After their parents’ departure from Yorkshire, the girls’ perceptions of reality were further explored during trips to Yorkshire with their father, a land surveyor. During his graduate studies in Italy, Hepworth worked with master stone carvers and met the British sculptor John Skipping, whom he later married. Back in London, Hepworth was part of a group of avant-garde sculptors who studied abstraction.
From 1924 she spent two years in Italy and in 1925 she married her first husband in Florence, the artist John Skipping, and from 1932 she lived with the artist Ben Nicholson, and for several years the two artists worked closely to develop an almost collaborative style of work. In 1934 she became pregnant with triplets when Hepworth created Mother and Child, one of several related sculptures, whereas his Yorkshire contemporary Henry Moore used to make the mother and son parts as separate figures.
She was not a militant feminist herself, she just asked to be treated like a sculptor (never a sculptor) regardless of gender. Hepworth has written extensively about his work as well as latest technological developments, politics and his love of poetry, music and dance. In the book, she draws on untranslated correspondence that reveals not only the detailed thoughts on her sculptures but also the practical aspects of the work of a mother of four children (including triplets!
In recent years, a special bond has developed between Hepworth and Hertfordshire. The blue plaque was unveiled in October 2020 in the London apartment where Barbara Hepworth and her first husband, John Skipping, lived and worked at 24 St Anns Terrace in St Johns Wood in 1927 and held their first exhibition there and Hepworth produced his first mature works in that year.
The Dance Palace, Barbara Hepworth’s second studio in St Ives, Cornwall, was designated a Cultural Heritage Site in May 2020. It is hoped that after restoration and reconstruction the palace will be able to return to public use. The Rodin Museum in Paris will host the first monographic exhibition of the work of British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975).
Barbara Hepworth (born February 10, 1903 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England – died May 20, 1975 in St Ives, Cornwall ) is a sculptor whose work was one of the first abstract sculptures created in England. Her lyrical form and sense of matter made her a formidable figure.
Pure formal elements gradually took on more and more importance for her until her sculpture became completely abstract in the early 1930s. Strongly influenced by her embodied reaction to the landscape, she worked with stone, wood and metal with equal concern for material and scale, as in Hemisphere Pierced I and Two Shapes.
It seems sometimes that Hepworth’s sculptures were always in our orbit in their familiar and universal forms – but it’s easy to forget that they were carved from wood, carved from stone, or cast from bronze less than a century ago by a renowned sculptor who is now considered one of Britain’s greatest painters. The museums at the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield and St Ives are a wonderful tribute to her life and practice but by rooting her so deeply in the place where
Barbara Hepworth was born in 1921 in the former industrial town of Wakefield, West Yorkshire and is located in the Hepworth-Wakefield Gallery, named after her. Created by architect David Chipperfield in a pleasing jumble of gray cubicles surrounded by a river (a bit like a harsh modernist interpretation of a moat castle) his work has been noted in an extensive retrospective. The museum building, beautifully designed by David Chipperfield, overlooks the Calder River in the Yorkshire
In 2011, the city opened a 17,000-square-foot museum of the British architect David Chipperfield to house 44 works by the artist donated by his family and colleagues Graham Sutherland, Jacob Epstein, Walter Sickert, Nash and Nicholson, with the house, garden and studio as Hepworth left them, complete with furniture, demolished tools and unfinished work.
After the sale and intervention of Hepworth’s friends, Valentine refused repeated requests to keep a significant amount of his work. It wasn’t until 1955, when Martha Jackson Gallery offered Hepworth the opportunity to display his work in its space along with works by William Scott and Francis Bacon, that Hepworth formalized the gallery’s representation in a new world. Hepworth’s difficulty in establishing a stable relationship with a gallery in the United States is due to many factors including the artist’s
When Martha Jackson was unable to organize the American one-woman exhibit of sculptures and drawings requested by Hepworth, he moved to the Galerie Chalette by Arthur and Madeleine Leyva known for their close relationship with Jean Arp and their dedication to close relationships with their artists in 1957. She organised a retrospective at the Kroller-Müller Museum in 1965 and won the first prize in So Paulo.
