The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was published by the Tate Gallery. On the back of the card is printed:
'Barbara Hepworth.
Stringed Figure (Curlew) (Version II) 1956, Edition 1959.
Brass and cotton string on wood veneer base.
53 x 75.5 x 49 cm.
Tate. Presented by the executors of the artist's estate,
in accordance with her wishes, 1980, Bowness, Hepworth
Estate.
On display at Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture
Garden, St. Ives, Cornwall.'
The Hepworth figure is somewhat reminiscent of some of the work of Naum Gabo, who was well known to Hepworth.
Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903 - 1975)
The 10th. January 1903 marked the birth in Wakefield, West Riding of Yorkshire, of Barbara Hepworth.
Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was an English artist and sculptor. 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.
After Wakefield Girls' School, Barbara Hepworth studied at Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in the 1920's.
She married the sculptor John Skeaping in 1925. In 1931 she fell in love with the painter Ben Nicholson, and in 1933 divorced Skeaping. At this time she was part of a circle of modern artists centred on Hampstead, London, and was one of the founders of the art movement Unit One.
Barbara married Ben Nicholson in 1938.
At the beginning of the Second World War, Hepworth and Nicholson moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where she remained for the rest of her life, having divorced Nicholson in 1951.
Best known as a sculptor, Hepworth also produced drawings – including a series of sketches of operating rooms following the hospitalisation of her daughter Sarah in 1944 – and lithographs.
Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson struck up a friendship with Norman Capener, the surgeon who treated Sarah at the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Hospital in Exeter. Through this friendship, Hepworth was invited to witness a variety of surgical procedures at Exeter and the London Clinic.
Over a two-year period, 1947–9, Hepworth produced around 80 works. As well as ink and chalk drawings, many were executed in both pencil and oil paint on board.
Barbara died at the age of 72 in a fire at her studio in St. Ives, Cornwall on the 20th. May 1975. The fire was almost certainly caused by her inveterate smoking in bed.
Today, the studio is a shrine to this dedicated artist, and you can see the last pieces of stone that she was still working on when she died.
For many museumgoers the angular, wraithlike Dame Barbara Hepworth was the lady who put the hole in modern sculpture, and made it her signature.
The momentous event occurred in 1931, when, in a flash of daring, she pierced a hole in a small carving in order to give the figure a sense of flow, and to lead the viewer's eye around it.
Barbara recalled:
“When I first pierced a shape,
I thought it was a miracle.
A new vision was opened.”
From then on, Barbara carved or chiselled holes in virtually all her abstractions, as if to disclose their inner structural natures. Sometimes she painted the hollows; sometimes she bound the sides with a cat's cradle of wire or string, funnelling and, trapping light and creating infinite filigrees of shadow.
Barbara explained:
“The holes I make depend on what
I want to see—the depth, the thickness,
the curvatures, the arc, the swoop, the
spiral.”
Many of Dame Barbara's sculptures—in wood, stone and metal— were large, on the order of her “Single Form,” a 21‐foot, five‐ton bronze memorial to Dag Hammarskjold that rises from a pool at the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York.
