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Lot Essay
Four figures, black, white & yellow is a captivating example of Hepworth’s exploration of sculptural themes in two dimensions. A bold yellow horizon is rendered in thickly applied oil paint and dissected by precise pencil lines and the black sculptural form. As the title suggests, the rectangular and prismatic forms are loosely figurative, a parallel between Hepworth’s sculptural practice and abstract drawing which deftly illustrates the way her eye interprets the world. Alan Wilkinson notes ‘Perhaps a useful analogy to illuminate the close relationship between Hepworth’s drawings and sculptures would be the sounds produced quite separately by two musicians playing the same score but on different instruments’ (A. Wilkinson, The Drawings of Barbara Hepworth, Surrey, 2015, pp. 128-129). In light of this dynamic, one can see in the figures in the present work, a conversational relationship not unlike those explored in her drawings and sculptures of upright people, such as Rhythmic Form (1949), Drawing for Stone Sculpture (1947), and Group I (Concourse) (1951).
Her mode of drawing is uniquely responsive to the way she processed the visual world. On observing crowds walking through the Piazza San Marco in Venice in 1950, she writes ‘… as soon as people, or groups of people, entered the Piazza they responded to the proportions of the architectural space. They walked differently, discovering their innate dignity. They grouped themselves in unconscious recognition of their importance in relation to each other as human beings’ (the artist, ‘Carvings and Drawings', in P. Curtis and A. Wilkinson, exhibition catalogue, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, Liverpool, Tate, 1994). In a similar manner, Hepworth describes the way the process of drawing takes on a life of its own in response to the conditions of its creation and the architecture of the page: ‘abstract drawing has always been for me a particularly exciting adventure. First there is only one’s mood; then the surface takes one’s mood in colour and texture; then a line or curve which, made with a pencil on the hard surface of many coats of oil or gouache, has a particular kind of ‘’bite’’ rather like incising on slate; then one is lost in a new world of a thousand possibilities because the next line in association with the first will have a compulsion about it which will carry one forward into completely unknown territory…’ (the artist quoted in A. Bowness, Barbara Hepworth, Drawings from a Sculptor’s Landscape, London, 1966, pp. 19-20).
Her mode of drawing is uniquely responsive to the way she processed the visual world. On observing crowds walking through the Piazza San Marco in Venice in 1950, she writes ‘… as soon as people, or groups of people, entered the Piazza they responded to the proportions of the architectural space. They walked differently, discovering their innate dignity. They grouped themselves in unconscious recognition of their importance in relation to each other as human beings’ (the artist, ‘Carvings and Drawings', in P. Curtis and A. Wilkinson, exhibition catalogue, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, Liverpool, Tate, 1994). In a similar manner, Hepworth describes the way the process of drawing takes on a life of its own in response to the conditions of its creation and the architecture of the page: ‘abstract drawing has always been for me a particularly exciting adventure. First there is only one’s mood; then the surface takes one’s mood in colour and texture; then a line or curve which, made with a pencil on the hard surface of many coats of oil or gouache, has a particular kind of ‘’bite’’ rather like incising on slate; then one is lost in a new world of a thousand possibilities because the next line in association with the first will have a compulsion about it which will carry one forward into completely unknown territory…’ (the artist quoted in A. Bowness, Barbara Hepworth, Drawings from a Sculptor’s Landscape, London, 1966, pp. 19-20).