The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was published by the Tate. On the back of the card the following is printed:
'Dame Barbara Hepworth
Sphere with inner form.
Bronze
90 x 90 x 89 cm
Tate. Presented by the
executors of the artist's
estate 1980.'
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.
-- Final Thoughts From Barbara Hepworth
"I am the form and I am the hollow,
the thrust and the contour."
"I rarely draw what I see. I draw what
I feel in my body."
"All my early memories are of forms and shapes and
textures. Moving through and over the West Riding
landscape with my father in his car, the hills were
sculptures; the roads defined the form.
Above all, there was the sensation of moving physically
over the contours of fullnesses and concavities, through
hollows and over peaks - feeling, touching, seeing,
through mind and hand and eye.
This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the
landscape."
"It is easy now to communicate with people through
abstraction, and particularly so in sculpture. Since
the whole body reacts to its presence, people become
themselves a living part of the whole."
"Body experience... is the centre of creation."
"My works are an imitation of
my own past and present."
"The naturalness of life... the sense of community
is, I think, a very important factor in an artist's life."
"I found one had to do some work every
day, even at midnight, because either
you're professional or you're not."
"Before I start carving the idea must be almost
complete. I say 'almost' because the really important
thing seems to be the sculptor's ability to let his
intuition guide him over the gap between conception
and realization without compromising the integrity of
the original idea; the point being that the material has
vitality - it resists and makes demands."
"I have gained very great inspiration from the Cornish
land- and seascape, the horizontal line of the sea and
the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one's
sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure
which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a
greater whole. This relationship between figure and
landscape is vitally important to me. I cannot feel it in
a city."
"I must always have a clear image of the form
of a work before I begin. Otherwise there is no
impulse to create."
"The sculptor must search with passionate intensity
for the underlying principle of the organisation of
mass and tension - the meaning of gesture and the
structure of rhythm."
"My left hand is my thinking hand. The right is only
a motor hand. This holds the hammer. The left hand,
the thinking hand, must be relaxed, sensitive.
The rhythms of thought pass through the fingers and
grip of this hand into the stone."
"I love my blocks of marble, always piling
up in the yard like a flock of sheep."
"At no point do I wish to be in conflict with
any man or masculine thought. It doesn't
enter my consciousness. Art is anonymous.
It's not competitive with men.
It's a complementary contribution."
"My works are an imitation of my own past
and present, and of my own creative vitality
as I experience them in one particular instant
of my emotional and imaginative life. . ."
"One must be entirely sensitive to the structure
of the material that one is handling. One must
yield to it in tiny details of execution, perhaps
the handling of the surface or grain, and one
must master it as a whole."
"I felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the
stone in order to make an abstract form and
space; quite a different sensation from that of
doing it for the purpose of realism."
"Whenever I am embraced by land and seascape
I draw ideas for new sculptures; new forms to touch
and walk around, new people to embrace, with an
exactitude of form that those without sight can hold
and realize... It is essentially practical and passionate."
Barbara Hepworth
"Sculpture is, in the twentieth century, a wide field of
experience, with many facets of symbol and material
and individual calligraphy. But in all these varied and
exciting extensions of our experience, we always
come back to the fact that we are human beings of
such and such a size, biologically the same as
primitive man, and that it is through drawing and
observing, or observing and drawing, that we
equate our bodies with our landscape."
"Halfway through any work, one is often tempted
to go off on a tangent. Once you have yielded,
you will be tempted to yield again and again...
Finally, you would only produce something hybrid."
"The United Nations is our conscience.
If it succeeds it is our success. If it fails
it is our failure."
