Art as an intuitive process

Perfect shapes, precision, and a new beauty are the hallmarks of Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures and they inspire us to be free in our thoughts. With technical precision, fine thread formations measure the gaps in her sculptures. They create a completely new form of three-dimensionality. By not filling in empty spaces but describing them graphically, in a unique way they link technical-artisanal innovation with the grace of organic shapes. They fire our imagination, cause the eye like a subtle touch to glide over the sculptures that seek to bond with the space around them. It is the balance between elated lightness and the naturalness of the structure that characterizes Barbara Hepworth’s oeuvre. Her sculptures are less material phenomena of the dissolution of matter and more concrete form lent to the interaction of volume and emptiness, whereby the two are in a carefully calibrated balance. They thus lead us into a different, abstract reality in which there are hardly any reminiscences of objects from our everyday world. They go beyond the limitations of their roots in time and space and give rise to new dimensions of aesthetic experience that exude a sense of balance and harmony.

Barbara Hepworth’s oeuvre embodies in exemplary manner that key theme of Modernism, the liberation of form through abstraction. Hepworth is a central figure in the development of both abstract sculpture and the relevant theory: She perfected abstract form like no other sculptor before her. In this way, she emerged as one of the most important 20^th century sculptors and to this day she continues to influence the younger generation of artists. In her day, Hepworth moved in avant-garde circles with a self-confidence almost unparalleled by other female artists; today she is one of the few women sculptors of international repute who stood her ground in the largely male-dominated world of sculpture. 


The liberation from the function of imitation, of depicting the objective world, is one of the decisive movements of change in 20^th century art and it is one of the most complex phenomena precisely in sculpting. To this day, it is closely bound up with our notion of progress and modernity. The abstract stands for a liberation from conventions and rigid rules that have been handed down and are set by external reality. Up to the present day, the abstract has lost little of its validity. That said, the abstract movement was from the beginning set on anchoring its formal language in the objective world. It can therefore by no means be shortsightedly described solely as the product of the formal competition between figuration and abstraction as at heart what is involved is a movement of intellectual rejuvenation that draws on the free and potentially infinite diversity of forms. The program of abstract art formulated by Wassily Kandinsky as long ago as 1911 was intended to provide the foundations for social and intellectual progress. It is directed against the entire “nightmare of materialism”.² The abstract formal language is expected to lend expression to the inner voice that is in harmony with the intellectual current of the age, the “all-important spark of inner life,” so Kandinsky wrote.


Barbara Hepworth’s oeuvre rests on these considerations: Her liberation from established conventions of imitation of the objective world relates not primarily to formal aspects but leads to a revaluation in a social and political sense – the detachment from the world of objects becomes a synonym for the freedom of thought and action. Hepworth’s sculptural, organic, and often oval forms opened a wealth of formal opportunities up to her. “I have always been interested in oval or ovoid shapes … the weight, poise and curvature of the ovoid as a basic form. The carving and piercing of such a form seems to open up an infinite variety of continuous curves in the third dimension.”³ In her first completely abstract sculpture, Abstraction (1932) there are no reminiscences of the world of objects at all; later Hepworth was to give it a new title: Pierced Form under which it came to fame in the 1930s. The weight of the material recedes and the opening defines the shape: Outer and inner, positive and negative forms meld and create an organic shape that claims to create a reality of its own alongside that of nature. 


The striving to give the inner world, the spiritual, a shape was something Hepworth shared not only with some of her contemporaries but also with Wilhelm Lehmbruck. Both sought to express the abstract world of thoughts and ideas. For both, art had the function of overcoming the limitations of the purely physical and by extending the limits in this way bringing about social renewal. Although the two came up with respectively very different formal solutions, it is striking that they both chose metaphors of Creation and origins in order to describe the focus of their work: “Each and every artwork must have something of the first days of Creation about it, the smell of the earth or something animalistic as it were,” Lehmbruck said.⁴ For Hepworth, the influence of the light brought forth “intensifications … a residue of primordial life that is absolutely necessary in order to be able to better capture space and volume more perfectly.”⁵ Lehmbruck’s figures grow quite literally upwards, they aspire to rise beyond their bodies, up into the sphere of the spiritual. Lehmbruck developed his so-called “Gothic” extension, a highly characteristic process of abstraction quite unique for his day. The Kneeling One is a key work in Modernism, it is a sculpture with which he for the first time received international recognition in 1913 in the United States. It shows how abstraction emerged as a method of representing a new reality, even if Lehmbruck by no means forewent the human figure. Lehmbruck’s works have to date hardly been considered in the context of the movement of abstraction: Relationships between his late piece Liebende Köpfe (1918), that arose a year before his death and early sculptures by Barbara Hepworth, such as Two Heads (1932) and Large and Small Form (1934) show that both sought to find an increasingly abstract shape of the world of thoughts and feelings.

Often, Hepworth’s output from the 1930s onwards takes the limelight; that is to forget that between 1920 and 1934 she had already created 65 works, of which 50 have survived.⁶ As early as spring 1924, shortly after graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, she produced a high relief for the main entrance to a hospital.⁷ In the years that followed, Hepworth achieved true crafts perfection in direct work with stone and later also with wood. This was especially unusual as so-called direct carving from stone or wood had not been part of her training at the Royal College of Art and was not included in the sculpture curriculum until 1932. In other words, at an early date Hepworth consciously addressed the major challenges of sculpting and specifically mastered the handling of hard materials. She has acquired the technical skills outside her academic training. Her time spent in Italy from 1924 gave her the opportunity to learn how to work in marble: The result were her first marble sculptures, such as Doves (1927) and Mask (1928). Her formal vocabulary initially took its cue from the human figure and from those of animals. In her sculpture Torso (1928) and the group of figures entitled Mother and Child (1927), which she carved from a block of Hoptonwood stone,⁸ we can readily discern Hepworth’s early technical prowess. She soon expanded her materials to include alabaster, sandstone, and onyx. Hepworth was already booking successes with these sculptures at this early point in her career: Doves and Mother and Child were acquired by collector and Orientalist George Eumorfopoulos as was the later piece Seated Figure (1932-3).⁹ The often small-sized figures are not salon or genre pieces, something the subject matter might suggest. Rather, they should be viewed in the context of non-Western cultures, which had inspired them. They are works of exceptional perfection, with a quality that in terms of its “intimacy” is “talisman-like”, as Penelope Curtis rightly puts it.¹⁰ These are small figurines, and they possess a spiritual power and protective function. Here, we can already sense the role that abstraction would later play for Hepworth. 


The simple, archaic and primordial are qualities that characterize Hepworth’s oeuvre at the end of the 1920s. The years 1927 and 1928 were a decisive period for both Hepworth and her first husband John Skeaping. Their works went on display in the Beaux Arts Gallery in London and were part of the exhibition Modern and African Sculpture in Sydney Burney’s London gallery, a show that highlighted the common ground shared by modern sculpture and African art. The review in the Times was especially favorable when it came to Hepworth’s piece: The reviewer suggested that in comparison with Skeaping’s pieces her work was more aware of the characteristic shape of the material, which was to be distinguished from its substance. Most of her sculptures were given a shape within the respective cube as if they had been “found” in it.¹¹ In the years that followed, the “truth of the material” became an important guideline for Hepworth in her sculpting. At the same time, her pieces increasingly bid farewell to figuration and brought the intrinsic beauty of the material to the fore from which both form and content resulted as if as a matter of course. In this way, Hepworth locked into major avant-garde developments of the 1910s and 1920s. 


Like all those who have emphatically renewed sculpture, Hepworth consciously saw her oeuvre in the lineage of the art of sculpting since Classical Antiquity. From 1947 onwards she gave her works Greek and Roman titles such as Janus (1948), Orpheus (1956; p. 36), Discs in Echelon (1959; p. 59–60) and Caryatid (Single Form) (1961; p. 29). Hepworth’s oeuvre arose in full awareness of her own historical position and contemporaneity. Parallel to her sculptural output she also published on art theory, treatises that have a standing equal to her artistic work.¹² In her programmatic essay on “Sculpture”, she describes the relationship between abstraction and its potential to underpin social progress. A “clear social solution” could, Hepworth felt, only be achieved if there is a relationship between the individual and the whole: “When we say that a great sculpture has vision, power, vitality, scale, poise, form or beauty, we are not speaking of physical attributes. Vitality is not a physical, organic attribute of sculpture—it is a spiritual inner life. Power is not man power or a physical capacity—it is an inner force and energy.”¹³
For Hepworth, abstraction was a timeless quality of art that is tied neither to a particular epoch nor to a particular genre.¹⁴ The claim to general validity and universality was something she shared with the champions of abstraction. Hepworth first met Constantin Brâncuși in Paris in 1932-3, Naum Gabo was for many years part of the group of artists who worked in St Ives, and the works of Jean Arp impressed her greatly when in 1933 she visited the Parisian studio he shared with Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Like Henry Moore, she had studied art at the Leeds School of Arts and at the Royal College of Art in London, and the two were closely linked in artistic terms, a relationship that became even stronger when Moore and his wife Irina moved in 1929 to Hampstead and thus lived close to Hepworth’s studio. 


In particular, Constantin Brâncuși played a key role in the development of modern sculpture. As a young artist he had headed for Paris, worked as an assistant in Auguste Rodin’s studio, and was initially strongly influenced by the latter’s language of forms, which he, however, soon left behind him. Departing sharply from the course of infinito, the unfinished nature of sculpture that is considered one of Rodin’s key innovations, Brâncuși proceeded to create sculptures that sought perfection and aspired to be formally complete. He often took his cue from the human figure, albeit while developing a formal language that concentrated on elementary underlying shapes. To his mind, the appropriate key to knowledge was simplification: “Simplicity is not a goal but rather an indispensable approach to the true meaning of things.”¹⁵ It was his goal to come up with the ideal form, the primordial form. While Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich are regarded to be the unwavering representatives of abstraction in painting, this applies to Brâncuși in the world of sculpting. With his marvelous sculpture La Négresse blonde (1926) he came close to achieving his goal. Today, it is considered the incunabulum of abstract sculpture. On closer inspection we can discern a human figure in this gleaming bronze sculpture: an egg-shaped head with pronounced lips and two topknots, one on the top, the other on the back of its head. The title reflects the widespread fascination for African culture in the art of the avantgarde, which with Brâncuși is expressed aesthetically in the unification of the opposites of blond and black.¹⁶ Contrasts such as polished and satin, or soft and hard, are the key properties of the materials of hard, high-gloss bronze and the soft, matte sandstone of the plinth that also doubles as the figure’s body. Brâncuși’s objective was “a simplification and proportioning of the volumes down to the very last detail,” in which “the conceptualized and the grown, the intellectual and the material, the geometric and the organic” thoroughly permeate each other.¹⁷

Hepworth was taken in particular by the simplicity and reduction: “In 1932, Ben Nicholson and I visited the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși in his Paris studio … In Brâncuși’s studio I encountered the miraculous feeling of eternity mixed with beloved stone and stone dust. It is not easy to describe a vivid experience of this order in a few words—the simplicity and dignity of the artist; … the whole great studio filled with soaring forms and still, quiet forms, all in a state of perfection in purpose and loving execution.”¹⁸ The visit greatly inspired Barbara Hepworth. It was above all the ovaloid shapes, the exceptional smoothness and perfection, and the harmonious balancing of contrasts, that influenced her sculptural efforts in the years that followed. 


Jean Arp’s oeuvre is known to have had a liberating influence on Hepworth.¹⁹ Arp’s sculptures, with their molded organic shapes, developed a sculptural presence all of their own in which fluidity and morphing defined the forms. No doubt, his human concretions that he made from 1933 onwards had a special importance for Hepworth. A prime example of this is the sculpture entitled Concrétion humaine sur coupe ovale (p. 25). Arp formulated his intentions as follows: “We do not want to imitate nature. We do not want to depict things. We wish to form the way a plant forms its fruit… We want to form directly, not indirectly… The concrete art seeks to transform the world and make it more tolerable.”²⁰ This lends new meaning to the organic and embeds humans and nature in a cosmic weave. It also applies to the geometric marble sculptures that were among Hepworth’s output from the mid-1930s onwards, such as Two Segments and Sphere, which clearly references the sculptural oeuvre of Alberto Giacometti. In the 1970s, Hepworth was to return to these and further perfect the geometric shapes with works such as Three Forms in Echelon (1970) and the groups of Magic Stones. The belief in the healing and harmonizing power of art was a strong theme running through art in the inter-war years.
 
Hepworth herself considered the year 1934 a caesura:²¹ All traces of naturalism disappeared from her art and works were now defined by their construction, their scale, the relationship of space, texture, and materiality. While Brâncuși in his La Négresse blonde managed to interweave sculpture and space with the reflective surface of the highly polished bronze, Hepworth chose to perforate her sculptures. She inserted empty spaces into them in order to contrast materiality and emptiness. Her pierced forms celebrate their very own penetration. Hepworth later painstakingly elaborated on the empty spaces with color, thus introducing formal elements that played a definitive role in the ideal type of abstract painting as devised by Piet Mondrian.²² In 1940, the maquettes for her Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red)  arose, which she then produced in 1943 in wood.

Until the outbreak of World War II, there was intense communication in Paris as the metropolis of the international art scene, artists strongly influenced one another. Aspiring artists such as Barbara Hepworth arrived in Paris in order to strengthen links to fellow artists there and get their own work known. A multi-faceted avantgarde arose that was also closely connected to the English art scene. There was a political dimension to abstract art that became ever more pronounced in the course of the 1930s. It transposed revolutionary concepts from the world of politics into art and represented the freedom of thought. For their part, artists working in an abstract vein championed “universal freedom” based on the “freedom of ideas” and the imagination.²³ As the totalitarian governments in Russia and in Germany increasingly suppressed abstract art, so the group of those in exile in Paris grew. Those among them who shared artistic and socio-political convictions emigrated and found a safe haven in Great Britain. From 1939 onwards, the house of Barbara Hepworth and her second husband Ben Nicholson in St Ives in Cornwall became the meeting place of artists – painters, sculptors, writers, and musicians.²⁴ 


Naum Gabo, who left the Soviet Union in 1921 after the end of the civil war there, had arrived in London together with László Moholy-Nagy as early as 1935. Gabo changed sculpture fundamentally, because he no longer viewed it as shaping mass but as a matter of construction. His works were of especial significance for Hepworth: “Gabo made a profound effect during the six years he lived and worked here. His unusual powers of expression in discussion and the exceptional charm of his personality when talking of creative processes seemed to unleash a great energy in all who came near him.”²⁵ Naum Gabo aspired to a new order. He invented constructive, translucent shapes in which gravity seemed to dissolve. Together with his brother Antoine Pevsner he discerned “in the fine arts a new element, the kinetic rhythms, as the basis of our perception of real time” and as the essence of current sculptural creation.²⁶ Permanence gave way to the impetus of mutability and change. Hepworth first came across Gabo’s work at a guest performance by the Russian Ballet in London – he had designed the stage sets. In 1939, Naum and Miriam Gabo moved to Cornwall and lived very close at hand to Hepworth and Nicholson, with whom a close friendship developed. The artists’ group primarily also became influential through its writings: Together with Leslie and Sadie Martin, in 1937 Gabo, Hepworth and Nicholson formulated in the publication Circle the principles of Constructivist art. Painters, sculptors, architects, and writers made programmatic statements on their work, they formed a group that worked together on abstraction in art and design. 


Barbara Hepworth developed her own constructive style with her String Pieces that evolved into her iconic works. Having been the first sculptor to introduce hollow spaces as a defining formal element into her works,²⁷ she proceeded to define this space as depth which, if shaped correctly, can render the sculpture dynamic (fig. 8). The lines dividing emptiness and mass blur. Openness, dynamism, and multi-perspectivity come to define Hepworth’s sculptures from the 1940s onwards. These are qualities that stand for a new era, a new beginning. Herbert Read, Britain’s most influential art critic of the day, pinpointed the quality of her work as follows: “I know of no better examples of such purely abstract kinetic sculpture than certain carvings by Barbara Hepworth in which a counterpoint is created between the organic rhythms of the wood and the geometric intervals of the strings stretched across the hollows.”²⁸ For Hepworth, in subsequent years stringent geometry became decisive, exercising an ordering and rationalizing function in her pieces. Alongside multi-part works, from 1937 onwards a main theme that emerged was the towering Single Form. Together with the geometric sculptures these contributed to laying the historical foundations for the autonomous forms of 1960s Minimal Art. 


With the end of the war, Hepworth’s inventiveness appeared to have absolutely no bounds. She received commissions for sculptures for the public realm, and this led to a fundamental change in her formats and preferred material. With Turning Forms (1950-1) – also labeled Dynamic Forms and Pierced Revolving Abstract Forms, she produced a piece that opened out on all sides to the surrounding space and viewers. The sculpture, more than two meters high, is made of reinforced concrete and boasts a surface of gleaming white cement. It bears the weight of the spiraling upward movement of the form and originally actually possessed a motor that enabled it to rotate on its own axis every two minutes.²⁹ Hepworth introduced time as a new dimension in sculpture through movement: “The two things, which interests me most are the significance of human action, gesture, and movement in the particular circumstances of our contemporary life, and the relation of these human actions to forms which are eternal in their significance.”³⁰ She was able to realize her ideal of extreme dematerialization of form through kinetic sculpture. Mass and volume dissolve and blend with the surroundings. For Philips’ Electronics Center in London, in 1956 she created a further kinetic sculpture entitled Theme on Electronics (Orpheus) which again relied on a motor for rotation. The ideal of sublating the limits between art and life that Hepworth had already tried to create back in the 1930s with her designs of everyday objects and tableware was realized in the years that followed with countless prominent sculptures destined for outdoor spaces.

Naum Gabo, der 1921 nach dem Ende des Bürgerkriegs die Sowjetunion verließ, war bereits 1935 mit László Moholy-Nagy nach London gekommen. Gabo veränderte die Skulptur grundlegend, denn er verstand sie nicht mehr als Gestaltung von Masse, sondern als Konstruktionen. Seine Arbeit war von besonderer Bedeutung für Hepworth: »Gabo hat in den sechs Jahren, in denen er hier lebte und arbeitete, eine große Wirkung gehabt. Seine ungewöhnliche Ausdruckskraft in Diskussionen und der außergewöhnliche Charme seiner Persönlichkeit, wenn er von kreativen Prozessen sprach, schienen bei allen, die in seine Nähe kamen, eine große Energie freizusetzen.«²⁵ Naum Gabo strebte nach einer neuen Ordnung. Er erfand konstruktive, transluzente Formen, in denen sich die Schwerkraft aufzulösen schien. Gemeinsam mit seinem Bruder Antoine Pevsner erkannte er »in der bildenden Kunst ein neues Element, die kinetischen Rhythmen, als Grundlagen unserer Wahrnehmung der realen Zeit« und als Wesen des aktuellen bildnerischen Schaffens.²⁶ An die Stelle von Dauerhaftigkeit trat der Impetus der Veränderbarkeit und des Wandels. Hepworth lernte Gabos Werk bei einem Gastspiel des Russischen Balletts in London kennen, für das er die Bühnenausstattung entworfen hatte. 1939 zogen Naum und Miriam Gabo nach Cornwall in die unmittelbare Nähe von Hepworth und Nicholson, mit denen sich eine enge Freundschaft entwickelte. Die Künstlergruppe wurde vor allem auch durch ihre publizistische Tätigkeit einflussreich: Zusammen mit Leslie und Sadie Martin formulierten Gabo, Hepworth und Nicholson 1937 in der bereits erwähnten Publikation Circle die Grundsätze der Konstruktivistischen Kunst. Maler, Bildhauer, Architekten und Schriftsteller äußerten sich programmatisch zu ihrer Arbeit, sie bildeten eine Gruppe, die gemeinsam an der Abstraktion in Kunst und Design arbeitete. 


Barbara Hepworth entwickelte den ihr eigenen konstruktiven Stil mit ihren String Pieces, die zu ihren ikonischen Werken avancierten. Nachdem sie als erste Bildhauerin den Hohlraum als formprägendes Element in ihre Werke eingeführt hatte,²⁷ definierte sie diesen Raum als Tiefe, dessen Gestaltung in der Lage ist, die Skulptur zu dynamisieren. Die Grenzen zwischen Leere und Masse gehen ineinander über. Offenheit, Dynamik und Multiperspektivität prägen die Skulpturen Hepworths seit den 1940er-Jahren. Es sind Qualitäten, die für eine neue Zeit, für einen Neuanfang stehen. Herbert Read, der einflussreichste Kritiker Großbritanniens, beschreibt die Qualität ihres Werkes wie folgt: »Ich kenne keine besseren Beispiele für eine solche, rein abstrakte kinetische Skulptur als bestimmte Werke der Bildhauerei von Barbara Hepworth, bei denen ein Kontrapunkt zwischen den organischen Rhythmen des Holzes und den geometrischen Intervallen der über die Vertiefungen gespannten Schnüre geschaffen wird.«²⁸ Die strenge Geometrie, die eine ordnende und rationalisierende Funktion in sich trägt, wurde in den folgenden Jahren für Hepworth stilbildend. Neben den mehrteiligen Werken etablierte sich ab 1937 die hochaufragende Single Form als ein Hauptmotiv. Zusammen mit den geometrischen Skulpturen wirkten sie daran mit, das historische Fundament der autonomen Formen der Minimal Art in den 1960er-Jahren zu bilden. 


Mit dem Ende des Krieges scheinen dem Erfindungsreichtum Hepworths keine Grenzen mehr gesetzt gewesen zu sein. Sie erhielt Aufträge für Skulpturen im öffentlichen Raum, und so veränderten sich Format und Material grundlegend. Mit Turning Forms (1950/51) – auch als Dynamic Forms und Pierced Revolving Abstract Form bezeichnet – entstand ein Werk, das sich dem umgebenden Raum und den Betrachtern von allen Seiten öffnet. Die mehr als zwei Meter große Skulptur besteht aus Stahlbeton und besitzt eine Oberfläche aus strahlend weißem Zement. Sie trägt die wirbelnde Bewegung nicht nur in ihrer sich in die Höhe schraubenden Form, sondern wurde ursprünglich von einem Motor angetrieben, sodass sie sich alle zwei Minuten um die eigene Achse drehte.²⁹ Hepworth führte mit der Bewegung die Zeit als neue Dimension in die Skulptur ein: »Die beiden Dinge, die mich am meisten interessieren, sind die Bedeutung der menschlichen Handlung, Geste und Bewegung in den besonderen Umständen unseres heutigen Lebens sowie die Beziehung dieser menschlichen Handlungen zu Formen, die in ihrem Gehalt ewig sind.«³⁰ Das Ideal der äußersten Entmaterialisierung der Form realisierte sich in der kinetischen Skulptur. Masse und Volumen lösen sich auf und verschmelzen mit dem Umraum. Für das Electronics Center von Philips in London schuf sie 1956 mit Theme on Electronics (Orpheus) eine weitere kinetische Skulptur, die mit einem Motor in Rotation versetzt wird. Das Ideal der Aufhebung der Grenzen von Kunst und Leben, das Hepworth bereits in den 1930er-Jahren mit der Gestaltung von Alltagsgegenständen wie Vorhängen und Tafelgeschirr angestrebt hatte, realisierte sich in den folgenden Jahren mit zahlreichen prominenten Skulpturen, die im Außenraum ihren Platz fanden.