Dame Barbara Hepworth

Dr R.J. Lande, 1967
Crane Kalman Gallery, whence acquired by the present owners, 1983 

London, Tate Gallery, 1968, cat. no.175, and touring to St Ives.

Alan Bowness (ed.), The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth 1960-69, Lund Humphries, London, 1971, cat. no.439, p.44, illustrated p.45 (another cast);

There is some minor wear to the patina on the top of each form and some minor scattered surface stains notably to the middle form otherwise in good original condition. Held on a rosewood base. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 5381 if you have any queries regarding this work.
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Conceived in 1967 and cast in an edition of 9.

Executed in the later years of Hepworth's life, Three Forms (Tokio) provides an important visual manifestation of many of the major themes that she had explored throughout her life. The interaction of upright forms was one that was particularly relevant in the works of her last years, culminating in the large groups, The Family of Man of 1970 (fig.1, BH513) and Conversation with Magic Stones of 1973 (BH567), and the present sculpture perfectly typifies the concerns that she was exploring in these sculptures, primarily that of social interaction. Throughout her career, Hepworth had been grouping together forms into coherent and balanced compositions, but in the later sculptures the sense that these forms are in some way related to the totemic depiction of primitive figures grows much stronger. Indeed, Hepworth herself described the upright figures of Conversation with Magic Stones in terms of 'the majesty of totems', an epithet that could easily refer to the vertical elegance of the present work.

The pierced forms are a direct reference to another important strand of her sculptural language and to her seminal work Pierced Form 1932, now sadly lost. Whilst a number of European sculptors had introduced piercings into their work much earlier, notably Archipenko and Lipchitz, this had tended to be organic and related to the stylisation of their subject. Hepworth's use of a non-objective piercing of the form in 1932 appears to pre-date that of her contemporary and friend Henry Moore by somewhere approaching a year. Whilst such questions of dating are difficult to pin down, what is irrefutable is that Hepworth's introduction of this element greatly enriched the possibilities of abstract sculpture by abolishing the concept of a closed, and thus entire form, and brought the individual sculpture firmly into the environment within which it was placed. 

In the present work, the piercing also serves to create contrast between the solidity of the rounded forms and add a delicacy and openess to them, as well as bringing light and reflection into the heart of the grouping.

Drawing together the strands of both the organic-derived forms of the post-war period and the abstract modernist sculpture of the pre-WWII years, it is in pieces such as Three Forms (Tokio) that we see the culmination of Hepworth's artistic vision.

We are grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.