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090 HEPWORTH


She was greatly influenced by Roger Fry’s ground-breaking exhibitions of European and British post-impressionist painters, as well as by radical new art movements that reflected this period of extraordinary technological and social change. Naum Gabo’s Constructivist principles to ‘create or enrich reality’ using ‘elementary, accurate and primary shapes’ deeply resonated with her, as did the Vorticists’ celebration of industry and the machine age. She advocated a dialogue between science, art, mathematics and music.


While at the Royal Academy, Hepworth and sculptor John Skeaping fell in love. When he won the British Prix de Rome in 1924, she joined him in Italy, having herself won a West Riding Scholarship to study in Florence, where they married in 1925. In Italy, she recognised what was missing in her Yorkshire childhood: light. During this formative period in her life, she studied Romanesque and Renaissance art and architecture, and in Rome, she was introduced to carving marble. She said that being told ‘that marble changes colour under different people’s hands made me decide immediately that it was not dominance that one had to attain over material, but an understanding, almost a kind of persuasion, and a greater coordination between head and hand’. Her first carvings in marble were of doves that they kept in their studio in Rome. Tey shared a love of animals, and when they returned to London in 1926, they rented an apartment with a garden where they built an aviary. Tey were both influenced by sculptures they saw in the British Museum and V&A made by non-Western artists. Hepworth and Skeaping’s marriage deteriorated, but they remained friends and co-parented their son Paul after a divorce in 1933. Meanwhile, she had fallen passionately in love with the artist Ben Nicholson, who at the time was married to Winifred Nicholson,


another artist. In 1934, Hepworth became pregnant with Ben’s child, which turned out to be triplets – a complete shock as ultrasound had not yet been invented. She adored her children, but needed to keep working; the demands upon her as a professional artist were huge. She was married to Nicholson from 1938 to 1951, but he divided his time between Winifred, with whom he had an open marriage, and Hepworth, who was essentially left as a single mother of four children. Her letters reveal the tensions and logistics of finding time to carve and raise a family. Both of her husbands, like her, wanted time for their own art practices. She deeply loved her children, but had an essential need to retain her own identity and agency. Her forms reflect the inspiration she said her children gave her: ‘I hope to discover some absolute essence in sculptural terms giving the quality of human relationships.’ In an essay for the Architectural Association


Journal, Hepworth wrote about the symbiotic relationship between material and concept that carving allows. She celebrated the ‘unlimited variety of materials’ from which she drew inspiration, and noted that ‘it would be possible to carve the same subject in a different stone each time, throughout life, without a repetition of form’. She was highly sensitive to materials, and like Michelangelo, the act of carving allowed forms to emerge and ‘free’ ideas. In other sculptures, she worked with a clear idea of what she wanted to do. She never dispensed with representation, but her figures and animals became increasingly abstracted as she strove for universal human forms. Later in life, she was excited to work in metal on monumental commissions. She continued to draw and paint, and worked through ideas concurrently in both two and three-dimensions. On a trip to Paris in 1933, she visited the studios of Hans Arp, Picasso, Braque and Constantin Brâncusi, and their work had an


enormous impact on hers, particularly how Arp fused landscape and the human figure. She maintained a close connection to Paris, and had lifetime friendships with many avant- garde artists, including Arp, Gabo, Alexander Calder, Joan Miró, László Moholy-Nagy, Braque and Mondrian, whom she helped to find a studio in London before the war. Te reality of the war years on British artists’ lives are vividly brought to life in this book. During the Second World War, Hepworth left London for Cornwall, where, with very little money, space or materials, looking after four children gave her little time to do the work that she wanted, despite having a live-in nanny. As the war years continued, she and her children suffered severe ill health and worry – medical costs were huge before the NHS was established. She experienced financial hardship and tried various ways to make money, including making


JONTY WILDE


BOWNESS HEPWORTH ESTATE. IOANA MARINESCU


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