Barbara Hepworth : biography
Dame Barbara Hepworth DBE (10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975) was an English sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism, and with such contemporaries as Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Naum Gabo she helped to develop modern art (sculpture in particular) in Britain.
Galleries holding her work
Hepworth’s former studio and home now form the Barbara Hepworth Museum. A new £35 million museum dedicated to Hepworth, the Hepworth Wakefield, opened in Britain in May 2011 at Wakefield in West Yorkshire. ARTINFO.com
Her work may also be seen at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, the School of Music at Cardiff University, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in West Bretton, West Yorkshire; Clare College, Churchill College and Murray Edwards College (formerly New Hall), Cambridge; Snape Maltings, Snape, Suffolk; and on view in or attached to the John Lewis department store, part of the John Lewis Partnership, in Oxford Street (see picture); and Kenwood House, both in London. Seaform (Atlantic) may be viewed in a newly created open space on St George’s Street Norwich; it has been seen to be used by the Norwich parcour group to hang from horizontally and move through its apertures as part of their own physical urban art form (the sculpture was relocated from the Norwich Castle gardens for fear the precious bronze would be stolen and melted down for scrap). Her 1966 work, Construction (Crucifixion): Homage to Mondrian, can be seen in the grounds of Winchester Cathedral next to The Pilgrims’ School; Hieroglyph can be seen at Leeds Art Gallery. The Tate Gallery owns many of her works. In the Netherlands, the Kröller-Müller Museum also owns several of her sculptures. Curved Form (Trevalgan) (1956), which stood in Margaret Gardiner’s rear garden in Hampstead, is now at the Pier Art Gallery in Stromness together with 67 other works donated by Gardiner. Trevalgan was Hepworth’s first entire bronze form.
Marble portrait heads dating from London, ca. 1927, of Barbara Hepworth by John Skeaping, and of Skeaping by Hepworth, are documented by photograph in the Skeaping Retrospective catalogue,John Skeaping 1901–80: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Arthur Ackermann and Son, London, 1991, page 7 but are both believed to be lost.
List of selected works
1928 | Doves | Parian marble |
1932–33 | Seated Figure | lignum vitae |
1933 | Two Forms | alabaster and limestone |