Artist of the day: Barbara Hepworth

Showing posts with label Barbara Hepworth. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

Artist of the Day, December 13, 2023: Barbara Hepworth, an English sculptor - modernism (#1982)

Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth DBE (1903 – 1975), was an English artist and sculptor, one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. 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.

Her father was a surveyor for West Riding County Council, and Hepworth accompanied him on his inspections of local roads and bridges.

At Wakefield Girls’ High School Hepworth was inspired by seeing images of Egyptian sculpture and encouraged by the headteacher, to apply for a scholarship to Leeds School of Art.

Following this, in 1921, she began her studies at the Royal College of Art in London.

On completing her degree in 1924, Hepworth was awarded a West Riding travel scholarship, enabling her to travel to Italy. She learnt to carve from a master-carver in Rome, where she met her first husband and fellow artist John Skeaping.

The couple returned to London in 1926 as proponents of ‘direct carving’, the practice of carving directly into wood or stone, rather than modelling sculpture in clay for a master-craftsman to then make the finished work.

Hepworth and Skeaping separated in 1931, and Hepworth became part of an artistic circle that included Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, with whom she lived in Hampstead during the 1930s.

Representational aspects of Hepworth’s work gave way to geometric shapes, as in Pierced Hemisphere I and Two Forms.

Hepworth would later relate this shift to having triplets with Nicholson in 1934, noting that after this ‘the work was more formal, and all traces of naturalism had disappeared, and for some years I was absorbed in the relationships in space, in size and texture and weight, as well as in the tensions between the forms.’

Hepworth moved to St Ives in 1939, the same year she begun making stringed sculptures. As seen in her ‘Landscape Sculpture’ works of the late 1940s, Hepworth connected these forms to nature noting, ‘the strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.’ Living in close proximity to the countryside, Hepworth reflected in 1946, ‘The main sources of my inspiration are the human figure and the landscape; also the one in relation to the other.’

Hepworth took on a number of important public commissions in later life. On permanent display at The Hepworth Wakefield is the aluminium prototype for Winged Figure (1961–3), commissioned by John Lewis for their flagship store on Oxford Street, London. At nearly six metres high, this is the only working model to survive from the monumental commissions Hepworth received at this time.

Hepworth was prolific during her later years, making nearly as many works during the 1960s as between 1925 and 1960. She experimented with new materials, working in bronze, slate and printmaking noting, ‘while always remaining constant to my conviction about truth to material, I have found a greater freedom for myself’

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Barbara Hepworth

Torso, ca. 1928

Infant, ca. 1929

Figure of a Woman, ca. 1929-30

Figure, ca. 1933

Two Forms, ca. 1933

Mother and Child, ca. 1934

Discs in Echelon, ca. 1935, cast 1959

Three Forms, ca. 1935

Plane and Hole, ca. 1936

Forms in Echelon, ca. 1938

Oval Sculpture (No. 2), ca. 1943, cast 1958

Landscape Sculpture, ca. 1944 cast 1961

Pelagos, ca. 1946

Tides I, ca. 1946

Bicentric Form, ca. 1949

Maquette for ‘The Unknown Political Prisoner’, ca. 1952

Corinthos, ca. 1954-55

Curved Form (Trevalgan), ca. 1956

Orpheus (Maquette 2) (Version II), ca. 1956

Figure (Nyanga), ca. 1959-60

Image II, ca. 1960

Epidauros II, ca. 1961

Square Forms, ca. 1962

Squares with Two Circles, ca. 1963

Pierced Form, ca. 1963-64

Four-Square (Walk Through), ca. 1966

Spring, ca. 1966

Vertical Form (St Ives), ca. 1968 cast 1969

Touchstone, ca. 1969

Two Forms (Divided Circle), ca. 1969

Oval with Two Forms, ca. 1971

Rock Face, ca. 1973

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

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."