Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975

Gimpel Fils, London;
Harcus Krakow Gallery, Boston, whence acquired by Private Collection, New Jersey, U.S.A.;
Offer Waterman & Co., London, whence acquired by Private Collection, Switzerland

J.P. Hodin, Barbara Hepworth: Life and Work, Lund Humphries, Neuchatel and London, 1961, pp.22 and 169, no.225, illustrated;
Matthew Gale and Chris Stevens, Barbara Hepworth: Works in the Tate Gallery Collection and the Hepworth Museum, St Ives, Tate Gallery, London, 1998, pp.164-5;
Penelope Curtis, Barbara Hepworth, Tate Gallery, London, 1998, p.39.

The three variants of the sculpture known as Stringed Figure (Curlew) were conceived and produced contemporaneously with the Orpheus group (see lot 68) and thus have their genesis in the 1956 commission for a sculpture by Mullard Ltd. Stringed Figure (Curlew) (Maquette I) and Stringed Figure (Curlew) (Maquette II) were both produced in editions of 9, and the largest of the group, Stringed Figure (Curlew)(Version II) was produced in an edition of three.   

Using the same method of cold-rolled cut brass sheet and stringing with red-brown cotton as the Orpheus group, the underlying triangular form seems to have given much more room for variety in the shapes of the finished pieces and thus the sculptures retain a rather more individual sense than the Orpheus sculptures. As well as the varying shapes of the sculpture, the flat brass plate on which the work sits also varies enormously from piece to piece.

Moore had used stringing within his sculptures from the late 1930s and Hepworth had incorporated this into her work from at least 1940, such as Sculpture with Colour, 1940 (Coll. Tate Gallery, London), but the complexity of the strung elements in the Orpheus and Curlew group seems to relate much more closely to her ‘drawings for sculpture’ of the same period. Of relatively small scale, these two-dimensional works seem to develop the ideas of creating a three-dimensional space through the use of intersecting straight lines and have much in common with the contemporary sculptures of Naum Gabo, then working in St.Ives and a close friend of Hepworth. His sculptures incorporating plastics and nylon stringing were highly regarded by his contemporaries, Spiral Theme of 1941 (Coll. Tate Gallery, London) being described at the time by Herbert Read as ‘the highest point ever reached by the aesthetic intuition of man’ (Herbert Read, ‘Vulgarity & Impotence: Speculations on the Present State of the Arts’, Horizon, vol.5, no.28, April 1942, p.269).  

The subtitling of the group is unusual in that it relates to a specific creature, and it has been suggested that the avian reference may have a link with the contemporary work of Hepworth’s friend John Wells, whose Sea Bird Forms (Coll. Tate Gallery, London) of 1951 would have been well known to her as it was originally in the collection of their mutual friend, Ethel Hodgkins. However, the subtitle may be no more than a reference to the very distinctive down-curving bill of the wader which winters in large numbers in the Hayle estuary.