Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975

Charles Gimpel
Gimpel Fils, London, whence purchased by Mr and Mrs Kreitman, 1972

London, Gimpel Fils, Recent Works by Barbara Hepworth, June 1958, no.2.
St. Ives, Tate and Wakefield, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Barbara Hepworth : Centenary, May-October 2003 (this piece included in the ex-catalogue Bothy Gallery display)

Conceived in 1956 and produced in 1959 in an edition of 8, this being number 8.  It is listed as BH222A.

Hepworth’s group of Orpheus sculptures all have their genesis in the commission from the electronics firm Mullard Ltd. to produce a sculpture for their offices at Mullard House in Bloomsbury, London. The final work was over four feet tall and was followed by two smaller versions, Orpheus (Maquette 1) and Orpheus (Maquette 2)(Version 1), each subsequently produced as an edition of 8. A third version, Orpheus (Maquette 2) (Version II) was also produced in an edition of 3.

The present work belongs to a period when Hepworth was experimenting with a variety of materials for sculpture, including sheet metals, and in the Orpheus and related Curlew pieces, she combines a variety of sources and elements from her own earlier works to produce sculptures which have not only a grace and balance but also a striking feel of modernity for the period. Moore had used stringing within his sculptures from the late 1930’s 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 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). This rather more constructivist approach to the creation of space within a sculptural form also fits in with the position that both she and Nicholson had in relation to the younger constructivist circle of artists in London, notably Kenneth Martin, whose hanging spiral mobiles and constructions seem to relate here. This is particularly relevant when one remembers that the original Orpheus sculpture, Theme on Electronics (Orpheus) (Private Collection) was designed to be mounted on an electrically powered turntable, thus being both conceived fully in the round and including a sense of animation by rotation.

The making of the Orpheus and Curlew sculptures was also a departure for Hepworth, the use of cut sheet metal allowing for an openness in the work that was not structurally possible in either wood or stone carving. The sculptor Brian Wall, who was one Hepworth’s studio assistants at the time, has been able to offer valuable insight into the process by which the pieces were made. The initial form of the metal shape was cut out from a cardboard template, the sharp edges filed away, and, as Hepworth did not wish the metal heated, the curvature was then laboriously achieved by ‘cold-rolling’ the sheet by hand with a piece of wood. The sheets were patinated by hand, with most of the sculptures retaining a loosely-brushed greenish-pink colouring. The stringing also appears to have been done by eye rather than strict measurement, and the small graduations in the spacing of the holes are consistent with adjustments to compensate for the curvature of the metal.

The Orpheus title is both consistent with the more frequent use of Greek names in her work following her visit to the Aegean in 1954, but it may also allow for the visual similarity between the form of the sculpture and the lyre of the mythical poet.