Barbara Hepworth
The renewer of modern sculpture in England.
Barbara Hepworth made abstract sculptures with holes and strings in wood, stone and bronze. Her studio in St Ives is a museum.
Barbara Hepworth was born in 1903 in Wakefield, Yorkshire. Her father was an engineer. She studied at the Leeds School of Art, where she got to know Henry Moore, and then at the Royal College of Art in London. With a scholarship she travelled to Italy, where she learned to carve marble. In 1925 she married the sculptor John Skeaping.
Hepworth worked by direct carving, that is, cutting the form directly from the stone or block of wood without a clay model. Around 1931 she made a sculpture with a hole through the form, and the pierced hole became her hallmark, something she and Moore developed in parallel. In the 1930s she became entirely abstract and was part of the international avant-garde circle in London together with the painter Ben Nicholson, whom she married in 1938. They had triplets in 1934.
When the Second World War broke out, the family moved to St Ives in Cornwall. The sea, the cliffs and the landscape there influenced her forms. She began stretching strings across the holes, like the strings of an instrument, and worked in wood and stone and, from the 1950s, often in bronze. The forms are clean and soft and recall stones worn smooth by water.
She became internationally recognised and received major commissions. The best known is Single Form outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, in memory of the Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, who was her friend and owned works by her. It was unveiled in 1964. Her son Paul was killed in 1953 in a plane crash while serving in the Royal Air Force.
Hepworth died in 1975 in a fire in her studio in St Ives. The studio and garden, Trewyn Studio, are now a museum, and in her home town of Wakefield the gallery The Hepworth opened in 2011. She is regarded as one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century and as a pioneer of abstract sculpture.