Lot 9
  • 9

Barbara Hepworth

Estimate
450,000 - 650,000 GBP
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Description

  • Barbara Hepworth
  • SHAFT AND CIRCLE
  • Irish marble
  • height (exluding base): 116cm.
  • 45 5/8 in.

Provenance

Dorothy M. Skinner & John S. Cook, Oak Ridge, Tennessee (acquired from the artist through the Marlborough Gallery in June 1974)
A bequest from the above to the present owner in 2007

Exhibited

New York, Marlborough Gallery, Barbara Hepworth, 'Conversations', 1974, no. 8, illustrated in the catalogue

Literature

Jane Bell, 'Barbara Hepworth at Marlborough', in Arts Magazine, May 1974, vol. 48, no. 8, mentioned p. 75
Jeanne Siegel, 'BH', in Art News, Summer 1974, vol. 73, no. 6, mentioned p. 125
Matthew Gale & Chris Stephens, Barbara Hepworth: Works in the Tate Gallery Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum, St Ives, London, 1999, mentioned p. 262
Sophie Bowness (ed.), Barbara Hepworth - The Plasters, London, 2011, illustrated p. 172

Catalogue Note

Hepworth’s Shaft and Circle is an elegant and highly impressive late marble sculpture indicative of her mastery of the carved abstract form. Carving was the artist’s predominant mode of expression and produced her most celebrated works. As early as 1932, Hepworth declared her passion for carving: ‘The sculptor carves because he must. He needs the concrete form of stone and wood for the expression of his idea and experience, and when the idea forms the material is found at once. [...] I have always preferred direct carving to modelling because I like the resistance of the hard material and feel happier working that way. Carving is more adapted to the expression of the accumulative idea of experience and clay to the visual attitude. An idea for carving must be clearly formed before starting and sustained during the long process of working; also, there are all the beauties of several hundreds of different stones and woods, and the idea must be in harmony with the qualities of each one carved; that harmony comes with the discovery of the most direct way of carving each material according to its nature’ (B. Hepworth, ‘The Sculptor carves because he must', in The Studio, London, vol. 104, December 1932, p. 332).

Throughout her career Hepworth focused much of her attention on the exploration of three basic sculptural structures – two forms, the closed form and the standing form (as represented by the present work). These elemental configurations allowed Hepworth to introduce both figurative and landscape elements, often drawn from her beloved Cornish coastline, into her abstract art. Introducing the solo-exhibition in which the present work was shown in 1974, Dore Ashton discussed the Palaeolithic references in the artist’s work: ‘Sometimes Hepworth’s use of archaisms, particularly in linear incisions in the stone, is as blunt as prehistoric man’s. The Shaft and Circle stands as an open allusion to the ancients, whether the ancient graffiti draftsmen, or the ancient animal-stone carvers, or the old Anglo-Saxon cross-or-round-shaft builders. Often her allusions to ancient motifs are highly sublimated, tinctured with the values of our century, yet emergent wherever we look’  (D. Ashton in Barbara Hepworth, 'Conversations' (exhibition catalogue), op. cit., p. 7).

In 1973 Hepworth went on to cast an edition of Shaft and Circle in bronze. There are casts in the Tate Collection at the Barbara Hepworth Museum in St. Ives and the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt
.


Fig. 1, Photograph of the present work in the Barbara Hepworth's Studio garden in Trewyn, St. Ives, June 1972