Hepworth, Dame Barbara

Hepworth, Dame Barbara (1903–75). Britain sculptor, one of the most important figures in the development of abstract art in Britain. She trained at Leeds School of Art, where she became a friend of Henry Moore, and at the Royal College of Art. Her early sculptures were quasi-naturalistic and had much in common with Moore's work (Doves, 1927, Manchester AG), but she already showed a tendency to submerge detail in simple forms, and by the early 1930s her work had become entirely abstract. She worked both in wood and stone, and she described an important aspect of her early career as being ‘the excitement of discovering the nature of carving’. In this preference for direct carving, she was again united with Moore, but whereas his abstractions always remained based on natural forms, Hepworth's were often entirely unrepresentational in origin. Yet she consistently professed a Romantic attitude of emotional affinity with nature, speaking of carving both as a ‘biological necessity’ and as an ‘extension of the telluric forces which mould the landscape’.

From 1925 to 1931 Hepworth was married to the sculptor John Skeaping (1901–80). In 1931 she met Ben Nicholson, who became her second husband in 1938, and through him she became aware of contemporary European developments. They joined Abstraction-Création in 1933, and Unit One in the same year. During the 1930s Hepworth, Nicholson, and Moore worked in close harmony and became recognized as the nucleus of the abstract movement in England. In 1939 Hepworth moved to St Ives in Cornwall with Nicholson and lived there for the rest of her life (see St Ives School). During the late 1930s and 1940s she began to concentrate on the counterplay between mass and space in sculpture. In 1931 in Pierced Form (destroyed during the Second World War) she first introduced into England the use of the ‘hole’, and she now developed this with great subtlety, making play with the relationship between the outside and inside of a figure, the two surfaces sometimes being linked with threaded string, as in Pelagos (1956, Tate, London). Pelagos also shows her sensitive use of painted surface to contrast with the natural grain of the wood. In all her work she displayed a deep understanding of the quality of her materials and superb standards of craftsmanship. By the 1950s she was one of the most internationally famous of sculptors and she received many honours and prestigious public commissions, among them the memorial to Dag Hammarskjöld—Single Form— at the United Nations in New York (1963). She now worked more in bronze, especially for large pieces, but she always retained a special feeling for direct carving. Hepworth died tragically in a fire at her studio in St Ives, which is now a museum dedicated to her work. Her obituary in the Guardian described her as ‘probably the most significant woman artist in the history of art to this day’.