Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975

The Morton family
Crane Kalman Gallery, London

After the outbreak of WWII, Hepworth and Nicholson moved down to Cornwall at the invitation of Adrian Stokes and Margaret Mellis, initially staying with them at their house, Little Parc Owles, before moving to Dunluce, another house in Carbis Bay, just after Christmas 1939.

With triplets to look after, materials becoming scare and space limited, Hepworth found that her opportunities for carving were becoming fewer and thus in the earliest part of her time in Cornwall, she ‘could only draw at night and make a few plaster maquettes’. However, the possibilities of drawing soon became apparent to her and she found that they could be produced relatively quickly and provided a useful source of income during the war years, and virtually all her friends and collectors acquired examples, including Margaret Gardiner, Cyril Reddihough, Leslie Martin and Alastair Morton, the original owner of the present work.

Dated to 1940, Two Drawings: Spatial Constructions must be one of the earliest examples of this group of works, and demonstrates clear links with other pieces of similar date, perhaps most notably Drawing (crystal) 1940 (formerly collection of the Late Helen Sutherland). Both compositions in the present work use a network of pencil lines to create three-dimensional forms, and in the right-hand composition, the sense of strung diagonals to create tension is very clear. In this, Hepworth echoes both her own sculpture, where she had incorporated strung elements into her work from at least 1940, such as Sculpture with Colour, 1940 (coll.Tate), but the complexity of the strung elements to create a three-dimensional space through the use of intersecting straight lines in the early drawings seems to relate much more closely to her knowledge of 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) 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). 

Alastair Morton (1910-1963), the original owner of the present work was an important figure in the history of modernist design, particularly through his role as artistic director of Edinburgh Weavers from 1932 onwards. A long-time friend of both Hepworth and Nicholson, he formed a substantial collection of modernist works, as well as being a talented artist in his own right.