Title: Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World
Abstract: Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World Tate Britain, London, 24 June-25 October 2015 Chris Stephens (ed.), Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World London, Tate Britain, 2015, 192 pp., 200 illustrations, £24.99. ISBN 9781849763127To present a fresh view of an artist as familiar as Barbara Hepworth - even though this is her first major exhibition in London for nearly fifty years - would never be easy; the curators' success depended not only on the sculpture but on the way in which it was conceptualized and presented. Six thematic, loosely chronological sections plotted Hepworth's career, presenting her as an international figure since the 1930s. The exhibition design, with wall colours in shades of blue and stone, emphasized that she was by choice an artist of the open air, of light, stone and water. The catalogue, which is evidently indispensable, asserts her modernity, being set in P22 Bayer Universal, a font designed by Herbert Bayer and associated with the Bauhaus. The essays complement the exhibition and reflect the wide range of current research on Hepworth's work, addressing subjects from her religion to her links with architects and the relationship between her art and photography.In the 1920s sculptors from Jacob Epstein to the neophyte Hepworth were engrossed in the still novel practice of direct carving, experimenting with materials from lapis lazuli to Corsehill stone. Her early animal subjects gave way to chunky human figures that reveal the novice carver's fear of accidentally ruining the stone. Hepworth carved several tentative torsos and explored African proportions before making the rosewood Kneeling Figure (1932). She showed it in her joint exhibition with Ben Nicholson in 1932, near his painting of her, profile - Venetian red, signalling the centrality of their relationship. It was Nicholson who, on a visit to Paris, first showed photographs of her sculpture to members of Abstraction-Creation with the result that the group's journal was the first non-British publication to feature her work, marking her entry to the 'International Community of Abstract Artists'.The exhibition demonstrated that for Hepworth, abstraction was as much a political as an aesthetic matter, passionately promoted in the 1930s as a 'universal language', a response to burgeoning totalitarianism. In this context, as in her life-long socialism and devotion to Christian Science, Hepworth emerges as an artist deeply and purposefully engaged with current ideas and events. This was in many ways the most engrossing section of the exhibition, although, maddeningly, the facsimile copies of Axis and AbstractionCreation displayed on the walls were so arranged as to be almost impossible to read. This room disclosed both partners' use of photography, still an esoteric pursuit in the 1930s and a hitherto unexplored aspect of Hepworth's practice. Possibly taught by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, she learnt to produce the carefully arranged, previously unexhibited images through which she and Nicholson constructed the record of their working life.Her fascination with geometry became evident at the same time and led her to make the Sculpture with Colour (1943) and subsequent stringed pieces. She clearly had a sophisticated mathematical understanding, also demonstrated in drawings such as Red in Tension (1941). From these, she moved on to make Pelagos (1946) and other complex strung and painted carvings in wood which are among the most beautiful and technically accomplished sculptures of the twentieth century. Their startling juxtaposition with a small group of Hospital Drawings revealed an unexpected affinity between the precision and tension of the stringed sculpture and the images of hands moving in disciplined medical orchestration. …
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-09-01
Language: en
Type: article
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