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Lot Essay
Timeless and totemic, Barbara Hepworth’s The Family of Man: Figure 2, Ancestor II is an evocative and powerful rendering of a monumental figure. Comprised of four bronze blocks, and standing at nearly three meters tall, the present sculpture possesses an immortal gravitas, and was conceived by Hepworth as one of nine individual sculptures that make up the group known as The Family of Man. Alongside its eight sculptural kin—Ancestor I, Parent I, Parent II, Bride, Bridegroom, Young Girl, Youth, and Ultimate Form—the present work is a musing on humanity, on our relationships to each other, and to ourselves. While the figures of The Family of Man exist in a relative dynamic to one another, they also all stand alone—though their identity is tied to the other generations of the “family,” they each retain their own personal individuality.
The idea for The Family of Man group had lingered in Hepworth’s imagination for many decades. “The Family of Man has been in my head for a long time,” she reflected in 1973. “I think, maybe, since I was a child” (quoted in A. Matheson’s interview with Hepworth, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 16 May 1973; reproduced in S. Bowness, ed., Barbara Hepworth: Writings and Conversations, London, 2015, p. 287). The upright modular format Hepworth employed in the group enriches the character of each figure, inviting the viewer to ponder the variety of these cubic and rounded shapes as a means toward understanding the metaphorical relationships between one sculpture and the next, and within the group as a whole. “The combined titles suggest the seven ages,” Alan G. Wilkinson has observed (exh. cat., op. cit., 1996, p. 21).
Hepworth moved to St. Ives, on the northern coast of the Cornwall peninsula, in August 1939, and was immediately struck by the Cornish landscape: “I was enchanted: the bays, caves, promontories, the beaches, hills and rocks, the stones weathering” (quoted in E. Mullins, “Barbara Hepworth,” 1970; reproduced in S. Bowness, op. cit., 2015, p. 224). “It was during this time that I gradually discovered the remarkable pagan landscape which lies between St. Ives, Penzance and Land’s End,” she later wrote, “a landscape which still has a very deep effect on me, developing all my ideas about the relationship of the human figure in landscape—sculpture in landscape and the essential quality of light in relation to sculpture... I was the figure in the landscape and every sculpture contained to a greater or lesser degree the ever changing forms and contours embodying my own response to a given position in that landscape… There is no landscape without the human figure: it is impossible for me to contemplate pre-history in the abstract” (Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, London, 1952, n.p.).
It was in Cornwall that Hepworth encountered the roughly hewn neolithic stone monuments that dotted the landscape. These monoliths, known as menhirs, as well as other prehistoric stone structures, were to profoundly impact the artist. Hepworth had known and visited the neolithic stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury, but reflected in a 1970 interview with Alan Bowness that she had not known of such sites in Cornwall, before Desmond Bernal, seeing a resemblance, mentioned the county’s ancient dolmens, cromlechs, and quoits in the foreword to an exhibition of Hepworth’s works in 1937. “All it did coming here was to ratify my ideas that when you make a sculpture you’re making an image, a fetish, something which alters human behavior or movement... Any stone standing in the hills is a figure, but you have to go further than that... To resolve the image so that it has something affirmative to say is to my mind the only point. That has always been my creed. I like to dream of things rising from the ground—it would he marvelous to walk in the woods and suddenly come across such things” (quoted in A. Bowness, ed., The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth, 1960-69, London, 1971, p. 13).
Hepworth recalled that whenever she came across the menhirs or dolmens, she always felt compelled to interact with the stone, “to pat it, or pick some flowers and put them on it: it’s very ancient this feeling, and very pagan” (quoted in E. Mullins, “Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Family’” in Daily Telegraph Magazine, 7 April 1972; reproduced in S. Bowness, op. cit., 2015, p. 249). Hepworth sought to create this same impact with her own work, aiming to evoke what she called an “ancient response” in the viewer, encouraging them to interact with the sculpture, to move around it, or touch it. Her capacity to prompt a primitive, and profoundly human, reaction through her sculpture is evident in Ancestor II, where the viewer is immediately awestruck by the mystical might of the towering bronze figure. The titles of each of the “family members” reveal the identity of the figure within the series, and its relation to the others. As an “ancestor,” Ancestor II has a generative and quasi-mythical role within the group. This is perhaps amplified by the fluted, column-like form, on which the three upper quadrants rest. The number of vertical undulations vary on each of the four sides of the form, which imbues the work with a biomorphic sense of fluidity, their wavelike, sweeping ripples recalling the Cornish sea.
A sense of verticality dominated Hepworth’s sculptural oeuvre, and the artist acknowledged that all her life she had seen her sculpture as vertical. Just as the upright monoliths in Cornwall possessed a figurative quality, so too do her sculptures evoke the grandeur and the power of the standing human figure. While many of her sculptures are a kind of “single form,” often titled as such, The Family of Man sculptures are multi-partite. Through this innovative structure, Hepworth was able to explore the idea of descendancy, repeating—with slight modifications—some of the segments of the figures. For example, the lower middle quadrant of Ancestor II and the upper middle quadrant of Parent I both have a conical central hole, while the uppermost segments of Ancestor I and Ultimate Form share visual similarities. This strengthens the sense of family and lineage, an allusion, perhaps, to family resemblance.
Hepworth maintained that familial heritage was an anchor of oneself, and that through connection with one’s forebearers and descendants, it was possible to ascertain a better understanding of one’s own identity. The uppermost bronze block of Ancestor II is symmetrically concave on two of its sides, as if, Janus-like, it looks both forward and backward into time, a striking representation of identity, and an individual’s connection to both their past and present.
The idea for The Family of Man group had lingered in Hepworth’s imagination for many decades. “The Family of Man has been in my head for a long time,” she reflected in 1973. “I think, maybe, since I was a child” (quoted in A. Matheson’s interview with Hepworth, The Australian Women’s Weekly, 16 May 1973; reproduced in S. Bowness, ed., Barbara Hepworth: Writings and Conversations, London, 2015, p. 287). The upright modular format Hepworth employed in the group enriches the character of each figure, inviting the viewer to ponder the variety of these cubic and rounded shapes as a means toward understanding the metaphorical relationships between one sculpture and the next, and within the group as a whole. “The combined titles suggest the seven ages,” Alan G. Wilkinson has observed (exh. cat., op. cit., 1996, p. 21).
Hepworth moved to St. Ives, on the northern coast of the Cornwall peninsula, in August 1939, and was immediately struck by the Cornish landscape: “I was enchanted: the bays, caves, promontories, the beaches, hills and rocks, the stones weathering” (quoted in E. Mullins, “Barbara Hepworth,” 1970; reproduced in S. Bowness, op. cit., 2015, p. 224). “It was during this time that I gradually discovered the remarkable pagan landscape which lies between St. Ives, Penzance and Land’s End,” she later wrote, “a landscape which still has a very deep effect on me, developing all my ideas about the relationship of the human figure in landscape—sculpture in landscape and the essential quality of light in relation to sculpture... I was the figure in the landscape and every sculpture contained to a greater or lesser degree the ever changing forms and contours embodying my own response to a given position in that landscape… There is no landscape without the human figure: it is impossible for me to contemplate pre-history in the abstract” (Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, London, 1952, n.p.).
It was in Cornwall that Hepworth encountered the roughly hewn neolithic stone monuments that dotted the landscape. These monoliths, known as menhirs, as well as other prehistoric stone structures, were to profoundly impact the artist. Hepworth had known and visited the neolithic stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury, but reflected in a 1970 interview with Alan Bowness that she had not known of such sites in Cornwall, before Desmond Bernal, seeing a resemblance, mentioned the county’s ancient dolmens, cromlechs, and quoits in the foreword to an exhibition of Hepworth’s works in 1937. “All it did coming here was to ratify my ideas that when you make a sculpture you’re making an image, a fetish, something which alters human behavior or movement... Any stone standing in the hills is a figure, but you have to go further than that... To resolve the image so that it has something affirmative to say is to my mind the only point. That has always been my creed. I like to dream of things rising from the ground—it would he marvelous to walk in the woods and suddenly come across such things” (quoted in A. Bowness, ed., The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth, 1960-69, London, 1971, p. 13).
Hepworth recalled that whenever she came across the menhirs or dolmens, she always felt compelled to interact with the stone, “to pat it, or pick some flowers and put them on it: it’s very ancient this feeling, and very pagan” (quoted in E. Mullins, “Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Family’” in Daily Telegraph Magazine, 7 April 1972; reproduced in S. Bowness, op. cit., 2015, p. 249). Hepworth sought to create this same impact with her own work, aiming to evoke what she called an “ancient response” in the viewer, encouraging them to interact with the sculpture, to move around it, or touch it. Her capacity to prompt a primitive, and profoundly human, reaction through her sculpture is evident in Ancestor II, where the viewer is immediately awestruck by the mystical might of the towering bronze figure. The titles of each of the “family members” reveal the identity of the figure within the series, and its relation to the others. As an “ancestor,” Ancestor II has a generative and quasi-mythical role within the group. This is perhaps amplified by the fluted, column-like form, on which the three upper quadrants rest. The number of vertical undulations vary on each of the four sides of the form, which imbues the work with a biomorphic sense of fluidity, their wavelike, sweeping ripples recalling the Cornish sea.
A sense of verticality dominated Hepworth’s sculptural oeuvre, and the artist acknowledged that all her life she had seen her sculpture as vertical. Just as the upright monoliths in Cornwall possessed a figurative quality, so too do her sculptures evoke the grandeur and the power of the standing human figure. While many of her sculptures are a kind of “single form,” often titled as such, The Family of Man sculptures are multi-partite. Through this innovative structure, Hepworth was able to explore the idea of descendancy, repeating—with slight modifications—some of the segments of the figures. For example, the lower middle quadrant of Ancestor II and the upper middle quadrant of Parent I both have a conical central hole, while the uppermost segments of Ancestor I and Ultimate Form share visual similarities. This strengthens the sense of family and lineage, an allusion, perhaps, to family resemblance.
Hepworth maintained that familial heritage was an anchor of oneself, and that through connection with one’s forebearers and descendants, it was possible to ascertain a better understanding of one’s own identity. The uppermost bronze block of Ancestor II is symmetrically concave on two of its sides, as if, Janus-like, it looks both forward and backward into time, a striking representation of identity, and an individual’s connection to both their past and present.