Dame Barbara Hepworth

Alex Reid & Lefevre, London, where acquired by Wilfrid A. Evill September 1954 for £50.0.0, by whom bequeathed to Honor Frost in 1963

New York, Durlacher Brothers, Barbara Hepworth, October 1949, cat. no.17;
London, Alex Reid & Lefevre, New Sculpture and Drawings by Barbara Hepworth, February 1950, cat. no.48;
London, The Whitechapel Gallery, Barbara Hepworth: Retrospective Exhibition 1927-1954, April - June 1954, cat. no.127;
London, The Home of Wilfrid A. Evill, Contemporary Art Society, Pictures, Drawings, Water Colours and Sculpture, April - May 1961, (part IV- section 2) cat. no.1;
Brighton, Brighton Art Gallery, The Wilfrid Evill Memorial Exhibition, June - August 1965, cat. no.52.

The following condition report has been prepared by Hamish Dewar Fine Art Conservation, 13 & 14 Mason's Yard, Duke Street, St James's, London, SW1Y 6BU: UNCONDITIONAL AND WITHOUT PREJUDICE Structural Condition The artist's prepared board is providing a secure and stable structural support. Paint surface The paint surface, which appears to be oil and pencil, is obviously unvarnished and no retouchings are visible under ultra-violet light. There are some minor abrasions around the framing edges where it would appear there has been frame rubbing. These are all very slight but most concentrated on the left of the upper horizontal framing edge where there is a thin diagonal scratch approximately 2 cm in length in the upper left corner. There is also a very small loss on the left vertical framing edge. It should be stressed that these are of the most minimal size and may well be covered by the framing sight edge. Summary The painting would therefore appear to be in excellent and stable condition with no evidence of any intervention in the past.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

The body of works which tend to be known as the 'hospital drawings' have their genesis in the meeting in 1943 of Hepworth and the orthopaedic surgeon Norman Capener. Capener, an amateur sculptor of some ability, had operated on Hepworth's daughter Sarah, and in November of 1947 she was invited to observe an operation at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital, Exeter. Hepworth recalled,

'...a suggestion was made to me that I might watch an operation in a hospital, I expected I should dislike it; but from the moment when I entered the operating theatre I became completely absorbed by two things: first, the extraordinary beauty of purpose and co-ordination between human beings all dedicated to the saving of life, and the way that unity of idea and purpose dictated a perfection of concentration, movement, and gesture; and secondly by the way this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture very close to what I had been seeking in my own work' (The artist, quoted in Barbara Hepworth & Alan Bowness, Barbara Hepworth: Drawings from a Sculptor's Landscape, Cory, Adams & Mackay Ltd., London 1966, p.22).

The drawings (an inappropriate label for a corpus which consists of mostly fully finished and independent works) produced as a result of this and further visits to watch Capener at work, and later the renowned ear specialist Garnet Passe, form a clear and self-contained group that at first sight seem to have little direct connection to Hepworth's contemporary work. At an obvious level, as the artist's own words above make clear, she saw in the actions, and indeed tools, of the surgeons she observed, a parallel with her practise as a sculptor. However, she also seems to have been very aware of the surgeons' own sense of involvement with their 'materials' in a way that mirrored her own. This was perspicaciously noted by Capener who in his introduction to the 1948 Lefevre Gallery exhibition (modestly signed 'A Surgeon') speaks of: 

'...an uncanny sense of the unseen; indeed the sense of the good surgeon himself – always conscious of the unseen "person" beneath his hands and never callous of his "material"' (Norman Capener, Introduction, Lefevre Gallery, 1948).

Both in their handling and concentration on the construction of space, the 'hospital drawings' continue the themes that we see Hepworth exploring in the abstract drawings and paintings she produced during the war years. Apparently initially produced as a means of exploring ideas that strictures of time and materials prohibited in three dimensions, the compositional forms are remarkably similar to those of the 'hospital drawings'.

They must also be seen within the context of the inauguration of the National Health Service in 1948, an event which was a key element of post-WWII Britain. Central to the plans for a fairer more collective society envisaged in the Beveridge Report of 1942, the founding of the N.H.S. was seen by many, and especially within the broad left that Hepworth and most of her contemporaries supported, as a concrete realisation of the social reconstruction of Britain.  

The titles of these works tend to relate to the operation in progress and Smith-Petersen Pin (named after the doctor who innovated the procedure) refers to the insertion of a pin for stabilising fractures to the upper end of the femur bone, which extends from the hip to the knee.

We are grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness for her kind assistance with the cataloguing of the present work.