Barbara Hepworth: the radical British sculptor who combined rigour with sensuality

In 1946, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote to her friend Philip James, director of art at the Arts Council of Great Britain. ‘Many have spoken of the sensuality contained in my sculptures despite the outward classical and disciplined exterior,’ she noted. ‘All want to touch, and that is as it should be.’

For the previous two decades, the international modernist had pursued a singular vision: to create harmony out of the post-First World War rubble. Taking her inspiration from the landscape around her — first in Hampstead in north London, and then in Cornwall in the south-west of England — she carved smooth, undulating forms that echoed the natural world.

Today, her polished sculptures, with their complex interiors, are highly prized for their tension — between light and darkness, solidity and weightlessness — and she is celebrated for having revolutionised the possibilities of carving.

While studying at the Royal College of Art in London, Hepworth was shortlisted for the 1924 Prix de Rome art scholarship, which was won that year by the sculptor John Skeaping. Hepworth won a West Riding Travel Scholarship and went to Florence, where she and Skeaping married the following year before moving to Rome. In Italy, she studied Romanesque and Renaissance art and architecture, learned traditional carving techniques from the master marble-carver Giovanni Ardini, and visited the marble quarries in Carrara. Hepworth and Skeaping returned to London in 1926.

In 1932, three years after the birth of her first child, Hepworth pierced her first carving, thus introducing the ‘hole’ to British sculpture. The negative space — which Hepworth used to explore balance in forms — became a hallmark of her work, and is considered her most important contribution to abstract art.

From 1934 onwards, Hepworth’s figurative sculptures gave way to pure abstraction, as she distilled her work to increasingly simple shapes. To create these abstracts, she employed a technique known as direct carving, in which the final form of the work is determined by the act of carving rather than through the creation of preparatory maquettes and models. Her contemporary Henry Moore was another advocate of the technique; the pair studied together at Leeds College of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, and shared a long, friendly rivalry.

Later, in works such as Torso II (Torcello), she would move from direct carving to cast bronze, and this would come to dominate her later practice as she revisited existing artworks and familiar forms using alternative materials.

Hepworth’s abstract carvings tended towards seemingly simple oval forms, which might be based on the shape of the human head or the body of a bird. ‘Gradually,’ she said, ‘my interest grew in more abstract values — the weight, poise and curvature of the ovoid as a basic form.’

The carving and piercing of these forms opened up what she described as ‘an infinite variety of continuous curves in the third dimension, changing in accordance with the contours of the original ovoid and with the degree of penetration of the material’. The ovoid, she declared, offered ‘sufficient field for exploration to last a lifetime’.

In 1933, after visiting the studios of Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp, Hepworth — along with fellow artists Ben Nicholson (who would become her second husband) and Paul Nash, the architect Wells Coates, and the critic Herbert Read — founded Unit One, an art movement dedicated to uniting abstraction and Surrealism in British art.

The group announced its creation in a letter to the The Times and held meetings at the Mayor Gallery in London. Unit One staged a single exhibition, which toured for two years before closing in Belfast in 1935, the same year that the group disbanded.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Hepworth moved to Cornwall, where she co-founded the Penwith Society of Arts at a local inn. Originally comprising 19 artists, including Peter Lanyon and Bernard Leach, the group converted old fishing lofts along Porthmeor beach into studios. The society still operates today, from a local gallery established in 1961.

The Cornish light, sea air, open spaces and sometimes wild weather all helped, Hepworth said, to fire her imagination. In 1942, she and Nicholson moved into a house high on a clifftop overlooking Carbis Bay near St Ives, and her work began to show a growing engagement with landscape.

In 1944, Hepworth’s daughter Sarah — one of triplets, along with Rachel and Simon, who were born in 1934 — underwent treatment for a bone condition. While at the local hospital, Hepworth befriended a surgeon named Norman Capener, who invited her to observe his operations in Exeter (she also watched other surgeons at work in London). Afterwards, Hepworth reflected on the ‘close affinity between the work and approach both of physicians and surgeons, and painters and sculptors’. She went on to produce around 80 works about surgery between 1947 and 1949.

Hepworth also made countless abstract drawings and paintings, which, like her sculptures, are a celebration of natural and organic forms. Works such as Stone Form (Tresco) illustrate her interest in England’s rugged coastline.

From around 1960, Hepworth produced a series of monumental works from her studio in St Ives. They included Winged Figure (1963), a commission for the John Lewis department store on Oxford Street in London, and the five-tonne Single Form for the United Nations headquarters in New York. The latter commemorated the death of her friend and patron Dag Hammarskjöld, the second secretary-general of the UN, who was killed in a plane crash in 1961 en route to ceasefire negotiations in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia).

During the last decade of her life, Hepworth created The Family of Man, a series of bronze figures — each standing as an independent work in its own right — representing the stages of life. The artist suggests the complexity of the human form and generational progression by vertically stacking the component elements of each work.

Along with her other series from the 1970s, Conversation with Magic Stones, these works serve as Hepworth’s valedictory artistic achievement, yet the idea for such a sculptural grouping was one she had considered for many years. ‘The Family of Man has been in my head for a long time,’ she said in 1973. ‘I think, maybe, since I was a child.’

A work from the cycle, Parent II, which echoes the Neolithic stones of Cornwall in its monumentality and austere abstraction, sold for a then record price of $7,110,000 at Christie’s in New York in 2021.

Hepworth’s legacy is celebrated in the place of her birth, Wakefield, West Yorkshire, in the north of England. In 2011, the city opened the Hepworth Wakefield, a 17,000-square-foot museum designed by the British architect David Chipperfield to house 44 of the artist’s works, as well as those of her peers Graham Sutherland, Jacob Epstein, Walter Sickert, Nash and Nicholson.

The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St Ives, Cornwall, preserves Trewyn studio, which was purchased by Hepworth in 1949. She lived there for 26 years. The house, garden and studio remain as Hepworth left them, complete with her furniture, downed tools and unfinished works. The museum was opened by her family in 1976, and ownership passed to Tate in 1980.

Hepworth had established and cemented her reputation with a career-long series of solo shows — at Alex Reid and Lefevre gallery in London (1937), Wakefield City Art Gallery (1944) and the Whitechapel Gallery in London (1954 and 1962) — leading to her first retrospective at London’s Tate Gallery in 1968. A posthumous retrospective was held at Tate Britain in 2015.

The artist also exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1950 and won the Grand Prix at the São Paulo Biennial in 1959. Hepworth was appointed CBE in 1958, then DBE in 1965, for her contributions to art. In her lifetime, she became the most celebrated British woman working in the male-dominated world of sculpture.

The Modern British and Irish Art Evening Sale takes place on 22 October 2025, followed by the Day Sale on 23 October. The sales will be on view 18-22 October at Christie’s in London

Related artists: Barbara Hepworth