The original move to St Ives was more like a desperate evacuation, and for many years afterwards Hepworth fought for the time and space to pursue her vocation. She was the mother of four by the time war came (including five-year-old triplets with Nicholson). The exhibition will show how that idealism and political engagement was challenged both by the war and by the demands of Hepworth’s personal life. Hers is not aspiring to be grounded and worldly it is utopian, in search of perfect forms.” “A lot of his work is dark and about trauma and so on. “If she and Moore had not been from the same county and about the same age then I don’t think they would ever have been compared to each other,” Stephens says. Though she is sometimes viewed in relation to male artists of the period, in particular Nicholson and Henry Moore (her Yorkshire contemporary), Hepworth’s career insists on her standing alone. They came together in response to the advance of nationalism, initially through letters and journals and then literally, as everyone flees Europe and ends up in Hampstead for a while.” That movement in the 30s was about freeing art from everyday reality. “One of the reasons we called the exhibition Sculpture for a Modern World,” Stephens tells me, “was that it was not just modern sculpture Hepworth was engaged with, but modern thought. When she established her home and studio in Hampstead, London with painter Ben Nicholson before the war, they quickly became the focus of a group of artists that included Piet Mondrian and Naum Gabo, as well as visiting Picasso and Constantin Brancusi in France. Right from when she first visited Italy in her early 20s, Stephens suggests, Hepworth was near the forefront of European modernism. The Hepworth gallery museums in Wakefield and in St Ives are wonderful homages to her life and practice, but in rooting her so comprehensively in the place she grew up and in the place where she lived and died, visitors are perhaps in danger of denying Barbara Hepworth her due in the pantheon of international 20th-century art.Īt least that is the view of Chris Stephens, lead curator of modern British art at the Tate and the driving force behind the Hepworth show that will open at Tate Britain this month. In the time since then, arguably Britain’s greatest woman artist has been claimed both by her native Yorkshire and her adoptive Cornwall. I t has been nearly 50 years since there has been a full retrospective of Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture and drawings in London.
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