Barbara Hepworth
Sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s work exemplifies Modernism and in particular Modernist sculpture. She was a leading figure in the British and international art scene over a career that spanned five decades and her story is closely intertwined with the history and culture of St Ives. Though concerned with form and abstraction, her work was primarily about relationships, not merely between two forms presented side-by-side, but primarily between the human figure and the landscape.
Barbara Hepworth was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire in 1903. She studied at Leeds School of Art from 1920–1921 alongside fellow Yorkshire-born artist Henry Moore. Both students continued their studies in sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London and both became leading practitioners of the avant-garde method of Direct Carving (working directly in to their chosen material) avoiding the more traditional process of making preparatory models and maquettes.
From 1924 Hepworth spent two years in Italy, and in 1925 married her first husband, the artist John Skeaping, in Florence; their marriage was to last until 1931. From 1932, she lived with the painter Ben Nicholson and, for a number of years, the two artists made work in close proximity to each other, developing a way of working that was almost like a collaboration. They spent periods of time travelling throughout Europe, and it was here that Hepworth met Georges Braque and Piet Mondrian, and visited the studios of Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and Jean Arp and Sophie Taueber-Arp.
When war broke out in 1939, Hepworth and Nicholson (now married) moved to St Ives, the place that would remain her home for their rest of her life. After the war she and Nicholson became a hub for a generation of younger emerging British artists such as Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Terry Frost. The wild beauty of the landscape surrounding St Ives was in contrast to the disruption and destruction of the war, and Hepworth and her contemporaries made paintings and sculptures inspired by the place and their experience of nature.
In her lifetime, Barabara Hepworth was a major international figure, showing her work at exhibitions around the globe. A retrospective of her work was held at the Kröller-Müller Museum in 1965, and she represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1950 and won first prize at the São Paulo Bienal in 1959, and her work has influenced countless artists, designers, architects and performers.
She died in an accidental fire at her Trewyn studios in St Ives, on 20 May 1975 at the age of 72.
The sculptor carves because he must. He needs the concrete form of stone and wood for the expression of his idea and experience, and when the idea forms the material is found at once. I think every sculpture must be touched, it’s part of the way you make it and it’s really our first sensibility, it is the sense of feeling, it is first one we have when we’re born. I think every person looking at a sculpture should use his own body. You can’t look at a sculpture if you are going to stand stiff as a ram rod and stare at it, with as sculpture you must walk around it, bend toward it, touch it and walk away from it.
