Woman's Place

When her triplets were born in 1934, Sculptress Barbara Hepworth laid aside her hammer and chisel for a whole month. Otherwise, domestic duties have rarely kept her from her work as an artist. As a result of this dedicated cultivation of her talents, Barbara Hepworth, now 51, is one of the world's top sculptors, and last week London's Whitechapel Art Gallery was having the biggest retrospective show of her work ever held.

The 70 pieces of sculpture in wood and stone and the 128 drawings on view were convincing evidence that a woman had at last become pre-eminent in a field long dominated by men. The works ranged from early representational carvings like Contemplative Figure (1928), a sensual but reposeful torso and head, to latter-day exercises in pure form such as Pastorale (1953), a chunk of gracefully carved marble pierced by strangely undulating tunnels. Another new work, Totem, was an imposing abstraction in wood and swirling hollows.

Realm of Light. The retrospective show, covering 27 years of Sculptress Hepworth's work, provoked some murmurs of dismay from the critics. The Manchester Guardian complained that her carvings were "cold austerities [which do] not rouse any emotion much stronger than deep respect." But the Observer hailed the skill with which "she contrives to impart [life] to her obdurate materials." One thing that the show demonstrated clearly was that she has moved sharply away from her early preoccupation with natural forms toward a colder, more mathematical expression of idea and feeling. It also showed her close artistic affinity with her fellow Yorkshireman, Henry Moore.

Barbara first met Moore when she was a young girl in the Leeds School of Art. Later they went to the Royal College of Art together, got simultaneous scholarships for further study abroad. Says she of that experience: "There had been something lacking in my childhood in Yorkshire, and that was light . . . Italy opened for me the wonderful realm of light . . ."

Back in England she found another great influence on both her life and her art. In 1930 she saw the work of British Abstractionist Ben Nicholson for the first time, an experience which "helped to release all of my energies for an exploration of free sculptural form." She fell in love with the painter as well as the paintings, and three years later she and Nicholson were married. It was about this time in her career that Sculptress Hepworth began to put holes in her carvings: "I . . . felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space."

Fresh Influence. The birth of the Nicholson-Hepworth triplets in October 1934 was soberly noted by Sculptress Hepworth: "It was a tremendously exciting event. We were only prepared for one child, and the arrival of three babies by 6 o'clock in the morning meant considerable improvisation . . ." She also tells what happened to her sculpture: "When I started carving again in November . . . my work seemed to have changed direction although the only fresh influence had been the arrival of the children. The work was more formal, and all traces of naturalism had disappeared, and for some years I was absorbed in the relationships in space, in size and texture and weight, as well as in the tensions between the forms."

Just before the outbreak of World War II, Sculptress Hepworth moved to the seaside Cornish town of St. Ives, where she has lived ever since (she and Nicholson were recently divorced). Since the war she has had showings of her work in Europe and the U.S., is generally acknowledged as the best woman sculptor of her day. Of that qualification Sculptress Hepworth says: "[The] belief in the inevitable inferiority of woman's art presupposes a competitive element between the sexes. I do not believe that women are in competition with men. I believe that they have a [special] sensibility, a perception . . . For example, if I see a woman carrying a child ... it is not so much what I see that affects me but what I feel ... It may be that the sensation of being a woman presents yet another facet of the sculptural idea."

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