‘I gradually discovered the remarkable pagan landscape of Cornwall… developing all my ideas about the relationship of the human figure in the landscape.’
Elegy belongs to a small and signifcant group of wooden carvings produced by Barbara Hepworth during the mid to late 1940s that evoked the landscape and atmosphere of her new found home of Cornwall. Hepworth, together with her husband Ben Nicholson and their triplets, arrived in St Ives in August 1939 at the invitation of Adrian Stokes and his wife Margaret Mellis who had a home at Little Park Owles in Carbis Bay. The outbreak of war caught the Hepworth-Nicholson family somewhat by surprise and they decided to stay, primarily for the safety of the children, and moved into their own home in Carbis Bay called Dunluce. Naum and Miriam Gabo followed them from Hampstead to St. Ives and would stay until 1946. Dunluce itself was rather cramped with little room to carve and so Hepworth engaged on a series of sculptural drawings and smaller plaster sculptures, often painted, which she worked on at night while the rest of the house slept.
In July 1942 the family moved to a larger house, also in Carbis Bay, called Chy-an-Kerris, here Hepworth had a studio and was able to carve outdoors in the garden. Indeed, Hepworth wrote:
‘A new era seemed to begin for me when we moved into a larger house high on the cliff overlooking the grand sweep of the whole of St. Ives Bay from the Island to Godrevy lighthouse. There was a sudden release from what had seemed to be an almost unbearable diminution of space and now I had a studio workroom looking straight towards the horizon of the sea and enfolded by the arms of land to the left and right of me.’
With this new found space and freedom and set against the dramatic landscape of the Cornish coast Hepworth began work on a group of carved and painted wooden sculptures, most of which now reside in public collections such as Oval Sculpture (1943, Pier Arts Centre, Orkney), Wave (1943-44, Scottish National Museum of Modern Art, Edinburgh), Pelagos and Tides I (Fig.1 and Fig 2., both 1946, Tate, London) and Pendour (Fig 3.,1947, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington). Elegy shares many features in common with these works namely the scale, the same ovoid form and painted interior. Hepworth herself was fascinated with the form and possibilities of the oval and commented:
‘I have always been interested in oval or ovoid shapes…the weight, poise, and curvature of the ovoid as a basic form. The carving and such piercing of such a form seems to open up an infinite variety of continuous curves in the third dimension’
‘carving is close to writing music - in so far as the composer takes in his whole work from beginning to end before he begins to write it down’
Carving for Hepworth was both intellectual and sensory, a process that had to be in rhythm with the body if it were to be successful. The very title of Elegy, meaning a song of melancholy or lament, demonstrates Hepworth’s connect between musical rhythm and sculptural forms. Hepworth also considered the title Lamentation for the present work which immediately invokes the Second World War and its social and political aftermath. For Hepworth the war ended a certain idealism and she was increasingly affected by the war and held deep seated concerns for the post-war world and the diminished role of the arts in an increasingly mechanised age. The end of the war instilled in Hepworth a more positive spirit and she wrote to her friend Margaret Gardiner:
'to create one lasting thing in a lifetime is an affirmation of what we are all fighting for. Of course there are other things to do - politics, social & family, but they must be welded into a coherent wholeness & into our experience. My show is definitely fixed for 14 months hence. I hope 1945 will be a bit easier. I've got into such a good rhythm of work. I feel I would rather die than be stopped.'
As the allied troops advanced towards final victory the full extent of Nazi atrocities were broadcast to the world. Hepworth went consciously to see a film about the Belsen concentration camp which was to have a profound impact on her and her work. When considered against this emotional backdrop Elegy takes on a new level of profundity as Hepworth's artistic reaction to the war and it's horrors.
Elegy was included in Hepworth's first solo exhibition after the war at Alex. Reid & Lefevre in autumn 1946, indeed it was Hepworth's fist exhibition in London since 1937. The show comprised thirty sculptures, alongside a number of drawings and paintings and was a significant commercial success, Elegy was acquired from the exhibition by Mr & Mrs S. Kaye of Cookham. Both The Times and The Telegraph reported that the Queen had visited the exhibition and Hepworth, 'was deeply touched by the Queen liking her sculptures.' (Eleanor Clayton, Barbara Hepworth Art & Life, Thames & Hudson, London, 2021, p. 137)
Elegy stands as a powerful sculptural reaction to both the landscape of Cornwall and an emotional reaction to the recent war carved with Hepworth's unique skill and vision.
‘The sea, a flat diminishing place, held within itself the capacity to radiate an infinitude of blues, greys, greens and even pinks of strange hues: the lighthouse and its strange rocky island was an eye; the Island of St. Ives an arm, a hand, a face. The rock formation of the great bay had a withiness of form which led my imagination straight to the country of West Penwith behind me - although the visual thrust was straight out to sea. The incoming and receding tides made strange and wonderful calligraphy of the pale granite sand which sparkled with felspar and mica. The rich mineral deposits of Cornwall were apparent on the very surface of things; quartz, amethyst, and topaz; tin and copper below in the old mine shafts , and geology and pre-history - a thousand facts induced a thousand fantasies of form and purpose, structure and life which had gone into the making of what I saw and what I was.’
