Dame Barbara Hepworth

Sale, Bonhams & Butterfields, 9th November 2003, lot 4102
New Art Centre, Salisbury, where acquired by the present owners, 27th February 2007

London, Marlborough Fine Art, Barbara Hepworth: Recent Work, Sculpture, Paintings, Prints, February - March 1970, cat. no.23, illustrated p.29 (another cast);
Salisbury, New Art Centre, The Hepworth Wakefield: A Celebration, April - May 2011;
London, Crane Kalman Gallery, Women and Art, November 2011 - January 2012.

Alan Bowness (ed.), The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth 1960-1969, Lund Humphries, London, 1971, cat. no.BH484, illustrated pl.185 (another cast);
Penelope Curtis, Barbara Hepworth, Tate Publishing, London, 1998/2013, p.54.

The elements of the sculpture appear sound. There are one or two light scratches to the aluminium disc, and several extremely small nicks to the edge of the disc, primarily apparent on the upper left edge. There is some extremely minor surface dirt. Subject to the above, the work appears to be in very good overall condition. The sculpture is affixed to a painted wooden base with one central metal stand. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
"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."

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.

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, 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 I felt between myself and 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.