Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth was a British sculptor inspired by the natural world. Her pierced forms, stringed pieces, curved wood, stone and polished bronze pieces established her at the heart of the early 20th-century avant-garde, and as one of most gifted sculptors of any age.

Hepworth was born in 1903 in Wakefield, Yorkshire. From the age of five, her father, an engineer and surveyor responsible for the roads and bridges of West Riding, took Hepworth with him in the car on his trips across the county. The shape of the landscape stayed with Hepworth all her life, translating into the abstract forms for which she became famous.

On winning a place at the Royal College of Art (RCA) in 1921, Hepworth moved to London. Both she and Henry Moore, who joined her at the RCA, went against the grain in exploring direct carving rather than making traditional preparatory models in clay first. Both studied Egyptian, African and Palaeolithic sculpture at the British Museum, and both set great store by the Parisian art scene, then in the grip of Modernism.

In 1924 Hepworth entered the Prix de Rome but lost to the other finalist, John Skeaping, who became her husband the following year. In Rome they took lessons from a master carver. In 1927 Hepworth sold her first major work, Seated Figure and Mother and Child, and the following year, she and Skeaping held their first important exhibition in London, mainly stone carvings of figures and animals.

In the early 1930s, Hepworth’s figurative work began to develop into abstraction as she explored the relationship between the figure and the landscape. In 1931, she pierced her first form: ‘I thought it was a miracle,’ she said, ‘a new vision was opened.’ In 2022, Christie’s set a new auction record for the artist with the 1954 piece Hollow Form with White Interior, which sold for £5,785,500.

In 1933, Hepworth was invited to join the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group, and in the following year, became a member of Unit One, a group of progressive artists and architects based in London. Moore was also a member, as was Ben Nicholson, whom Hepworth married in 1938. The couple moved to Cornwall when war was declared. Its craggy coastline reminded Hepworth of Yorkshire: ‘Here I have found the same bones and roots and scars and tissues.’

In the mid-1950s she returned to casting works in bronze, such as Oval Sculpture, conceived in 1943 and cast in 1959, which sold at Christie’s for £1,451,250 in 2019. She also returned to carving in white marble and alabaster, materials that had been central to her work in the 1930s. During the 1960s Hepworth embarked on several ambitious public commissions, including Winged Figure (1963) for the John Lewis building on Oxford Street, London. In 1965, she was made a Dame. She died at home in St Ives in 1975. The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden preserves her studio and garden.