Barbara Hepworth

Estate of the artist
Private Collection (by descent from the above)
New Art Centre, Salisbury
Private Collection (acquired from the above in 2003)
Beaux Arts Gallery, London
Acquired from the above in 2005

London, Beaux Arts Gallery, St. Ives, 2004, illustrated in color in the catalogue

This work is in excellent condition. The brass elements have recently been polished and the base shows no significant damages. The surface is clean.
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Executed within the last five years of Hepworth's life, Four Forms 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 and Conversation with Magic Stones of 1973. The present sculpture perfectly typifies the concerns that the artist was exploring in these works, primarily those of social interaction. Throughout her career Hepworth had been grouping together forms into coherent and balanced compositions, but in the later sculptures and in particular in the vertical emphasis of Four Forms, 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 1931, now sadly lost. While 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 stylization of their subject. Hepworth's use of a non-objective piercing of the form in 1931 appears to pre-date that of her contemporary and friend Henry Moore by approaching a year. While 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 pierced forms also serve to draw direct attention to the actual nature of the polished material itself. Hepworth had experimented with new materials in the 1950s, notably with sheet metals that provided the genesis for her now seminal series of Orpheus and related Curlew pieces. The use of cut sheet metal allowed a new openness in her work that was not structurally possible in either wood or stone carving.

The combination of a variety of sources and elements from her own earlier works imbues Four Forms with a grace and balance but also a striking feel of modernity.