Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red)

During the 1930s, when Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth were living in Hampstead, their neighbours included Naum Gabo and Piet Mondrian, and they were exposed to other key international artists, writers and architects through publications and exhibitions. The importance of white in the work of the Suprematist Russian artist, Kasimir Malevich, would have been familiar through the Bauhaus book, The Non Objective World, 1927, and white was the defining colour of contemporary architecture, epitomised in Le Corbusier's sleek buildings. Near to where they lived stood architect, Maxwell Fry's, the original owner of the present work, white modernist house in Frognal Lane. In this decade Hepworth responded to this dominance of white in her carved marble sculptures. After she had moved to Carbis Bay with Nicholson (see also note to lot 103), she found the lack of materials due to wartime restrictions led her to working in plaster.

She wrote to E.H. Ramsden in connection to the present work, 'Material is almost impossible to get hold of - maybe that in itself will produce new ideas and vitality' (see M. Gale and C. Stephens, loc. cit, p. 76). Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) was dictated through the combined factors of material available and lack of proper studio and demonstrates key developments in Hepworth's work, notably the use of string and colour. This stringing of works connects Hepworth to Naum Gabo, who had also moved to Cornwall during the war. The confusion over the dating of Gabo's first use of nylon string may suggest that it was Hepworth who led the way in this important development.

'While she [Hepworth] incorporated colour into many of her sculptures after 1939, the use of the strong hues seen in Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) is unusual. It is in sharp contrast to the predominance of white in her work in the second half of the 1930s and echoed Nicholson's move away from the white reliefs towards coloured paintings and reliefs in the same period. In this, both artists reveal their debt to Mondrian ... Hepworth's incorporation of colour may also be related to the proximity of Adrian Stokes, whose Colour and Form had been published in 1937. The book was concerned specifically with colour in painting but employed imagery from sculptural theory. 'Colour', wrote Stokes, 'is the ideal medium for the carving conception.' Significantly he went on to assert that colour related to the inside of the form and so may be seen as its vital character: 'Carving colour gives the interior life, the warmth, to composition ... the simultaneous life of the blood'. Colour was certainly used by Hepworth to emphasise the contrast between the exterior and interior surfaces of a work and, in a later interview, she associated it with medieval sculpture. She recalled the unearthing of an Anglo-Norman capital by wartime bombing: 'I was able to see how the cavities of the reliefs had once been coloured with a bright terracotta red, and this was exactly the kind of effect that I too had been seeking from 1938 onwards, in some of my own works'. The sculptures with colour represent the first appearance of the opening-up of the forms which would become such a characteristic of her work from the 1940s onwards' (see ibid, p. 77).

Hepworth commented in her retrospective statement, 'I used colour and strings in many of the carvings of this time [1939-1946]. The colour in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves, or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves. The strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills' (see H. Read, Barbara Hepworth, Carvings and Drawings, London, 1952, section 4).

Another slightly smaller version of Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) (BH 117.B) is in the collection of Tate Britain, London.

We are very grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness for her assistance with preparing the catalogue entries for lots 150-1.