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Portrait of Barbara Hepworth

Art · 20th century

Barbara Hepworth

1903–1975 · English

Modernist abstract sculpture — the St Ives school

Barbara Hepworth carved smooth abstract forms in wood, stone and bronze and, from the early 1930s, pierced them — putting a hole straight through the mass so that landscape and light became part of the sculpture. Based in St Ives from 1939, she became, with Henry Moore, the defining figure of British modern sculpture.

How to spot them

  • ▸Ovoid or upright abstract forms with a hole bored through them, often strung inside with taut white strings
  • ▸Hollows painted pale blue or white against the polished grain of guarea or elm
  • ▸Titles from Cornwall and the sea: Pelagos, Porthmeor, Trevalgan, Curved Form
  • ▸Truth to materials — direct carving, no modelling in clay first — and, from the mid-1950s, large bronzes

Key works

A bronze standing almost seven metres high in a fountain outside a New York headquarters, made in memory of a Secretary-General killed in a plane crash by Barbara Hepworth

A bronze standing almost seven metres high in a fountain outside a New York headquarters, made in memory of a Secretary-General killed in a plane crash (1964)

United Nations Headquarters, New York

Her largest work, a memorial to her friend Dag Hammarskjöld

Image: Unknown · CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

A winged aluminium form nineteen feet high on the corner of an Oxford Street department store by Barbara Hepworth

A winged aluminium form nineteen feet high on the corner of an Oxford Street department store (1963)

John Lewis, Oxford Street, London

Commissioned by John Lewis; one of the most-seen sculptures in Britain

Image: Unknown · CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

A spiral of hollowed elm, painted pale blue inside and strung with strings, named with the Greek for sea (1946)

Tate St Ives / Tate collection

Pelagos, inspired by the view of the bay from her Cornish window

No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia

A madonna and child in blue Irish limestone made for a Cornish parish church in memory of the sculptor's son, killed flying with the RAF (1954)

St Ives Parish Church, Cornwall

A memorial to Paul Skeaping, who died in a plane crash over Thailand in 1953

No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia

Nine tall bronze figures in a rough circle, the artist's last great group (1970)

Yorkshire Sculpture Park and other sites

The Family of Man (Nine Figures on a Hill)

No free image available (likely still in copyright) · see it on Wikipedia

A bronze square with four openings that visitors are meant to walk through by Barbara Hepworth

A bronze square with four openings that visitors are meant to walk through (1966)

Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, St Ives

Four-Square (Walk Through)

Image: Fractal Angel · CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1903; studied at Leeds School of Art alongside Henry Moore and then at the Royal College of Art
  • •Married first the sculptor John Skeaping and then, in 1938, the painter Ben Nicholson; she gave birth to triplets in 1934
  • •Pierced a hole through a sculpture in 1931, a device usually credited to her before Moore
  • •Moved to St Ives in Cornwall at the outbreak of war in 1939, making it a centre of British modernism with Nicholson and Naum Gabo
  • •Bought Trewyn Studio in St Ives in 1949; it is now the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, run by Tate
  • •Her Single Form at the UN was commissioned in memory of Dag Hammarskjöld, who died in a 1961 air crash
  • •Appointed DBE in 1965; she was also a Trustee of the Tate Gallery
  • •Died in a fire at her St Ives studio on 20 May 1975, aged 72
  • •The Hepworth Wakefield, designed by David Chipperfield, opened in her home town in 2011

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources