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Barbara Hepworth

Art genre: Abstract art.
Art media: Sculpture, carvings, printmaking.

Life: Born in Wakefield, West Yorkshire in 1903, the eldest daughter of a civil engineer who familiarised her with technical drawing. She won a scholarship to the Leeds School of Art where she met Henry Moore. In 1921 she won another scholarship, and spent the next three years at the Royal College of Art. She studied carving in Italy and married the sculptor John Skeaping. They returned to London in 1926 and held a joint exhibition in their St John's Wood studio. In 1930 and 1931 she went on holiday with a group of artists including Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson. She later married Nicholson and they lived in Hampstead where they were at the centre of a group of avant-garde artists. In 1934, she had triplets and the financial pressures of a large family forced her and Nicholson to move to St Ives in Cornwall. Hepworth ran a nursery school during the war. In 1942 they moved to a larger house and by 1949 Hepworth had a studio where she could carve out of doors even in winter. In the 1950s her marriage to Nicholson broke down and her eldest son, Paul Skeaping, was killed in an air crash. She sought comfort in her work and expanded her studio. She was made Commander of the British Empire in 1958 and created Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1965. Towards the end of her life she suffered ill health and died after a fire in her studio in 1975. The studio opened as a museum in 1976.

Work: Barbara Hepworth was important in the abstract movement in Britain. She studied carving in Italy where her work was influenced by the light she experienced there, and by using marble. It wasn't until after the Second World War that her work was recognised. Her pieces were shown at the Venice Bienniale in 1950. Through the 1950s her work increased in scale. She began to cast sculptures and many of these were displayed in the property around her studio. In 1962-3 she created a large bronze to stand outside the United Nations Building in New York.  She introduced the idea of piercing the solid mass of sculpture with a hole to make the object more transparent, a concept that influenced Henry Moore. Many of her sculptures were derived from nature, particularly the sea-washed rocks near her home in Cornwall.

Find out more:
www.tate.org.uk/stives/hepworth
www.en.wikipedia.org
www.artchive.com

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