Break with traditional roles

Barbara Hepworth is without doubt an artist who was strikingly talented and remarkably creative. However, the fact that within the space of only a few years she emerged as one of the best-known representatives of abstract sculpture and as Britain’s leading female sculptor certainly cannot be attributed solely to her extraordinary gifts. It is no coincidence that in past decades attention has repeatedly been drawn to how strongly in the history of art during their lifetimes female artists were squeezed to the margins, received little recognition, and how few female positions in art have ever made it into the major museum collections, into the standard reference works on modern art, and thus into the canon of art per se.¹ Barbara Hepworth seems at first sight to be one of the few exceptions to this rule: Her work was promoted as early as the 1950s and 1960s by international critics such as Herbert Read, Adrian Stokes, Abraham Marie Hammacher, Sigfried Giedion, and Carola Giedion-Welcker and she represented her country at the biennials in Venice and São Paulo as well as at the documenta in Kassel. She is represented with important works in museums all over the world and during her lifetime was awarded key public commissions. Her successful career and her numerous links to the European avantgarde have for some years now led to ever more differentiated interest in her oeuvre. So, what did she do differently? Why did she, compared to many other female artists of her day, succeed in gaining a foothold in the international art world? In order to explore these questions, it bears closely examining the strategies she used. This approach not only offers interesting insights into the links and networks in the field of abstract art, but may also provide a basis for establishing what you need as a woman in order to assert yourself in a field dominated by men and be successful.

Barbara Hepworth, born in 1903 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, grew up in a well-off family. In 1920, she enrolled at the Leeds School of Art and, thanks to a scholarship, continued her studies in 1921 at the Royal College of Art in London, where that same year a new director was appointed, the progressively minded painter William Rothenstein. Moreover, the inter-War years favored a structural change in society that left greater scope for new ways of thought and models for living while likewise casting into question the hitherto predominant gender roles. Henry Moore, who moved from Leeds to London at the same time as Hepworth and studied together with her, described just how immensely liberating the atmosphere at the college was.² Whether Hepworth shared this feeling is not known, but we can safely assume that the situation was somewhat different for her than it was for her male colleague Moore. While women were admitted to the Royal Academy art colleges as of 1860 this certainly did not mean they had the same status as their male counterparts. For example, until well into the 1890s they were not permitted to take part in life drawing classes with nudes. Furthermore, they were not accorded the same degree of recognition as their male colleagues.³ In particular, in the male-dominated field of sculpting it was at that time difficult for women to be perceived as the equals of their male counterparts. Unlike the painting classes in which were already broadly represented by the 1920s, they tended to be the exception in sculpting classes. Hepworth nevertheless consciously decided in favor of the genre. Artistically speaking, the decision was of great significance for her, as under Barry Hart in the sculpture class she learned the technique of direct carving, even though the method did not form part of the course and was not officially included in the curriculum until 1927.⁴ For Hepworth as for Moore acquiring the skill impacted fundamentally on their artistic oeuvre. 


During her student days, Hepworth stood out for her clear ambition. Having deliberately chosen an academic career, she now carefully plotted her career path. She thus remained at the Royal College of Art for another year after concluding her official training in order to be able to participate in the British edition of the Prix de Rome, as the winners were granted funding for a trip to Rome. Even if Hepworth did not win (the man who was later to become her first husband, John Skeaping, came first), she received a West Riding Scholarship that enabled her to travel abroad for a year. She chose Italy, initially lived in Florence, and then later with Skeaping in Rome, whom she married in 1925. In Italy she learned stone sculpting under Giovanni Ardini and likewise how to work marble. Skeaping also reported that he had spent time with Hepworth refining her wood carving skills.⁵ On their return from Italy, the couple took lodgings in London and went freelance as artists. 


Hepworth then took a strategic approach to planning her further career as an artist: She consciously resolved to appear in public and exhibit along with her husband, and thus to benefit from the fact that at this time he was still the better known of the two. It is therefore not surprising that in particular at the beginning of her career, critics often referred to her as Mrs. Skeaping or later as Mrs. Nicholson. It is hard to gauge whether this actually troubled her. Eleanor Clayton, for example, points out that Hepworth and Skeaping very deliberately exhibited as a couple as this received greater coverage in the press.⁶ They also negotiated a joint contract with Arthur Tooth & Sons Galleries. This was officially terminated in 1931 after Hepworth and Skeaping had separated, and Hepworth was in a relationship with Constructivist artist Ben Nicholson. Nicholson was almost ten years her senior, came from a family of artists, and already had forged strong links in the international art scene. In the first few years of their marriage the two exhibited together, for example from November to December 1932 in the show Carvings by Barbara Hepworth, Paintings by Ben Nicholson at Arthur Tooth & Son’s Gallery. 


Without doubt, at the beginning of her career, in particular Ben Nicholson was an important partner for Hepworth, opening many doors for her. He introduced her to the relevant circles and to important players in the art world. He traveled to Paris regularly, visited the various galleries there, as well as other artists working in a Modernist vein. If Hepworth was prevented from taking part in a trip in person, he talked about her and showed around photographs of her sculptures. The positive responses among artists such as Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hélion, Piet Mondrian, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp or Ossip Zadkine told Hepworth she was on the right path and helped strengthen her international reputation.⁷ The fact that at the beginning of her career she thus relied strongly on her husbands and their contacts may seem somewhat unemancipated from today’s point of view. However, it was a conscious decision by Hepworth (her biographer Eleanor Clayton reaches the same conclusion) to comply with the realities of her gender and therefore fulfill the associated expectations.⁸ 

Alongside her participation in exhibitions and competitions, her links to other artists and her membership in various artists’ associations proved to be of fundamental help in advancing Barbara Hepworth’s career. In 1930, she joined the London Group whose objective was to promote the public awareness of contemporary art by holding annual exhibitions. The group considered itself first and foremost as the progressive alternative to the Royal Academy. In 1931, Hepworth became a member of the 7&5 Society, joining among others Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Frances Hodgkins. With the arrival of these new members, the society morphed from being an essentially reactionary group into one of the leading associations for abstract art in Great Britain. Hepworth was busy trying to gain greater international recognition and as a consequence in the 1930s focused more strongly on Paris, that had in the inter-War years again developed into one of the centers of modern art. What proved especially effective in this context was her membership of Abstraction-Création, an international association of  artists who primarily took a non-figurative approach; it was the brainchild of Theo van Doesburg who sought to network artists producing abstract work with one another. The group, which was founded in Paris after van Doesburg’s death by Belgian artist Georges Vantongerloo and French painter Auguste Herbin and in its heyday had almost 400 members, did not pursue a political agenda but served above all as a basis for joint exhibition and publishing activities. In the foreword of the first joint issue of its international journal, the group outlined the different currents in abstract art: “Abstraction because through the gradual abstraction of forms in nature, some artists arrived at a non-figurative position. Creation because other artists arrived directly at non-figuration through a purely geometrical approach or by exclusively using elements that are commonly termed abstract, such as circles, planes, bars, lines, etc.”⁹ Alongside Hepworth and Nicholson, who became members in 1933, in the course of the years the group included artists such as Naum Gabo, Antoine Pevsner, Piet Mondrian, El Lissitzky, Wassily Kandinsky, Max Bill, Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Constantin Brâncuși, Alexander Calder and many others among its active members. In 1934, the group’s importance started to wane because numerous artists left owing to the debates over content, among them Hepworth. Nevertheless, her short-lived membership certainly boosted her reputation and gave her countless new contacts.


In 1933, Hepworth was a founding member of the Unit 1 association which brought together architects, painters, and sculptors. In particular the joint publication Unit 1 was to make the English avantgarde art better known. The association’s goal was to combine the two prevalent main artistic currents of the day, abstract art and Surrealism. The first and only exhibition the group held was entitled Unit One and took place in 1934, accompanied by a book that bore the subtitle The Modern Movement in English Architecture, Painting and Sculpture. It contained explanatory notes on all the artists, photographs of their works, and an introduction by critic and poet Herbert Read, who was one of the most important promoters of Modernist art in Great Britain. The group did not last for long and while from today’s viewpoint the publication is an important document, it did not achieve the desired effect and thus Nicholson wrote to Hepworth from Paris in 1934 that no one had taken any notice of the publication at all.¹⁰ In 1935, the group then dissolved, but was, despite its brief existence, nevertheless extremely important in establishing London as a center of abstract art and architecture in the 1930s. 


When the Nazis seized power in Germany it led to the defamation of and discrimination against Modernist art and at the latest as of the outbreak of war in September 1939, the German invasion of France in 1940, and the foundation of the Vichy regime, the artistic and intellectual avantgarde sought to leave the country. In Great Britain, many artists also resolved to leave the big cities and move to the country. Barbara Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson moved in 1939 to St  Ives, at the time a small fishing village on Cornwall’s north coast that in the course of the War years emerged as a haven for countless fine artists. Hepworth had always felt a strong attachment to nature and this became even more intense after the move to Cornwall, evolving into a defining factor in her artistic oeuvre. Hepworth and Nicholson’s house developed into a meeting place for creative minds from the worlds of art, literature, and music, who sat down to exchange views and devise joint ideas for concepts for exhibitions and events. 


The fact that Barbara Hepworth personally knew numerous European avantgarde artists and in the course of her career moved in a dynamic network of progressively minded artists and intellectuals contributed decisively to her becoming ever better known and gaining a strong reputation as an internationally recognized artist. In particular, her contacts to established artists such as Constantin Brâncuși, Piet Mondrian or Jean Arp and their benevolent attitude towards her works proved helpful.

Alongside membership in artists’ groups and networks, Hepworth also worked intensively to present her work in exhibition as widely as possible and all over the world. After the first joint presentations with Skeaping and Nicholson, her participation in the 1936 Abstract and Concrete show (the first exhibition offering an overview of abstract art in Britain) marks an early high point in these efforts. The show brought together no less than 16 international artists (including Arp, Calder, Gabo, Alberto Giacometti, Moore, and Mondrian) and toured Oxford, Liverpool, Newcastle upon Tyne, London, and Cambridge. The show offered Hepworth a marvelous opportunity to display her works alongside those of artists to whom she felt a close conceptual connection. That same year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired a first piece by her: Discs in Echelon (1935). This was followed in 1937 by Hepworth’s first solo show at Alex Reid & Lefèvre in London; one year later she took part in an exhibition of abstract art in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. With the outbreak of World War II, her exhibition activities dwindled, but only shortly after the end of the war Hepworth was able to take up where her previous successes had left off: As early as 1946 she was invited to participate in the competition for Waterloo Bridge and, in 1949, she presented her works in the USA for the first time. In 1950, she then also received official recognition from the British government, as she was asked to present at the British Pavilion at the XXV Venice Biennale. That same year, the Tate Gallery acquired its first piece by her. In 1951, she realized Turning Forms and Contrapuntal Forms in the context of the Festival of Britain, her first works for outdoors. This was followed that same year by the piece Vertical Form for Hatfield Technical College, in 1960 by Meridian which was erected outside the State House high-rise in London, and in 1963 by Winged Figure which is located in a prominent position on Oxford Street in London. 


Possibly the best-known piece by Hepworth for the public realm is her sculpture Single Form that strands in front of the United Nations building in New York and is dedicated to UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, who had died a short while before under dramatic circumstances and whom Hepworth knew in person. In 1964, the year it was made, the monument was the first large abstract public sculpture in New York City. The large number of public commissions she received in the 1950s and 1960s attest not only to Hepworth’s growing fame but also through the presence of her works in the public space created a strong awareness in society of her oeuvre. 


At the same time as the number of her works commissioned for public display grew, so too did that of the exhibitions in which she participated: In the 1950s, she repeatedly presented work in North America, among others in New York, San Francisco, Washington D. C., Montreal, and Toronto. In 1959, she participated alongside painter Francis Bacon and printmaker Stanley Hayter as representatives of Great Britain at the 5^th São Paulo Biennial (1959), where she won the Grand Prize. In the wake of this, many of her works went on an exhibition tour of South America organized by the British Council.¹¹ For Hepworth the São Paulo Biennale show and the subsequent exhibition tour offered a perfect opportunity to increase awareness of her art outside Europe and the United States, too. Likewise in 1959, she exhibited at documenta 2, which at the time was already one of the world’s most important contemporary art shows. Between 1964 and 1965, she presented works, among others, in Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki and Oslo, followed by a major retrospective at the Kröller-Müller Museum Otterlo, Netherlands, which then traveled on to Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland, to Turin, Italy, and then to Karlsruhe and Essen in Germany. In 1968, she had the opportunity to present her oeuvre as a major retrospective in the Tate, a privilege which other than Hepworth was only accorded four other women during their lifetimes.¹² 


Without elaborating in detail all the exhibitions in which Hepworth took part, the above outline should suffice to see how extraordinarily successful she was in her lifetime and how her presentations became renowned worldwide. She paid careful attention to how her works were presented and repeatedly expressed displeasure when something did not accord with what she had in mind. She was above all insistent that the sheer variety of materials and works be displayed and preferred to this end stark juxtapositions that stood out for their dynamism and most certainly avoided appearing “discreet” let alone “ladylike”.¹³ Penelope Curtis points out that it was important for Hepworth to have the right collectors and gallerists, to be represented in the most important exhibitions and museums, and to be duly perceived by the public eye. She was thus especially displeased by the selection and presentation of her pieces at the documenta in Kassel. In that context she above all accused her gallery Gimpel Fils in London of not having adequately looked after her interests and in particular of having neglected her international exhibitions.¹⁴

In his introduction to Unit 1 Herbert Read suggested that genuine artists are characterized by refusing to obey rules let alone follow trodden paths or forms of thought. Since they created something completely new, they themselves had to create an audience that appreciated their work. In other words, they had to become “propagandists” of their art.¹⁵ Barbara Hepworth appears to have shared this view as from the early 1930s onwards she preferred to resort to international publications to make herself and her art known.¹⁶ Alongside the accompanying publications on Unit 1 and Abstraction-Création, which established Hepworth’s oeuvre in the context of European art, she had Axis magazine to thank for her reputation in the USA ; it was published between 1935 and 1937 and was at the initiative of Jean Hélions edited by Mary Myfanwy Evans and her later husband John Piper. Even if the magazine was not a commercial success, it definitely helped the artists presented in it become known in the United States: In 1936, The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art in New York recommended Axis and The Studio as the only English publications that provided good orientation on contemporary currents in art.¹⁷ At the same time as Axis was discontinued, in 1937 the Circle: International Survey of Constructive Art came out, almost 300 pages long, and edited by Nicholson, Gabo and architect Leslie Martin. Hepworth was closely involved in the production and concerned herself primarily with issues relating to the layout and print.¹⁸ The book appeared on the occasion of the Constructive Art exhibition at London Gallery. While it was not particularly successful commercially, of the 675 copies a total of 250 were sold in the USA. As curator Valerie Holman rightly says, the success of such publications can hardly be gauged by the sales figures as they have an impact by virtue of being discussed in other media and the ideas they contain being taken up and spread further.¹⁹ 


What was almost equally important in shoring up Hepworth’s international career was her links to renowned critics such as the afore-mentioned Herbert Read. From today’s viewpoint, these links were probably more important than they seemed at the time. After all, retrospectively it became clear that artists at the time were above all remembered if they were discussed and mentioned in the standard reference works. Thanks to her close friendship with Read, possibly the most influential art historian in post-War Modernism in Britain, Hepworth had a man with an exceptional profile promoting her art. Read was also born in Yorkshire and as early as 1932 wrote an essay on Hepworth, subsequently became a friend and champion of her work, later also the neighbor of Hepworth, Nicholson and Moore, when in 1933 he likewise moved into The Mall Studios²⁰ – it was a link that all benefited from equally thereafter. In the post-War period Read emerged as one of the most powerful protagonists of British art criticism, he was already close friends with Hepworth. It bears emphasizing here that Hepworth was the only female artist whose oeuvre Read repeatedly and extensively mentioned. That said, even the repeated reviews took place in the framework of a binary gender distinction, as curator and writer Stephen Feeke has shown. He is therefore critical in particular of the introduction to the first Hepworth biography (1952) as he discerns in it a gender-specific paradigm that Read uses to classify Hepworth’s artistic achievements as secondary to those of Moore.²¹ In actual fact, it is somewhat dubious that in Herbert Read’s The Art of Sculpture Hepworth only gets mentioned once whereas Moore’s works are extensively discussed. 


Katy Deepwell assumes that the close ties to Herbert Read were in part responsible for Hepworth’s oeuvre dwindling in importance in the public mind following her death, something that could possibly have been prevented if Hepworth had in her lifetime already expanded the circle of critics who reviewed her work.²² We can presume that other critics would possibly have chosen a different narrative, one that did not trace Hepworth’s artistic emergence in comparison to or distinction from Henry Moore. For just how strongly this artistic rivalry was the focus of attention in particular of male critics can be seen from their repeated statements on Hepworth. In texts by Herbert Read, Adrian Strokes, Lawrence Alloway or David Lewis it was always Moore who is taken as the yardstick for Hepworth. Thus, Lewis for example distinguishes between the two oeuvres by attributing to Hepworth’s sculptures the ability to be in harmony with their surroundings while Moore’s pieces stood out for their visual contrast, which lent them special significance and extreme power.²³ Alloway wrote on the occasion of Hepworth’s show at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1954: “Her feeling for stone and wood is distinguished, less powerful than Moore’s, but more subtle: it is her strategy to appear to persuade rather than dominate her material.”²⁴ 


From today’s viewpoint, many of the texts on Hepworth seem to focus very strongly on gender-specific differences and accord Moore greater importance as he was a man. Read at any rate relied on gender-specific factors when comparing Moore and Hepworth, but likewise underlined (and this was to prove especially disadvantageous for Hepworth) above all Moore’s seniority, placing him thus in the position of being a kind of teacher.²⁵ In this way, many publications upheld the assumption that it had been Moore who first had the idea of piercing a sculpture. Yet we now know that Hepworth first used the technique as early as 1931 in her work entitled Pierced Form (since lost), while Henry Moore declared 1932 the “Year of the Hole”. 


There is no disputing that precisely at the beginning of their artistic careers both sculptors shared much in common. The conclusion drawn from this, among others by Herbert Read, that Moore served as a role model for Hepworth, who was five years his junior, seems dubious against this background. Moreover, Katy Deepwell points out that Read’s countless references to the influence of other outstanding artists such as Constantin Brâncuşi, Nicholson, Gabo and specifically Moore fostered the impression that Hepworth copied them as if she lacked a genuinely artistic originality of her own.²⁶ Given this briefly outlined situation it is not surprising that Hepworth paid great attention to the reception of her works and at times tried to influence or indeed define it. 

“It is very difficult for me to speak, because I can only communicate through my sculpture.”²⁷ – This was the sentence with which Barbara Hepworth commenced her talk on the occasion of the unveiling of her sculpture Single Form in front of the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Just how little this self-assessment applied can be seen on closer inspection from her written and spoken remarks; in them Hepworth was extremely self-confident and precise in her reflections on and her analysis and assessment of her art.²⁸ From today’s point of view, one would therefore probably assume that it was precisely her communicative strengths which formed an elementary foundation for her international reputation and helped shape her public image. In her essay “Hepworth and her critics” Katy Deepwell highlights that the vast majority of the critics repeatedly referred to Hepworth’s own statements and explanations. She herself brought out two autobiographies, the first, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, came out as early as 1952 together with an introduction by Herbert Read. In the second, A Pictorial Autobiography, which appeared in 1970, she divided her life into four chronological periods: her childhood and youth; the years spent with Ben Nicholson; the period in St Ives; and the 1960s, which Hepworth termed a “New Decade”. She underlined how she had continued to advance her work throughout, and the key narrative was that of an extremely productive and successful artist who succeeded in reconciling her family with her career.²⁹ Moreover, she also found it important in her biography to correct some dates that had been wrong, for example that Hepworth’s artistic innovation with her Piercings had wrongly been assumed to have occurred after Moore: “Its main use was to put beyond dispute certain dates. My dates have been much altered by writers on Henry Moore.”³⁰ With the publication of these autobiographies Hepworth herself very decisively helped determine her public image.³¹ Without expressing exaggerated criticism it was nevertheless a fact that bears considering and was of great relevance in particular with reference to carefully constructing her public image. Having specifically at the beginning of her career repeatedly been dissatisfied by the photographic reproductions of her works, she at time took control of the process herself. She also used photographs for worldwide marketing purposes, sending them to potential buyers or multipliers. There are countless shots of Hepworth at work in her studio, and they focus above all on skillfully staging her working on her sculptures with her own two hands. Auguste Rodin was one of the first artists who recognized the importance of photography for marketing his sculptures and utilized them to make himself and his oeuvre better known. Hepworth took a similar approach and consciously made certain, or so the curator stated, what story she gave the media and how she created a public awareness of her art. Valerie Holman emphasizes that it was above all Hepworth’s written statements as well as the reproductions of her pieces that forged her international reputation.³² 


However, the problem with photographs is that they did not offer any visualization of space and reduced a piece intended to be seen all round to two dimensions. It is thus not surprising that Hepworth was also very open to the use of film. Penelope Curtis notes that film was an especially suitable medium for capturing Hepworth’s sculptures as it could show different views of one and the same piece.³³ Just how strongly this was at times staged can be seen from the 1952 film made by Dudley Shaw Ash Figures in a Landscape. Alongside shots in the studio garden there are countless scenes showing figures in the Cornish countryside, such as on the beach, but also in unusual places, such as at Mên-an-Tol, a Bronze Age megalith formation. Hepworth herself was very unhappy with the final version and therefore tried henceforth to intervene more strongly in production work. Fraser points out that not only did Hepworth propose the times for the shoots but also even compiled entire scripts and consciously tried to influence the content.³⁴ In other fields there are also countless examples of how careful Hepworth was with reference to her public representation. For example, she wrote to art historian Reginald Howard Wilenski, who authored the 1932 book , that she did not find the illustration of her work there sufficiently representative.³⁵ She repeatedly expressed criticism even when it came to her preferred reviewers (Herbert Read, Adrian Stokes).³⁶ In other words, Hepworth was not just a successful artist and businesswoman, but also a writer and self-presenter who took personal charge of shaping her public image and reputation.³⁷

Das Problem der Fotografien ist allerdings, dass sie keine Verbildlichung der Räumlichkeit ermöglichten und ein auf Allansichtigkeit angelegtes Werk zweidimensional reduzierten. So ist es nicht verwunderlich, dass Hepworth auch dem Medium des Films sehr aufgeschlossen gegenüberstand. Penelope Curtis weist darauf hin, dass der Film wegen der Möglichkeit, verschiedene Ansichten zu zeigen, ein besonders geeignetes Medium gewesen sei, um Hepworths Skulpturen einzufangen.³³ Wie stark die Inszenierung dabei zuweilen war, belegt der 1952 von Dudley Shaw Ash produzierte Film Figures in a Landscape. Neben Aufnahmen im Studiogarten zeigen zahlreiche Szenen die Figuren in der kornischen Landschaft, etwa am Strand, aber auch an außergewöhnlichen Orten, wie beispielsweise an der Mên-an-Tol, einer Megalithformation aus der Bronzezeit. Hepworth selbst war mit dem finalen Ergebnis sehr unzufrieden und versuchte daher, in der Folgezeit stärker in die Produktion einzugreifen. Fraser zeigt auf, dass Hepworth nicht nur die Zeit für Filmaufnahmen vorschlug, sondern mitunter ganze Skripts verfasste und bewusst Einfluss auf die Inhalte zu nehmen versuchte.³⁴ Auch in anderen Bereichen finden sich zahlreiche Beispiele dafür, wie sorgsam Hepworth in Bezug auf ihre öffentliche Repräsentation war. So schrieb sie beispielsweise an den Kunsthistoriker Reginald Howard Wilenski, von dem 1932 das Buch The Meaning of Modern Sculpture erschien, dass ihr die Abbildung ihres Werkes als nicht repräsentativ genug erscheine.³⁵ Selbst gegenüber ihren bevorzugten Kritikern Herbert Read, Adrian Stokes und deren Texten äußerte sie immer wieder Kritik.³⁶ Hepworth war also nicht nur eine erfolgreiche Künstlerin und Geschäftsfrau, sondern auch Schriftstellerin und Selbstdarstellerin, die es persönlich in die Hand nahm, ihr öffentliches Bild und ihre Reputation zu formen.³⁷ 

After Hepworth’s great successes during her lifetime, initially silence befell her oeuvre after her death. Strangely, she was also hardly noticed in the context of feminist art history. Sherry Buckberrough assumes that this can be attributed to the fact that Hepworth did not explicitly see herself as a feminist artist but solely lay claim to her due place in art history: “I have never understood why the word feminine is considered to be a compliment to one’s sex if one is a woman but has a derogatory meaning when applied to anything else. The feminine point of view is a complementary one to the masculine.”³⁸ On the other hand, she did say that in her opinion there were gender-specific differences as regards sensibility and perception, but did not feel this led to a fundamental rivalry between the sexes and instead should be considered enriching.³⁹ Hepworth believed that art was gender-neutral and should be judged solely by its quality: Either it was good, or is was not.⁴⁰ Perhaps it was this neutrality on gender issues that led to feminist art history by and large ignoring her. Hepworth’s stance, or so Buckberrough suggests, did not attract any interest in the critical world of the 1980s when questions of ethnic or gender identity played an overarching role.⁴¹ This is a strange dichotomy as both Barbara Hepworth’s oeuvre and her personality definitely had the potential to serve as the trailblazer followed by subsequent generations the way Rodin was. However, she remains, or so for example Claire Doherty judges, a phenomenon: a female artist whose reputation after her death, despite her outstanding successes during her lifetime and her key position within the avantgarde movement, was for a long time often forgotten.⁴²
 
A revaluation of her oeuvre first took place almost 20 years after her death thanks to a major retrospective at the Tate Liverpool in 1994-5. Since that time, the number of shows and publications on her and her oeuvre has grown. As a result, younger generations have started taking far greater note of her art, as is demonstrated by the artistic positions shown in the present exhibition by artists such as Claudia Comte, Tacita Dean or Julian Charrière. It remains to be said that Barbara Hepworth was both a driving force and a pioneer in Modernist art and that her works decisively contributed to stimulating abstraction, without presenting a feminist position, however. She was superbly networked in the international art scene and was very skillful in self-marketing as well as in using her contacts to important protagonists of the cultural world.