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拍品专文
Conceived in 1958, Sea Form (Porthmeor) is among the most celebrated bronzes of Barbara Hepworth’s mature career. In it, the artist distils the rhythms of the Cornish coastline into a single, sweeping organic form. Hepworth had only begun to work consistently in bronze in 1956, and the sculptures that followed marked a decisive turn in her practice. With their boldly expressive silhouettes and richly textured, coloured surfaces, they stood apart from the carvings of previous decades, and Sea Form (Porthmeor) is among the finest examples of this new direction. Cast in an edition of seven, the present work is the only example that remains in private hands, the six other casts having been acquired by major public institutions across Europe and North America.
In Sea Form (Porthmeor), Hepworth presents the viewer with a stretched, undulating form, its outer edges folding over like the crest of a breaking wave and its surface opened by a series of apertures through which light and space pass freely. The smooth, burnished rims gleam, contrasting with the worked, more textured surface within, while the patina is dark almost to black and enlivened with energetic dappling in green and white. Michael Shepherd observed that, with ‘its lipped edges, its amoebic or cellular organic forms, and its white-plastered metal as if salted from long immersion in seawater’, the sculpture seems to belong to ‘the living world of the sea’ (quoted in M. Gale and C. Stephens, Barbara Hepworth: works in the Tate Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum, St Ives, London, 2001, p. 189). His image aptly captures the effect of Hepworth’s patina, which lends the bronze the appearance of an object shaped and encrusted by the sea, as though it had only just washed up on the shore at Porthmeor.
Hepworth’s approach to her new medium was shaped by her long devotion to carving. Her working method – in which an armature of expanded aluminium was overlaid with plaster that could be carved once set – enabled her, in the words of Stephen Feeke and Alexandra Gerstein, to ‘sate her craving for carving within the casting process’ (S. Feeke and A. Gerstein, Hepworth in Colour, exhibition catalogue, London, Courtauld Gallery, 2026, p. 136). Casting began at the Art Bronze Foundry in Fulham in early 1959, and within months the sculpture was on show on both sides of the Atlantic, in New York, Toronto and São Paulo.
Its title anchors the sculpture in a particular place: Porthmeor Beach, on the northern side of St Ives, long home to artists’ studios, including those of Ben Nicholson and Terry Frost. From the early 1950s, Hepworth frequently added place names in parentheses to her titles, anchoring her abstract forms in the specific landscapes from which they grew. Although her Trewyn Studio looked towards the harbour, she was deeply attuned to the movement of the sea, describing to Herbert Read the ‘extraordinary feeling being poised above the changing calligraphy of tide & water movement, sand & wind movement & the pattern of men’s & birds’ feet’ (the artists, quoted in M. Gale and C. Stephens, ibid., p. 187). So enduring was her bond with Porthmeor that, in 1963, she took a studio flat overlooking the beach, bringing herself within sight of the very waters that had shaped the present work five years earlier.
The opening of solid form, so central to Hepworth’s art, finds a striking precedent in the ancient landscape of West Penwith. On the moorland a few miles from St Ives stands the Mên-an-Tol, its Cornish name often translated simply as ‘the holed stone’: a ring of granite set between two upright stones, its weathered surface shaped over millennia by Atlantic wind and rain. By local tradition, those seeking healing or fertility would pass through its opening, so that the stone has long been experienced not only by the eye but by the body. Sea Form (Porthmeor) invites a similar engagement: its apertures draw the viewer’s gaze through to the space beyond, while its polished edges, softened as if by the tide and perhaps by years of handling, recall the artist’s conviction that: 'every sculpture must be touched … with a sculpture, you must walk around it, bend toward it, touch it, and walk away from it.'
Shown at the V São Paulo Bienal in 1959, the year Hepworth was awarded the exhibition’s Grand Prix, Sea Form (Porthmeor) belongs to the moment at which her reputation became firmly international. Rooted in a single stretch of Cornish shore yet admired across the world, it remains one of the most eloquent expressions of a sculptor for whom, as she put it, a form could hold ‘the ebb and flow of the Atlantic’.
In Sea Form (Porthmeor), Hepworth presents the viewer with a stretched, undulating form, its outer edges folding over like the crest of a breaking wave and its surface opened by a series of apertures through which light and space pass freely. The smooth, burnished rims gleam, contrasting with the worked, more textured surface within, while the patina is dark almost to black and enlivened with energetic dappling in green and white. Michael Shepherd observed that, with ‘its lipped edges, its amoebic or cellular organic forms, and its white-plastered metal as if salted from long immersion in seawater’, the sculpture seems to belong to ‘the living world of the sea’ (quoted in M. Gale and C. Stephens, Barbara Hepworth: works in the Tate Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum, St Ives, London, 2001, p. 189). His image aptly captures the effect of Hepworth’s patina, which lends the bronze the appearance of an object shaped and encrusted by the sea, as though it had only just washed up on the shore at Porthmeor.
Hepworth’s approach to her new medium was shaped by her long devotion to carving. Her working method – in which an armature of expanded aluminium was overlaid with plaster that could be carved once set – enabled her, in the words of Stephen Feeke and Alexandra Gerstein, to ‘sate her craving for carving within the casting process’ (S. Feeke and A. Gerstein, Hepworth in Colour, exhibition catalogue, London, Courtauld Gallery, 2026, p. 136). Casting began at the Art Bronze Foundry in Fulham in early 1959, and within months the sculpture was on show on both sides of the Atlantic, in New York, Toronto and São Paulo.
Its title anchors the sculpture in a particular place: Porthmeor Beach, on the northern side of St Ives, long home to artists’ studios, including those of Ben Nicholson and Terry Frost. From the early 1950s, Hepworth frequently added place names in parentheses to her titles, anchoring her abstract forms in the specific landscapes from which they grew. Although her Trewyn Studio looked towards the harbour, she was deeply attuned to the movement of the sea, describing to Herbert Read the ‘extraordinary feeling being poised above the changing calligraphy of tide & water movement, sand & wind movement & the pattern of men’s & birds’ feet’ (the artists, quoted in M. Gale and C. Stephens, ibid., p. 187). So enduring was her bond with Porthmeor that, in 1963, she took a studio flat overlooking the beach, bringing herself within sight of the very waters that had shaped the present work five years earlier.
The opening of solid form, so central to Hepworth’s art, finds a striking precedent in the ancient landscape of West Penwith. On the moorland a few miles from St Ives stands the Mên-an-Tol, its Cornish name often translated simply as ‘the holed stone’: a ring of granite set between two upright stones, its weathered surface shaped over millennia by Atlantic wind and rain. By local tradition, those seeking healing or fertility would pass through its opening, so that the stone has long been experienced not only by the eye but by the body. Sea Form (Porthmeor) invites a similar engagement: its apertures draw the viewer’s gaze through to the space beyond, while its polished edges, softened as if by the tide and perhaps by years of handling, recall the artist’s conviction that: 'every sculpture must be touched … with a sculpture, you must walk around it, bend toward it, touch it, and walk away from it.'
Shown at the V São Paulo Bienal in 1959, the year Hepworth was awarded the exhibition’s Grand Prix, Sea Form (Porthmeor) belongs to the moment at which her reputation became firmly international. Rooted in a single stretch of Cornish shore yet admired across the world, it remains one of the most eloquent expressions of a sculptor for whom, as she put it, a form could hold ‘the ebb and flow of the Atlantic’.