A sculptor of profound vision and technical ability, Barbara Hepworth also made drawings and paintings loaded with qualities of texture and volume. Some of these works feature in Piano Nobile’s current exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Strings.
InSight No. 166
Barbara Hepworth | Turning form (blue), 1960
Many human endeavours require preparatory work. By comparison with the goal they help to realise, such preparations are often unremarkable: a good dinner might be preceded by a shopping list and a soup-stained recipe book; cabinets need technical drawings, parties guest lists, novels first drafts. However, for the sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975), preparation was almost entirely a mental act: ‘all the time I am not working I am thinking about sculpture. […] Then a new project suddenly appears, and demands realisation as a result of accumulated emotional experience.’ Her sculptures were executed without the aid of two-dimensional plans, the simplicity of which would have rendered them redundant. Her paintings and drawings were likewise self-contained statements. Their integrity was underpinned by the quality of thought that preceded them. In 1961, John Read’s documentary about Hepworth recorded on film her rhythmic, instinctual manner of drawing and painting.
Hepworth avowed that her paintings and drawings were not preparations for sculpture. She consistently referred to all her planar works as ‘drawings’, despite brushed oil colour and painterly textures, and the principal motifs were often realised with succinct incisions of a hard, sharp pencil. She once remarked that certain lines of this sort had ‘a bite rather like cutting into a slate.’ A creative crosscurrent bound together her activities in sculpture and drawing, and volumetric forms often found simultaneous expression in both branches of her practice. In drawings such as Turning form (blue), a casement of arcing lines creates a frame around the central opening. A group of fifteen consecutive lines, drawn with a ruler as in the 1961 film, creates a tight spiral that produces an illusion of vertiginous recession through the mass. The hollowed interior, layered spatial quality and framed sightlines are analogous to the qualities of contemporary pierced sculptures such as the Epidauros works made in 1960 and 1961. These massive, volumetric qualities in both sculptures and drawings are unmistakeably the work of a single artist.
Shortly after Hepworth first began to thread string through sculpture in 1939, she also began to apply string and string-like motifs in her paintings and drawings. In two small, experimental works of 1940, she threaded twined string through holes in the surface of a planar abstract painting. The polarised, geometric units of colour are similar to those that her husband Ben Nicholson was using at the time, while the application of string emerged from her temporarily arrested sculptural practice. Whilst living in a small house called Dunluce in Carbis Bay between December 1939 and July 1942, Hepworth was unable to carve—she had no studio, few materials and little time or energy. She spent her days running a modest nursery for her children and others, as well as cultivating a small holding for sustenance. Throughout this severely challenging episode she produced some of her most lucid, cerebral abstract drawings.
In a letter of April 1942, Hepworth told her friend Herbert Read: ‘I have a vivid dramatic wrestle with the clock every day—trying to wrest for myself time for thought and making things other than puddings.’ She later remembered how the drawings of 1940–42 were made ‘in the late evenings, and during the night’. Although they do not translate directly into three-dimensional forms, each drawing produces a multifaceted geometric body with qualities of volume and constellations of intersecting planes. The motif of spiralling strings was also prominent. Just like Hepworth’s stringed sculptures, her paintings and drawings used ‘strings’ to create a twisting plane that dissolves into a sinuous, transparent screen. Hepworth later returned to the spiralling motif in abstract paintings of the fifties and early sixties, in which pencil drawing counterpoints with painterly grounds of scumbled warm and cool colours.
Hepworth belongs to a rare category of artists in the history of art. Few develop idioms of sufficient individuality to ensure the distinctiveness and validity of their work in both sculpture and painting. Amongst her contemporaries in twentieth-century Britain, Glyn Philpot was a painter who dabbled in sculpture; Lynn Chadwick was a sculptor whose drawings bear the imprimatur of his sculpture. Perhaps owing to her fame and success as a sculptor, her planar work has long been underappreciated by the wider public. Far more examples of her sculpture than painting have been acquired by public collections in the UK, and there is a peculiar dearth of the abstract paintings that Hepworth made between 1956 and 1964—a period of drawing and painting charged with considerable energy and variety. One rare example, Oval form with strings, owned by the University of Birmingham, is currently on display in Piano Nobile’s exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Strings. A forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Barbara Hepworth’s paintings and drawings by Dr Sophie Bowness and Dr Jenna Lundin Aral will greatly advance the study and appreciation of this vast and underexplored territory in the wide field of Hepworth’s oeuvre.
Images:
Film still from Barbara Hepworth (1961, directed by John Read)
Barbara Hepworth, Epidauros I, 1960, Tate © Bowness
Barbara Hepworth, Composition, 1940, Private Collection © Bowness
Barbara Hepworth, Forms in movement (Circle), 1942, Private Collection © Bowness
Barbara Hepworth, Oval form with strings, 1960, University of Birmingham – Research and Cultural Collections © Bowness
