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Lot Essay
Carved in 1959, Godrevy belongs to a year of renewed intensity in Barbara Hepworth’s practice. Hepworth arrived at 1959 fresh from the success of her exhibitions in New York and at the São Paolo Bienal, where she had been awarded the event’s Grand Prix. That December, she wrote to Herbert Read of her wish for ‘a long spell of quiet carving in the garden’ (quoted in M. Gale and C. Stephens (eds.), Barbara Hepworth: Works in the Tate Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum St. Ives, 2004, p. 203). Godrevy stands at the threshold of that return: a moment when, working simultaneously in bronze, wood and stone, Hepworth turned back to white marble and alabaster, materials central to her practice in the 1930s but used only sparingly in the two decades since.
Such a return was not merely technical. Hepworth’s carving remained rooted in the principle of truth to materials: the conviction, shared with her contemporary Henry Moore, that the density and character of the stone itself should dictate the final form. ‘Direct carving is the heart of sculpture’, Hepworth insisted, claiming to find clay and plaster too yielding, and too without resistance of their own: ‘I hate modelling’, she maintained. Stone and wood, on the other hand, offered the substance and tension her practice required (M. Merchant (intro.), exhibition catalogue, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1982, p. 5).
The present work takes its name from the lighthouse and headland on the Cornish coast, a landmark the naive painter and former mariner Alfred Wallis returned to often, drawn to the danger of the reef it was built to warn against. Hepworth’s own response to this same stretch of coast is quieter, but no less imaginative or indeed alert to its hazards. Alabaster – unlike granite or slate – is a soft stone, better suited to being worked into curving, liquid forms than cut with sharp incisions. Hepworth’s decision to score the surface of Godrevy with a fine network of crossing lines thus reads as a deliberate choice, something she brought to the stone rather than something the material itself invited. The lines read variously as the crossing beams of a lighthouse lamp, sweeping their arcs across open water, or as the bearings and sightlines by which a sailor might fix a position from the shore. Where the stone’s own nature offers roundness and containment, Hepworth's incised lines introduce direction, holding the solidity of the carved form in tension with the idea of light travelling outwards across a distance. This was a landscape Hepworth could see from her own studio, and one she described as a place in which ‘a distant figure is a monument, whilst I myself am cradled in the anatomy of landscape’ (P. Curtis and A.G. Wilkinson (eds.), Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, Tate, London, 1994, p. 83).
Godrevy was acquired directly from the artist by Sebastian and Mary Halliday of St Ives, and by September 1969 had entered the collection of Jacquelyn Littlefield, in whose family it has remained for over half a century. Littlefield, an art major by training, spent decades as the devoted custodian of San Diego's historic Spreckels Theatre, the city’s oldest indoor performance venue, holding her ground against developers and city officials who repeatedly sought to buy her out: ‘when the downtown establishment was all men, they tried to pat her on the head and make her go away, and she wouldn't’ (Welton Jones, quoted in J. Wilkens, ‘Jacquelyn Littlefield, longtime owner of historic Spreckels Theatre, dies at 96’, The San Diego Union-Tribune, 10 January 2019). Hepworth, too, had spent a career forging her own path in a discipline still overwhelmingly dominated by men. Littlefield's eye for art reflects the same discernment: she acquired Godrevy in the years she was also assembling an early and prescient collection of works by Joan Mitchell, another woman working at the forefront of her field. ‘The art is really what I'm all about’, she said (Ibid). Godrevy, a work by a sculptor who had spent her own career working against the grain, was very much in keeping with that instinct.
Such a return was not merely technical. Hepworth’s carving remained rooted in the principle of truth to materials: the conviction, shared with her contemporary Henry Moore, that the density and character of the stone itself should dictate the final form. ‘Direct carving is the heart of sculpture’, Hepworth insisted, claiming to find clay and plaster too yielding, and too without resistance of their own: ‘I hate modelling’, she maintained. Stone and wood, on the other hand, offered the substance and tension her practice required (M. Merchant (intro.), exhibition catalogue, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1982, p. 5).
The present work takes its name from the lighthouse and headland on the Cornish coast, a landmark the naive painter and former mariner Alfred Wallis returned to often, drawn to the danger of the reef it was built to warn against. Hepworth’s own response to this same stretch of coast is quieter, but no less imaginative or indeed alert to its hazards. Alabaster – unlike granite or slate – is a soft stone, better suited to being worked into curving, liquid forms than cut with sharp incisions. Hepworth’s decision to score the surface of Godrevy with a fine network of crossing lines thus reads as a deliberate choice, something she brought to the stone rather than something the material itself invited. The lines read variously as the crossing beams of a lighthouse lamp, sweeping their arcs across open water, or as the bearings and sightlines by which a sailor might fix a position from the shore. Where the stone’s own nature offers roundness and containment, Hepworth's incised lines introduce direction, holding the solidity of the carved form in tension with the idea of light travelling outwards across a distance. This was a landscape Hepworth could see from her own studio, and one she described as a place in which ‘a distant figure is a monument, whilst I myself am cradled in the anatomy of landscape’ (P. Curtis and A.G. Wilkinson (eds.), Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, Tate, London, 1994, p. 83).
Godrevy was acquired directly from the artist by Sebastian and Mary Halliday of St Ives, and by September 1969 had entered the collection of Jacquelyn Littlefield, in whose family it has remained for over half a century. Littlefield, an art major by training, spent decades as the devoted custodian of San Diego's historic Spreckels Theatre, the city’s oldest indoor performance venue, holding her ground against developers and city officials who repeatedly sought to buy her out: ‘when the downtown establishment was all men, they tried to pat her on the head and make her go away, and she wouldn't’ (Welton Jones, quoted in J. Wilkens, ‘Jacquelyn Littlefield, longtime owner of historic Spreckels Theatre, dies at 96’, The San Diego Union-Tribune, 10 January 2019). Hepworth, too, had spent a career forging her own path in a discipline still overwhelmingly dominated by men. Littlefield's eye for art reflects the same discernment: she acquired Godrevy in the years she was also assembling an early and prescient collection of works by Joan Mitchell, another woman working at the forefront of her field. ‘The art is really what I'm all about’, she said (Ibid). Godrevy, a work by a sculptor who had spent her own career working against the grain, was very much in keeping with that instinct.