Dame Barbara Hepworth

The Artist, from whom acquired by G. Blair Laing Ltd, Toronto, December 1963
Acquired from the above by the grand-parents of the present owner, August 1964, and thence by descent

Zurich, Galerie Charles Lienhard, October 1960, cat. no.13 (another cast);
London, Gimpel Fils, Barbara Hepworth, May - June 1961, cat. no.6, illustrated;
Bradford, Bradford City Art Gallery, 1962;
London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Barbara Hepworth: An Exhibition of Sculpture from 1952-1962, 9th May - 8th June 1962, cat. no.44, illustrated (another cast);
San Francisco, San Francisco Museum of Art, British Art Today, 1962-3, with tour to Dallas and Santa Barbara (another cast);
Toronto, Toronto Art Gallery, Exhibition of Work by Barbara Hepworth, March 1964, cat. no.9 (another cast);
London, Tate, Barbara Hepworth, 3rd April - 19th May 1968, cat. no.97 (another cast).

Josef Paul Hodin, Barbara Hepworth, Editions du Griffon, Neuchâtel, 1961, cat. no.265 (another cast);
Michael Shepherd, Barbara Hepworth, Methuen, London, 1963, no.17, illustrated un-paginated (another cast);
Abraham M. Hammacher, Barbara Hepworth, Thames & Hudson, London, 1968, no.115, illustrated p.136 (another cast);
Barbara Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth: A Pictorial Autobiography, Adams & Dart, Bath, 1970, no.215, illustrated p.80 (another cast).

We are grateful to Dr. Sophie Bowness for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work, which will feature in her forthcoming revised catalogue raisonné of the Artist's sculpture as catalogue number BH265.

The 1950s had been a decade of incredible success for Barbara Hepworth, beginning with her representing Britain at the 1950 Venice Biennale, continuing with a number of major British and international exhibitions and commissions, and culminating in her winning the Grand Prix at the São Paulo Biennale in 1959. She became a leading light not just in the British art scene, but internationally, writing that  ‘we all felt the fast growing understanding of art round the world and the international language which had been created – we may have lived in Lands End but we were in close contact with the whole world’ (the Artist, A Pictorial Autobiography, Moonraker Press, Bradford-on-Avon, 1970, p.76). Yet for all her newfound fame and growing international recognition, her works, both sculptures and two-dimensional paintings and drawings, remained rooted in ideas that she had been gradually developing since the 1920 and ‘30s, themes which were integral to the development of Curved Form with Inner Form (Anima).

At the outbreak of the Second World War Hepworth, together with her husband the painter Ben Nicholson, and their three children relocated to St Ives, the small town on the most South-Westerly tip of the British mainland that had, for decades, attracted artists and sculptors alike. Here she wandered the beaches, observing the crashing waves and collecting rounded pebbles that soon filled her small studio space. The wave became an important motif within her sculpture, beginning in the early Wave (1943-4, The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh), and going on to form a recurring theme which in the 1950s formed the basis of a number of new and exciting cast-bronze works. As a subject it allowed for Hepworth’s further exploration of many of her earlier ideas of the dialogue between male and female forms, and that of protection, a subject that had first preoccupied her in her figurative and maternal wood carvings of the 1930s, much as it did her close contemporary Henry Moore. Yet whilst Moore’s iconography remained largely rooted in the human figure, Hepworth developed her poised and elegantly abstracted formal language with references to the natural world, setting her at the forefront of international Modernism. The wave motif proved particularly fruitful for further exploring the ideas of an inside and outside form. As J.P. Hodin wrote, Hepworth became transfixed with ‘an inside and an outside of every form … a nut in its shell or a child in the womb, or in the structure of shells or of crystals, or when one senses the architecture of bones in the human figure’ (J.P. Hodin, ‘Barbara Hepworth and the Mediterranean Spirit’, Marmo, Vol.3, December 1964, p.62).

Curved Form with Inner Form (Anima) becomes a play of the inside versus the outside, and the male versus the female, with the bold, densely textured wave form enclosing the softly sinuating circle of the bony centre. It was in 1932 that Hepworth created her first pierced work carving Pierced Form in pink alabaster (BH35, destroyed during the war). The piercing, like the strength of the forms, call reference to the title of the work, looking to the animating principle, and embodying the otherwise inept materials with a fantastic sense of life, rhythm and energy.

The success awarded her in the 1950s allowed Hepworth to develop her forms not only in terms of mediums and subject matter, but, perhaps most importantly, in terms of size. As the artist later wrote of this period ‘I became more and more pre-occupied with the inside and outside of forms as I had been in the late 1930s, but on a bigger scale. I wanted to make forms to stand on hillsides and through which to look to the sea. Forms to lie down in, or forms to climb through’ (op. cit., p.80). 

These were forms and sculptures which the artist intended her viewers to interact with in the round, bringing them to life, with the piercing of the present work offering the perfect bolt-hole through which to observe the crashing waves of the Cornish coastline. Scale and presence too becomes an important feature of the present work, displaying the confidence of an artist who, by 1959, had well and truly found her stride.

Curved Form with Inner Form (Anima) showcases Hepworth’s mastering of materials, imbuing the heavy, otherwise lumpen metal with an incredible lightness and balance, which in the following two decades she would develop further as her sculptures increased in size. It captures the artist at her very best, and it is of no surprise that this is a sculpture that takes pride of place within the collections of three separate public galleries showcasing Hepworth’s work: The Kroller-Muller museum in Otterlo, the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis and the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea. Curved Form with Inner Form (Anima) is a sculpture that needs to be seen and needs to be experienced in order to appreciate the mastery of the hand that built it, for, to walk around it, to look through it, you are taken not only to the coastline that inspired it, but also to Hepworth’s studio at the moment of its inception, experiencing the energy and movements of the sculptor’s hand.