Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975

Lefevre Gallery, London, whence purchased by the family of the present owner, and thence by descent

London, Lefevre Gallery, Paintings by Barbara Hepworth: Paintings by L.S.Lowry, April 1948, no. 24.

Chris Stephens, ‘From Constructivism to Reconstruction: Barbara Hepworth in the 1940s’, in David Thistlewood (ed.), Barbara Hepworth Reconsidered, Tate Gallery Liverpool & Liverpool University Press, 1996, pp.135-155;
Matthew Gale & Chris Stephens, Barbara Hepworth: Works in the Tate Gallery Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum, St.Ives, Tate Gallery Publications 1999, pp.110-115;
John B.Booth, ‘Window on the Ear: Barbara Hepworth and the Fenestration Series of Drawings’, in The Journal of Laryngology & Otology, Vol.144, Supplement no.26, April 2000.

The body of works which tend to be known as the ‘hospital drawings’ have their genesis in the meeting in 1944 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 E.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 the present work, Astragaloid, refers to an operation on the astragalus, a bone within the ankle that forms part of the joint with the leg.

Unexhibited and apparently unpublished since 1948, the present work is an important re-emergence within a body of works that is central to Hepworth’s concerns in the late 1940s.