ongoing conversation with many other important artists of her time, working crucially in areas of greater abstraction while creating three dimensional objects. Her development of sculptural vocabularies and ideas was complex and multi-faceted. This included the use of a wide range of physical materials for sculpting and an unprecedented sensitivity to the particular qualities of those materials in helping decide the ultimate results of her sculptures, the investigation of "absence" in sculpture as much as "presence," and deep considerations of the relationship of her sculptural forms to the larger spaces surrounding it. Though her forms in their larger outlines tended to possess the clean lines of modernist aesthetics, she complicated these with different textures, an effect described by one reviewer as "sensuous and tactile" that "quickened the pulse".

She helped shift three dimensional art works into greater abstraction as she herself moved from creating work mingling figurative forms with abstraction in her earlier sculptures to almost entirely abstract, non-representational later works.

Hepworth was a key figure among modern sculptors in responding to the physical characteristics of whichever material was chosen to work with in order to resolve appropriate forms for the finished works, rather than simply mold material to fit some pre-determined shape.
Though she developed a long series of highly abstract pieces, the greater trajectory of her work was imbued with underlying aspects of nature, which she brought out more explicitly in the sculptures of her later career. "All my sculpture comes out of landscape," she wrote in 1943. "I'm sick of sculptures in galleries & photos with flat backgrounds... no sculpture really lives until it goes back to the landscape, the trees, air & clouds."

 Mrs Barbara Hepworth

1932, Two heads

1933, Two Forms

1934 Mother and Child

1934, Large and Small Form

1934, Mother and Child

1935 Discs in Echelon

1935 Three Forms'

1936 Ball, Plane and Hole

1937 Double exposure of Two Forms

1937, Pierced Hemisphere

1938, Forms in Echelon

1940 Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red)

1943 Oval Sculpture (No. 2)

1944 Landscape Sculpture'

1946 Orpheus (Maquette 2)

1946,  Pelagos

1946 Sculpture with Colour (Eos)

1946, Tides I

1954-55, Corinthos

1956 Curved Form (Trevalgan)

1956 Stringed Figure (Curlew), Version II

1956, Curved Forms (Pavan)

1958, Cantate Domino

1958, Sea Form (Porthmeor)

1960, Image II

1960, Pierced Form (Epidauros)

1960, Rosewall (Curved Reclining Form)

1961 Barbara Hepworth working on Curved Form

1961, Epidauros II

1961, Landscape sculpture

1961, Three Forms in Echelon

1961-63, Oval Form (Trezion)

1962 Merryn

1962, Square Forms

1963 Sphere with Inner Form

1963 Squares with Two Circles

1963 Squares with Two Circles

1963, Two Forms with White

1964 Sea form (Atlantic)

1964, Two Figures (Menhirs)

1965 Spring, (cast 1966)

1965, Dual form

1968, Three Obliques (Walk In)

1968, vertical form St Ive

1969, Touchstone

1970, Two Forms (Divided Circle)

1971, Oval with Two Forms

1972, Summer Dance

1974-75, Fallen Images

1975, Involute II