- 43
Dame Barbara Hepworth
Estimate
100,000 - 150,000 GBP
bidding is closed
Description
- Barbara Hepworth
- Disc with Strings (Moon)
- numbered 5/9
- aluminium and string
- height: 49cm.; 19¼in.
- Conceived in 1969, this version is numbered 5 from an edition of 9 plus 1.
Provenance
The Estate of the Artist
André Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1992
Raja Fuchs of R. Kaller-Kimche, Inc., New York, prior to November 1998
Sale, Christie's London, 3rd February 2004, lot 274, where acquired by the present owner
André Emmerich Gallery, New York, 1992
Raja Fuchs of R. Kaller-Kimche, Inc., New York, prior to November 1998
Sale, Christie's London, 3rd February 2004, lot 274, where acquired by the present owner
Exhibited
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Barbara Hepworth: Recent Work, Sculpture, Paintings, Prints, February - March 1970, cat. no.23, illustrated p.29 (another cast).
Literature
Alan Bowness (ed.), The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth 1960-1969, Lund Humphries, London, 1971, cat. no.484, illustrated pp.48-9 (another cast).
Condition
Structurally sound.
There is very minor surface dirt and matter to the work, most visible to the lower back of the reverse, as well as in isolated flecks to the front. There are two very minor scratches appearing to the lower right of the reverse, visible upon closer inspection. This excepting the work appears to be in excellent condition.
The strings appear to be in a good and stable condition.
Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present lot.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."
Catalogue Note
When Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson packed their three children and all their belongings into a car and drove from London to Cornwall in 1939, never to return, they were heading to a place that was something more than just a safe haven from the bombs that were soon to rain down on the capital.
As the Tate St Ives’ 2009 exhibition The Dark Monarch examined, West Penwith is about so much more than the clear light that drew Victorian and Edwardian gentleman painters to Newlyn and St Ives. With its rugged coast, pocked with sharp, forbidding caves and battered by Atlantic storms, and its blank, stripped-clean high moorlands, studded with ancient standing stones and dolmens (quoits), it is a landscape steeped in myth and mysticism, with a numinous, resonant presence all its own. And for Hepworth, more so than Nicholson, this was to have a profound influence on the work she made in Cornwall, becoming both its inspiration and its context. She acquired her studio in St Ives in 1949 – now one of the world’s most exquisite small museums - in part because of its garden, which enabled her to surround herself with work and view it (often in the changeling moonlight) outside, against the landscape from which she felt it had been carved.
However, ancient as the landscape of West Penwith is, with the arrival of Hepworth, Nicholson and their friend, the Russian Naum Gabo, it began to be etched and written over with new – sharp, rectilinear, Constructivist – lay-lines. At the same time that Gabo was attempting to sculpt ‘invisible space’ through stringing delicate plastic filaments in vortices across clear plexiglass frames, so Hepworth began to articulate the sensuous inner recesses of her carvings with a taught, orthogonal matrix of strings, to reveal the hidden, mathematical principles (a logic of form) that lie behind the seemingly random ebb and flow of the natural world. These strings also stood, as Hepworth herself commented, for ‘the tension between myself, the sea, the wind or the hills’.
The stringing of Disc With Strings (Moon) is distinct from that of its twin, Disc with Strings (Sun), where the brass wires twist to form a helix of roiling solar energy: here they are banded across, in two sets of parallel lines slightly offset from each other, subtle, geometric statement of a very ethereal and very elemental event – the slow drift of high cirrus clouds across the perfect disc of a full moon.
As the Tate St Ives’ 2009 exhibition The Dark Monarch examined, West Penwith is about so much more than the clear light that drew Victorian and Edwardian gentleman painters to Newlyn and St Ives. With its rugged coast, pocked with sharp, forbidding caves and battered by Atlantic storms, and its blank, stripped-clean high moorlands, studded with ancient standing stones and dolmens (quoits), it is a landscape steeped in myth and mysticism, with a numinous, resonant presence all its own. And for Hepworth, more so than Nicholson, this was to have a profound influence on the work she made in Cornwall, becoming both its inspiration and its context. She acquired her studio in St Ives in 1949 – now one of the world’s most exquisite small museums - in part because of its garden, which enabled her to surround herself with work and view it (often in the changeling moonlight) outside, against the landscape from which she felt it had been carved.
However, ancient as the landscape of West Penwith is, with the arrival of Hepworth, Nicholson and their friend, the Russian Naum Gabo, it began to be etched and written over with new – sharp, rectilinear, Constructivist – lay-lines. At the same time that Gabo was attempting to sculpt ‘invisible space’ through stringing delicate plastic filaments in vortices across clear plexiglass frames, so Hepworth began to articulate the sensuous inner recesses of her carvings with a taught, orthogonal matrix of strings, to reveal the hidden, mathematical principles (a logic of form) that lie behind the seemingly random ebb and flow of the natural world. These strings also stood, as Hepworth herself commented, for ‘the tension between myself, the sea, the wind or the hills’.
The stringing of Disc With Strings (Moon) is distinct from that of its twin, Disc with Strings (Sun), where the brass wires twist to form a helix of roiling solar energy: here they are banded across, in two sets of parallel lines slightly offset from each other, subtle, geometric statement of a very ethereal and very elemental event – the slow drift of high cirrus clouds across the perfect disc of a full moon.
We are grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness for her kind assistance in cataloguing the present work.