Barbara Hepworth

In 1903, Barbara Hepworth was born in Yorkshire, England. At an early age, her parents encouraged her to develop her artistic talents and provided her with as many educational opportunities as possible. In 1920, at the age of 17, Hepworth was admitted to the Leeds School of Art, where she began to develop an interest in sculpture. The following year, she was admitted to the Royal College of Art School of Sculpture Art in London and began to study sculpture. During her studies at the Royal College of Art, she became friends with Henry Moore, who studied at the college and later became a master of British sculpture. From that period, their friendship had a profound impact on their artistic creation. When Hepworth graduated from art school in 1924, she received a scholarship that gave her the opportunity to study Italian painting and sculpture in Siena, Rome, and Florence. While studying in Italy, she experimented with the technique of carving works directly without drafts, and the freedom of this technique gave her the confidence to develop her own sculpture style in the future. In 1931, the year she divorced the sculptor John Skipping, she met the sculptor Ben Nicholson, who became her second husband the following year. After their marriage, they traveled to Paris, France, where they met artists such as Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Arp, and Bracusi. While living and working in Paris, she developed a taste for abstract and geometric sculpture, and before leaving Paris in 1933, she and her husband Nicholson joined the French Society for the Creation of Abstract Art. After the outbreak of World War II, Barbara Hepworth left London and settled in St Ives, Cornwall. She never left her studio there until 1975.

Barbara Hepworth is an internationally renowned artist, hailed by the international sculpture community as one of the greatest sculptors of the 20th century. Along with Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, she was a leading figure in British sculpture and had a revolutionary impact on the development of abstract sculpture in Europe in the 1930s. Barbara's early works had a certain naturalistic style, which shared the same stylistic language as Moore's "Dove", but it was also from this period that she began to pursue a concise and clear style in the expression of her works. By the early 1930s, her works were completely abstract. Her main works of this period were wood carvings and stone carvings, because these works "showed a certain affinity with nature". This influence was also brought to St. Ives with her move. As early as the early 1930s, Hepworth's sculpture had begun to experiment with the language of abstract sculpture, and in 1931, her "The Shape with a Perforation" attracted the attention of the sculpture community. As the sculpture critic Ellen Walkinson pointed out, this abstract space constructed by Barbara Hepworth became one of the most important artistic features of her and Moorish later art, and this work became a milestone in the formation of her artistic style. In the mid-1930s, Nicholson, Moore and her contacts with internationally renowned artists further promoted the development of her abstract sculpture art. Arguably, the 1930s were the most important period in Hepworth's artistic career.

In order to meet the collection needs of museums, art galleries and collectors for her works, she began to use bronze materials in 1956, which greatly increased the number of works she produced. However, Hepworth did not like to use mud to make molds. Instead, she often used plaster to directly fire bronze works, which she learned while studying at the Royal College of Art. In a letter to Ben Nicholson in 1966, she wrote: "I really know I like bronze. I find it so gentle that I can file, carve and chisel on it. In my opinion, every bronze work is a 'person', just like a marble statue. With the help of her assistants, she often began polishing bronze sculptures as soon as she returned from the foundry. Compared to her textured bronze works, these polished works have a smooth surface and dazzling luster.

In 1958, Hepworth began casting her early wood carvings and stonework in bronze, both to preserve her fragile works and to satisfy various demands for her work. The Trapezoidal Disc, now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, is a particular example. Its original work is a wood carving work created in 1935 and reproduced in plaster and aluminum the following year. In 1959, Hepworth made a solid work in bronze and a hollow work in bronze in 1964. Over a period of 30 years, the work has undergone a complex process of multiple reproductions. Similarly, the 1972 "Oval with Two Shapes" is a polished bronze replica of a marble sculpture created in 1971, which is now in the collection of the Tate Gallery in England. Brancusi, the master sculptor, also often recasts his sculptures into polished bronze works, and in his view, the material itself has a special meaning. Hepworth visited Brancusi's studio in Paris in 1933 and left a deep impression on her. Perhaps it was Brancusi's concept that deeply influenced her creative activities.

In Hepworth's work from the 1960s and 1970s, we can also see her trace back to the abstract art of the 1930s. The stylistic simplicity of 30 years of abstract art is once again seen in geometric forms such as "Three Hemispheres". Hepworth also reinterprets the themes of some art works of the 1930s. In addition, some of her small polished bronze sculptures have an architectural grandeur, giving the feeling of large-scale outdoor sculptures. In works such as "Three Forms" and "Square", the combination of straight faces and circles is reminiscent of her monumental bronze sculptures of the 1960s, "Square with Two Rings" (1963) and "Square" (1966). In the last 15 years of her life, Barbara Hepworth created a series of high-polished bronze sculptures that further enriched the meaning of her later work and reflected her use of color. In addition to her polished bronze works, some of her marble sculptures and slate carvings also have the same luster as her polished bronze works. Although her polished bronze works are often small-scale or on-the-table, Barbara Hepworth particularly likes to create such works, "It is as fascinating as painting and sketching."

In the 1960s, Barbara Hepworth became interested in the relationship between the sun, the moon and the sea. She once wrote,"The sun and the moon rise from the east and shine brightly on the water." This new perspective can be seen from her sculpture "Plate with Strings". From 1962 to 1963, she created a landmark sculpture for the United Nations Headquarters in New York. This is the bronze sculpture "Single Form" placed on the front lawn of the building. It transformed from a closed entity through holes to an open one integrated with the environment. The new form, with a curved shape, plays a visual softening role in the hard and rigid architectural frame lines.

In the world of 20th century sculpture art, Barbara Hepworth is not only one of the most famous sculptors in the UK, but also one of the most important figures in the international modernist sculpture world. Over her decades of artistic creation, Barbara Hepworth has accepted many public art projects and has been awarded many awards. In 1959, she won the Grand Prize at the Sao Paulo Biennale, and in 1965, she was awarded the Order of the Lady of the British Empire. When she died in 1975, her works were collected in major art galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. In recent years, the international sculpture community and collection community have shown great interest in her works. Museums, galleries and collection institutions that have not yet collected her sculptures are competing to collect her representative works and regard her works as the most important collection. Currently, her studio in St Ives, Cornwall, has become a gallery owned and managed by Tate Gallery dedicated to her work.