DAME BARBARA HEPWORTH 1903 Wakefield - St

LE CLAIRE KUNST SEIT 1982

DAME BARBARA HEPWORTH 1903 Wakefield - St. Ives 1975

Marble Form

Oil and pencil over gesso-prepared board. Signed and dated lower left Barbara Hepworth 1963. Further signed, titled, dated and inscribed on the reverse. 455 x 660 mm

PROVENANCE: Mr and Mrs H. Davidson, Toronto – Private collection, U.S.A.

EXHIBITIONS: Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture and Drawings, Gimpel-Hanover Galerie, Zurich, 16 November 1963 - 11 January 1964 (drawings not listed) – Barbara Hepworth: Sculptures and Drawings, Gimpel Fils, London, 2 - 27 June 1964 (drawings not listed) – Focus on Drawings, Art Gallery of Toronto, Toronto, 15 October – 7 November 1965, cat. no. 117.

RELATED DRAWINGS IN PUBLIC COLLECTIONS: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto – Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. – National Gallery of Australia, Canberra – Manchester City Art Gallery – Milwaukee Art Gallery – Piers Art Centre, Stromness, Orkney Islands – Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo – Tate, London

Vision is not sight ‒ it is the perception of the mind. It is the discernment of the reality of life, a piercing of the superficial surfaces of material existence that gives a work of art its own life and purpose and significant power.1 (Barbara Hepworth, 1937)

In 1966, in her autobiographical essay A Sculptor’s Landscape, Barbara Hepworth reiterated the mental, rather than the visual inspiration that informed virtually all of her abstract, sculptural drawings from the early 1940s onwards, when she wrote: I rarely draw what I see – I draw what I feel in my body.2 By sculptural, I mean that the drawings echoed, were a two-dimensional exploration of her current three- dimensional obsessions. They were not direct studies for sculpture, as were Henry Moore’s drawings for sculpture from 1921 to the early 1950s. When I start drawing and painting abstract form I am really exploring new forms, hollows, and tensions which will lead me where I want to go.3

Since childhood, the three forms that obsessed Hepworth were the standing form (which is the translation of my feeling towards the human being standing in landscape); the two forms (which is the tender relationship of one living thing beside another); and the closed form, such as the oval, spherical or pierced form (sometimes incorporating colour) which translates for me the association and meaning of gesture in landscape.4

Marble Form 1963, with its hollowed out, “pieced” interior and taut strings stretching across the oval form, is representative of perhaps Hepworth’s favourite of the three motifs/forms that found expression in her many abstract drawings, the earliest of which date from 1940, two years after she

1 Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art, edited by J. J. Martin, Ben Nicholson, N. Gabo, London 1937, reprinted 1971, p.113. 2 Barbara Hepworth: Drawings from a Sculptor’s Landscape, introduction by Alan Bowness, London, 1966, p.11. 3 Ibid., p.13. 4 Barbara Hepworth: A Pictorial Autobiography, London, 1970, reprinted 1985, p.53.

ELBCHAUSSEE 386 ∙ 22609 HAMBURG ∙ TELEFON: +49 (0)40 881 06 46 ∙ FAX: +49 (0)40 880 46 12 [email protected] ∙ WWW.LECLAIRE-KUNST.DE HYPOVEREINSBANK HAMBURG ∙ BLZ: 200 300 00 ∙ KTO: 222 5464 SWIFT (BIC): HYVEDEMM300 ∙ IBAN: DE88 2003 0000 0002 2254 64 STEUERNUMMER 42/040/02717 ∙ UST.-ID.-NR.: DE 118 141 308 LE CLAIRE KUNST SEIT 1982 had moved to Carbis Bay, Cornwall, with her husband Ben Nicholson and their three children, triplets, born in 1934. She explained the rich associations of the forms in her abstract drawings, which are particularly relevant to Marble Form: Planes and curves are the pure rhythm of stance and energy. The pierced hole allows bodily entry and re-entry. The spiral takes hold of one’s hand and arm. A fullness can be a breast, or a head or a shoulder. A hollow can be the taut hollow in the thigh. Strings can twist one from the front to the back and colour establishes the mood of place and time.5

Hepworth’s first sculpture with strings, which were to become such a dominate feature of her drawings, carvings and bronzes, dates from 1940, as does the first drawing. She would have undoubtedly seen Henry Moore’s sculptures with strings of 1938-39, and the constructions with strings of Naum Gabo, the first which may have been made as early as 1938, before he and his wife Miriam joined Hepworth and Nicholson in Carbis Bay in early September 1939.

Stylistically, Marble Form is closely related to the first Cornish landscape inspired sculptures of 1943-44, when Hepworth found the time, a new studio space, and the materials to begin carving again. The plane wood Oval Sculpture, 1943, with the concavities painted white, echoes the shapes of caves. The blue interior of the plane wood Wave, 1943 - the first of many later sculptures and drawings with a direct reference in the title to landscape and seascape of Cornwall – corresponds to the colour of the sea. Likewise, the blue foreground in Marble Form might be read as the sea, the yellow/orange as the sky and sun. I see the strings and coloured concavities in Hepworth’s first abstract sculptures and drawings from the Cornish years, 1940-43, as functioning as abstract equivalents of bodily sensations in landscape: I used colour and strings in many carvings of this time. The colour in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves, or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves. The stings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.”6

To reiterate the affinities rather than direct, one to one connections between the drawings and the sculptures, the hollowed out, oval form of the marble Pierced form (Santorini) 1963 (B.H.337) (fig.1), and the oval bronze Spring, 1966 (B.H.430) (fig.2), with strings criss-crossing the concave space, are related in a general way to the 1963 drawing Marble Form. In 1946, Hepworth wrote: I do spend whole periods of time entirely in drawing (or painting, as I use colour) when I search for forms and rhythms and curvatures for my own satisfaction. These drawings I call “drawings for sculpture”, but it is in a general sense – that is - out of the drawings springs a general influence.7

Barbara Hepworth’s vivid comments on her work not only reveal the creative process, but more importantly, they unveil, as only the artist could, that there is nothing cold and austere about her abstract drawings and sculptures. Rather, they are layered with rich and poetic associations. Indeed, Hepworth not only identified with the visual beauty of the landscape and seascape of Cornwall, she was an extension of it: I the sculptor, am the landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.8

Alan Wilkinson

The present work is recorded as no. D465 in the unpublished catalogue of the artist’s drawings and paintings.

5 Barbara Hepworth, Drawings from a Sculptor’s Landscape, p.13. 6 Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, introduction by Herbert Read, London, 1952, section 4, n.p. 7 Barbara Hepworth, “Approach to Sculpture”, Studio, Vol. 132, no.643, October 1946, p.101. 8 Barbara Hepworth: A Pictorial Autobiography, p.9.

Fig. 1: Pierced Form (Santorini), 1963, opus 337, marble, height: 43,0 cm.

Fig. 2: Spring, 1966, opus 430, bronze, height: 85,0 cm. Tate, London