Carving a niche

By L.L.B.

BARBARA HEPWORTH, one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors, who died in 1975, often conjures up associations of landscape: the hills of Yorkshire, the coastline of Cornwall. So it is refreshing to see Tate Britain's Hepworth retrospective, the first in London for almost half a century, show a different side to her work.

The exhibition follows a smooth trajectory, from Hepworth's first hand carvings, curvaceous figures in stone and wood, to her abstract, abrasively surfaced bronzes of the late 1950s. The selection shows how she was never static in her work, enjoying sculpting as a physical process, carving everything herself, constantly refining surfaces, shapes and balance.

While her right hand held the hammer, the left, as she put it, was her thinking hand, through which "the rhythms of thought" passed into the stone. She was happier carving than modelling because she found it "more adapted to the expression of the accumulative idea of experience…" Passing through each room of the Tate's exhibition visitors can see that experience grow.

Her early carvings are placed among those of her peers, artists such as Eric Gill, Henri Gaudier-Breska and John Skeaping (her first husband), who were equally enamoured with direct carving. All operated within a shared aesthetic, using similar simplified forms and motifs, but Hepworth's pieces stand out as some of the most emotive and skilled.

In the 1930s she began living and exhibiting with a fellow artist, Ben Nicholson, a relationship that she described as "a very splendid co-operation. We were very stern critics of each other's works, and yet felt absolute independence." Her distinctive silhouette appears frequently in his works of the time, which are also on display, and a photo album shows how the two integrated their art into their daily lives.

The curators’ main interest, though, lies in presenting Hepworth within a more international context. They use archive material—magazines, photographs and film—of her frequent foreign exhibitions, and she emerges as a more political being than her reputation has previously suggested. Equating formal harmony with social harmony, she fervently believed in the power of sculpture to affect the spirit and the idea that abstract art could somehow reinforce an image of good and lead to more harmonious world.

The final room finds a surprising way to show her holistic vision, with a partial reconstruction of a modernist Dutch pavilion in which her work was displayed in 1965. Her large bronzes—a medium she adopted as demand for her work grew—look totally of their time in a construction made of breeze blocks and bamboo. Yet they mark a distinct leap from the graceful wooden carvings that dominate the show, especially the extraordinary, introverted beauty of the sculptures made of guarea (a tropical hardwood) in the preceding gallery.

The retrospective shows a new side of a well-known artist. But staging it in the darker ground-floor galleries robs the sculptures of some of their elegance and significance. "Light and space", Hepworth once observed, "are the sculptor's materials as much as wood or stone—I feel that I can relate my work more easily, in the open air, to the climate and the landscape.” Without these crucial elements, some of the vitality that Hepworth saw as so central to sculpture—the very message that the curators have worked so hard to reveal—vanishes.