Dame Barbara Hepworth

Venice, British Pavilion, XXV Biennale Internazionale d'Arte di Venezia, 1950, no.113;
Liverpool, Tate gallery, Barbara Hepworth a Retrospective, 14 September - 4 December 1994, no.107, illustrated in the exhibition catalogue, with tour to Yale Center for British Art, New Haven and Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. 

The board appears to be in excellent original condition and providing a good sound support. The surface of the work also appears to be in lovely original condition. Two shallow diagonal scratches running across the right hand figures appear to be contemporary with the time of execution. Presented behind glass in a sympathetic painted wooden frame with various tiny surface scratches but otherwise in good sound condition. Ready for the wall. Please note that the background colour is more red and saturated than it appears in the catalogue illustration and the pencil lines are more pronounced.
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After the outbreak of WWII, Hepworth and Nicholson moved down to Cornwall at the invitation of Adrian Stokes and Margaret Mellis, initially staying with them at their house, Little Parc Owles, before moving to Dunluce, another house in Carbis Bay, just after Christmas 1939.

With triplets to look after, materials becoming scare and space limited, Hepworth found that her opportunities for carving were becoming fewer and thus in the earliest part of her time in Cornwall, she 'could only draw at night and make a few plaster maquettes'. However, the possibilities of drawing soon became apparent to her and she found that they could be produced relatively quickly and provided a useful source of income during the war years, and virtually all her friends and collectors acquired examples, including Margaret Gardiner, Cyril Reddihough, Leslie Martin and Alastair Morton.

Once the privations of the war began to lift, Hepworth found that drawing was now solidly established as a key element of her work, and several themes began to emerge from this corpus. Although always described by the artist as drawings, the careful building up and working of the base surface, often gesso, the coloured washes and painted details make them more than simply drawings. The present work, with its repeating study of two standing nude figures, belongs to a body of works that in their immediacy and fluidity of line, catch a perfect balance between the rendering of observed depiction and loose suggestion, a balance that gives these works a quality almost entirely unlike any of her contemporaries. The conscious lack of idealization in the pose of the subjects is typical for Hepworth at this time, and indeed she tried not to use professional models, preferring people such as dancers, whose movements appealed to her.

Hepworth's return to the figure may have some links to the shift in the same direction that had been seen in the work of Henry Moore. Hepworth greatly admired Moore's shelter drawings, which also combined a consciously modernist approach to technique, but it may also be just a symptom of how the boundaries of abstraction amongst the avant-garde had been stretched by the seismic change of WWII.