Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975

The Artist
Gimpel family collection, London
Private Collection, Switzerland

Zurich, Gimpel & Hanover Galerie, Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture & Drawings, November 1963, cat.no.20, illustrated p.19;
London, Tate Gallery, Barbara Hepworth, 3rd April – 19^th May 1968, cat.no.133;
London, Gimpel Fils, Barbara Hepworth: 50 Sculptures from 1935-70, 1975, no.40;
London, Gimpel Fils, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson, 27 June - 8 September 1990;
Santiago de Compostela, Auditorio de Galicia; Porto, Fundacao de Serralves, Contemporary British Sculpture:  From Henry Moore to the 90’s, June-November 1995, illustrated in colour p. 102;
London, Gimpel Fils, 7 October - 5 November 1995.

Alan Bowness, The Complete Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth 1960-69, Lund Humphries, London, 1971, no.337, illustrated p.80;
Peter Davies, St.Ives Revisited: Innovators and Followers, Old Bakehouse Publications 1994, pp.50-5, illustrated p.50;
Stockholm Art Fair Magazine 1996, illustrated in colour p.11.

‘Do you know that I love marble specially because of its radiance in the light, its hardness, precision and response to the sun?’ (The artist, quoted in J.P.Hodin, “Barbara Hepworth and the Mediterranean Spirit”, Marmo, no.3, December 1964, p.59)

Pierced Form (Santorin) can be seen as the epitome of Hepworth’s mature carvings, distilled over the previous decades to become an instantly recognisable icon of her oeuvre. The pierced oval form, with countless nuances, turns and spirals within, perfectly balances the concerns that the artist felt were so key to her sculpture; the beauty (and flaws) of the natural material, the process of making (Hepworth notoriously forbade the use of any mechanical tools in the studio) and the hand of the artist, the balance of solidity and lightness, the modernist tradition, the relationship to the landscape of Cornwall and the allusions in the choice of material to the classical sculpture of the Mediterranean.

The link of the present sculpture to Hepworth’s watershed work, Pierced Form 1931, now sadly lost, is clear from the title, a piece which is central to the position of both Hepworth and Moore in the history of European modernism. Whilst a number of European sculptors had introduced piercings into their work much earlier, notably Archipenko and Lipchitz, this had tended to be organic and related to the stylization of their subject. Hepworth’s use of a non-objective piercing of the form in 1931 appears to pre-date that of her contemporary and friend Henry Moore by approaching a year but whilst such questions of dating are of primary interest to art historians, what is irrefutable is that Hepworth’s introduction of this element of her sculptural vocabulary greatly enriched the possibilities of abstract sculpture by abolishing the concept of a closed, and thus entire form, and brought the individual sculpture firmly into the environment within which it was placed.     

It also carries the subtitle Santorin, relating to the volcanic Greek Island north of Crete, also known as Thera. As such it sits within a group of marble carvings of the late 1950s and early 1960s that return in spirit to the severe abstraction of the 1930s, yet introduce a lyricism and organic beauty that derives in no small part from the Cornish landscape. The twisting spirals within the piercing of the sculpture suggest comparison with the sea-influenced carvings of the later 1940s, especially Pelagos of 1946 (Tate Collection), but the overall form is very much reminiscent of the prehistoric standing stones that are such notable features of the landscape of the Penwith peninsula.

As far back as the 1930s, J.D.Bernal had drawn comparison with the ancient stone sites of Cornwall, and the artist herself freely acknowledged the powerful influence both the landscape and its pagan history had on her. The basic form used in Pierced Form (Santorin) is remarkably similar to that found at a Cornish site well known to Hepworth, Men-an-tol, high on the moors above Morvah, just a few miles from St.Ives. A site with a strong local tradition of healing, such a link seems remarkably apposite in view of the tantalisingly tactile qualities of this sculpture and thus we can begin to see how the forms can spur the imagination of the viewer into glimpsing multiple readings of the elements, both human and abstract.  

For many years this important sculpture remained in the private collection of the Gimpel family, Hepworth’s dealers, friends and supporters, and is here offered at auction for the first time since its execution in 1963.