Barbara Hepworth: the modern classicist of the art world

The work of esteemed sculptor Barbara Hepworth can be seen to embody both feminine and masculine qualities

Barbara Hepworth’s Corinthos. 1954-1955, guarea wood and paint on wooden base, 104.1 x 106.7 x 101.6 cm. Credit © Tate. Barbara Hepworth © Bowness

Barbara Hepworth: In Equilibrium
Heide Museum of Modern Art, until March 13

Throughout the centuries and around the world, sculpture has taken two main forms: carving and modelling. The first process is subtractive, cutting away material to reveal the figure; the second additive, building it up in a malleable substance such as wax or clay. To these can be added, in the last century, assemblage and welding, in both of which existing materials are altered or brought together into new configurations.

The earliest sculptures were no doubt carved from wood, initially probably as decorations on the handles of tools and then as fetish or magical figures, perhaps beginning with pieces of wood whose natural shape inherently suggested a figure or features. But already by the later Stone Age, neolithic peoples from Stonehenge to Malta began to erect the massive monuments we call megalithic. Those at Filitosa in the south of Corsica may be the earliest to have schematic facial features.

Modelling in clay is no doubt also very old, but unless fired into ceramic form remains ephemeral. Ceramic sculpture itself has an important history, from Tang China to the Della Robbia workshop in renaissance Florence, but the highest vocation of modelling was as a preparation for bronze casting, which was perfected as a medium for full-scale statues in Greece in the fifth century BC. At the height of the classical period, the most important freestanding sculptures were in bronze, while architectural reliefs were carved in marble.

Many great sculptors in modern times have practised both of these processes, like Donatello, the most remarkable bronze sculptor since antiquity, and yet also a masterful carver in both marble and wood. Michelangelo, in contrast, was almost exclusively a carver, and his whole conception of the art of sculpture was based on his experience of carving, which he saw as a process of liberating from the block a form already virtually existing within it.

At the same time, his unparalleled genius for imagining that virtual shape in the block allowed him to work in a way unlike any other carver before or since. The usual process is to draw the intended figure on all four sides of a block and then begin to work your way in carefully, taking care not to take off too much in any one spot. Michelangelo understood or conceived the latent form so clearly that he could simply cut in from the front of the block, which is why his unfinished slaves, unique in the history of sculpture, appear to struggling to break loose from the stone.

Bernini too was a natural carver of prodigious ability, although his style was radically different from that of Michelangelo. Rodin on the other hand was a modeller, whose greatest works are all in bronze, and hardly ever touched a chisel. Even The Kiss, though executed in marble, was copied by an assistant from a model first formed in clay and then cast in plaster. Such reproduction was made considerably easier by the use of a so-called pointing machine, which contributed to the rapid manufacture of sometimes lifeless copies by artists of average skill – although admittedly still surpassing the ability of most sculptors today.

By the end of the 19th century, several currents converged to set the scene for modernist sculpture. For one thing there was a renewed interest in carving, and particularly direct carving, rather than copying from a model, especially with the aid of the pointing machine. This went hand-in-hand with a concern for the integrity of materials, promoted by Ruskin in his criticism of the illusionism of late Gothic tracery and of Baroque sculpture; marble can represent flesh or fabric, but should never lose the sense of being stone.

The concern for authenticity in process and in materials led to a revaluation of archaic Greek sculpture around the turn of the 20th century. Previously, these stone carvings of youths from the seventh and sixth centuries BC had been regarded as a primitive stage of Greek sculpture; they were not even given the generic name “kouros” until the beginning of the 20th century. But now they became archetypal expressions of the art of sculpture; in 1908 Rainer Maria Rilke published his famous poem “Archaic torso of Apollo”, and there is a photograph of Matisse, undoubtedly influenced by his friendship with Rilke, sketching another one in the Louvre in 1932.

Primitivism as a new interest in earlier and simpler forms of art, and as a source of renewal for artists who had grown up in the culturally stale world of modern mass society, led to the rediscovery or new appreciation of many forms of earlier artistic expression, from the Spanish Romanesque sculpture and painting that fascinated Picasso, as we saw in the recent Melbourne exhibition, to the masks and fetishes of the tribal peoples of the Pacific and Africa and even, in Barbara Hepworth’s oeuvre, of the colossal standing stones of the megalithic period.

Hepworth (1903-75) was heir to all of these developments, a contemporary of Henry Moore (1898-1986) and almost a generation younger than Jacob Epstein (1880-1959). Born in Yorkshire, she studied at the Leeds School of Art (1920-21), where she met Moore, who remained a lifelong friend, and then at the Royal College of Art (1921-24); there she met a fellow student, John Skeaping, whom she married in Florence in 1925, while they were both studying in Italy. They had one son together before separating in 1931, when she fell in love with Ben Nicholson, an abstract painter.

Her earliest work in this exhibition is from just after this period. Kneeling Figure (1932) is a fine example of the modernist ethos of truth to materials and direct carving, even preserving the lower part of the original rosewood block as a base, so that we are reminded of the initial mass from which the figure has been cut; the kneeling posture allows the figure to be more compact and thus make more economical use of the block and many parts of it, like the back, elbows or lower knee are only just inside the virtual frame of which the base reminds us.

Hepworth had triplets with Nicholson in 1934, and at the outbreak of war in 1939 they moved to St Ives in Cornwall, where she would live for the rest of her life. This idyllic seaside environment, far more peaceful and more spacious than London, is evoked in the exhibition in a short documentary film written by Cecil Day-Lewis, Figures in a landscape (1953) which also includes fascinating footage of the artist at work.

Cornwall is an ancient Celtic land, dotted with megalithic standing stones which later directly inspired Hepworth’s quasi-figural vertical pieces. But it is also, as Day-Lewis reminds us, a geologically ancient land formed of granite but subject to the endless erosion of wind and water. Corsica too is a granite island – the title indeed of Dorothy Carrington’s famous book, subtitled A Portrait of Corsica (1971) – but also subject to the wind and wave erosion that produces the extraordinary hollow forms called “tafoni”. Sydney sandstone displays similar forms but is of course a much softer material, so that the extent of erosion is less surprising.

Having just been in Corsica a couple of months ago, I was reminded of these natural shapes by the hollow forms characteristic of Hepworth’s mature sculptures. At the same time, they and her equally original pierced sculptures are inherently feminine and evocative of the womb. As Day-Lewis suggests, some of these naturally hollow forms appear to have been associated both with birth and death – an inevitable and cyclical link – by the early inhabitants of this country.

Hepworth’s sculptures play on the tension between convex exteriors and concave interiors, as though between complementary male and female energies. The inside spaces are often complex, none more so than the largest example in the exhibition, Corinthos (1954-55), made after the loss of her son by her first marriage in a flying accident, and a subsequent trip to Greece.

On her return to St Ives she found that her travelling companion had sent her a shipment of a hardwood from Nigeria that was apparently several centuries old. One segment of this remarkable timber was carved into this work with a title inspired by her recent travels. Although the outside of the wood is varnished and the interior painted white, Hepworth does not let us forget the original form of the timber as a segment of tree trunk.

The inside is particularly intriguing, carved into a series of curved planes that intersect and suggest a kind of inwardly-spiralling vortex. Thus the interior space is in no sense amorphous, but rather shaped by energy and movement, here articulated as sculptural form. In other cases this otherwise invisible energy may be represented by her distinctive use of strings or thread.

But Hepworth’s threads have other associations too. They recall the rigging of the boats she watched sailing out to the sea every day; or the strings of a musical instrument; or even the lacing of clothes, boots or a sack. In one of the most perfect of her hollow and pierced forms, Spring (1966), by now translated into bronze but painted green inside, the string is attached in a way that deliberately alludes to lacing.

All of the associations I have suggested – rigging, musical strings, lacing – entail tension, whether because they are holding a mast erect, producing a particular musical note or fastening clothes or shoes. And of all of these, it is perhaps the fastening that is most directly relevant to Hepworth’s sculpture, for one can interpret the tautly-drawn strings as holding together the quintessentially different worlds of the inside and outside, the masculine and the feminine dimensions of her sculpture.

This is one of the ways we can think about the “equilibrium” of the exhibition’s title. Sculpture requires this quality in so many ways: in the first place, a sculpture has to be able to stand on its own feet, unless it is conceived as a mural. Hepworth herself said, in a passage quoted on one of the wall panels, “In sculpture there must be a complete realisation of the structure and quality of the stone or wood which is being carved. But I do not think that this alone supplies the life and vitality of the sculpture. I believe that the understanding of the material and the meaning of the form being carved must be in perfect equilibrium.”

Here she begins by acknowledging the fundamental modernist demand for truth and integrity in the handling of materials, but goes on to assert the further principle that form and content, or material and idea, must also be in harmony. The strings that lace up the inside and the outside or her sculptures, in their taut stillness, invite us to contemplate the artist’s reconciliation, or at least her momentary resolution, of fathomless opposites.

Barbara Hepworth: In Equilibrium

Heide Museum of Modern Art, until March 13