Dame Barbara Hepworth

inscribed and dated
bronze
height: 61.5cm.

Conceived in 1968 and cast in bronze in an edition of 10 numbered 0/9 through 9/9.

Laing Gallery, Toronto, where acquired by the previous owner, circa 1970
Their sale, Sotheby's London, 17th October 1990, lot 107
Acquired by the present owner in the 1990s

New York, Gimpel-Weitzenhoffer Gallery, Barbara Hepworth, April - May 1969, cat. no.10, illustrated (another cast);
Bath Festival Gallery, St Ives Group: 2nd Exhibition, June 1969 (another cast);
Uttoxeter, Abbotsholme, Barbara Hepworth, Sculpture and Lithographs, 17th January - 8th February 1970, cat. no.14, illustrated (another cast), with Arts Council tour;
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Barbara Hepworth: Recent Work, Sculpture, Paintings, Prints, February - March 1970, cat. no.12, illustrated (another cast);
Japan, Hakone Open-Air Museum, Barbara Hepworth Exhibition, June - September 1970, cat. no.27 (another cast);
Plymouth, Plymouth City Art Gallery, Barbara Hepworth, June - August 1970, cat. no.50, illustrated (another cast);
New York, Gimpel Gallery, Barbara Hepworth, March - April 1971, cat. no.7 (another cast);
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Masters of the 19th and 20th Centuries, Summer 1972, cat. no.30 (another cast);
Zurich, Marlborough Galerie, Barbara Hepworth, August - October 1975, cat. no.6, illustrated (another cast);
Galashields, Scottish College of Textiles, Barbara Hepworth: a Selection of Small Bronzes and Prints, 17th April - 5th May 1978, cat. no.21 (another cast), with Scottish Arts Gallery tour;
New York, Marlborough Gallery, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Bronzes, May - June 1979, cat. no.30 (another cast);
Wakefield, Wakefield Art Gallery, Barbara Hepworth: Polished Bronzes, May - June 2003, with tour to Museum het Catharina Gasthuis, Gouda (another cast);
Salisbury, New Art Centre, Barbara Hepworth, Polished Bronzes, 2001,un-numbered catalogue (another cast).

Alan Bowness, The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth, 1960-69, Lund Humphries, London, 1971, no. 461, p.46, illustrated pl.12 (another cast).

The following condition report has been kindly prepared by Plowden & Smith Ltd., London. The sculpture consists of four cast bronze forms secured to a square, rusticated, cast bronze base. Each of the four forms has a smooth, bright polished finish. The rusticated base has a mid brown patination designed to contrast with the bright polished forms. The piece is generally in very good condition and structurally sound. There are areas of over-polishing on the patinated base where the intentionally polished forms have been re-polished without due care to the brown patinated base, this is a relatively minor aesthetic issue. There are deposits of cleaning product residues in the crevices and around the bases of the polished sections. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

We are grateful to Dr. Sophie Bowness for her kind assistance with the cataloguing apparatus for the present work, which will feature in her forthcoming revised catalogue raisonné of the Artist's sculpture.

Executed in 1968, Four Figures Waiting provides an important visual manifestation of many of the major themes that Hepworth 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 (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 Four Figures Waiting that we see the culmination of Hepworth's artistic vision.

Other casts are held in the collection of the Cecil Higgins Museum, Bradford and the Hakone Open-Air Museum, Hakone, Japan.