Remembering Barbara Hepworth: The Sculptor Who Carved Modernism into Stone

When Barbara Hepworth died in a fire at her St Ives studio in 1975, Britain lost a remarkable artistic voice. The artist who put the hole in modern art and made it her signature helped shape the direction of 20th-century sculpture. Unlike her contemporaries Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, Hepworth’s abstract art was often infused with spirituality and nature.

It was the year that the Empire State Building opened, the Star-Spangled Banner was adopted as the US national anthem, and when Japan occupied Manchuria, but 1931 was also notable as the year that Barbara Hepworth pierced a hole in a small carving and in doing so changed the course of modern sculpture.

“When I first pierced a shape, I thought it was a miracle. A new vision was opened,”

Barbara Hepworth

The sculpture was called Pierced Form. This groundbreaking work marked a significant shift in her artistic style and established the hole as a key element in her later sculptures. Allowing light to flow through it, Pierced Form created a sense of connection between different aspects of the form and would come to exemplify Modernism – and in particular modern sculpture.

The original was destroyed by German bombing of London during World War II, but her pierced form idea was immediately adopted by her friend and rival, Henry Moore, and would inform the practice of both artists in later years. Together with Moore, Hepworth established a vocabulary of modern British sculpture and was a leading female artist among her male-dominated contemporaries until her untimely death, apparently caused by falling asleep with a cigarette, aged 72.

“The holes I make,” she explained, “depend on what I want to see – the depth, the thickness, the curvatures, the arc, the swoop, the spiral.” From that moment, Hepworth carved and chiseled holes in nearly all her sculptures. Sometimes she painted the hollow holes, sometimes the sculpture was bound in string, but the result captured light and allowed viewers to engage with the space around and within the work.

Deeply abstract yet also displaying a human quality, Hepworth blended figurative forms with her modern approach to sculpture to move three-dimensional art into greater abstraction. Exhibiting the clean lines of Modernism, Hepworth set herself apart with sensuous and tactile textures in wood, stone, and metal. “Sculpture is a three‐dimensional projection of primitive feeling: touch, texture, size and scale, hardness and warmth, evocation and compulsion to move, live and love.”

Hepworth’s contribution to art in Britain was crowned when she was made a Dame in 1965, and her international reputation was confirmed with a 21‐foot tall, five‐ton bronze memorial at the United Nations Secretariat Building in New York the year before. Commissioned in memory of UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, the free-form abstraction of Single Form features Hepworth’s trademark, which could either be interpreted as an eye or a hand raised in salute.

A prolific artist, Hepworth produced over 500 sculptures in her lifetime, most of them from her studio in St Ives, in the scenic south-west tip of England, where she worked outdoors in her secluded garden, stuffed full of her pieces. A physical and philosophical process, the act of sculpture for Hepworth was an expression between the human form, the natural world, and Modernist expression.

Coastal Inspiration 

“When I’m in a landscape or looking at a cave or a wave, it’s all so pure that I become detached,” she explained. “Everything is merged into a new form, inside and outside. It’s like falling into the landscape or the sea. I’m transported into an untroubled world, a different epoch.”

Despite her work embodying a sense of abstraction, Hepworth’s art was imbued with nature, and she would spend hours watching the waves around her home or studying the geometry of seashells. Taking inspiration from the Cornwall’s craggy coastline, Hepworth would devote months on each carving in what she described as an “almost a kind of persuasion.” An immensely physical task, Hepworth did all her own polishing to create those sensuous and tactile elements of her sculpture.

St Ives offered Hepworth a haven, but also a community of like-minded artists. Surrounded by Cornish coastline, her studio, called Trewyn, became a sanctuary from where she incorporated the natural environment into her work. Hepworth was a leading figure in the collection of artists in St Ives during World War II, alongside the painter Ben Nicholson, whom she married in 1938. Nicholson was a source of influence for Hepworth, and he also expanded her artistic horizons by introducing her to the likes of Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp, while she also met Pablo Picassoand Georges Braque and joined the Abstraction‐Création group in Paris.

Producing the majority of her sculptures in stone, Hepworth’s association with nature was also evident in the rosewood carving Kneeling (1932) and the Figure in Sycamore (1931), portraying a woman with clasped hands, while the sea is represented in Tides I (1946) with its colored hollowed interior and polished grain of its sides.

But it’s perhaps Pelagos (1946) that best shows Hepworth’s relationship with nature and modernist aesthetics. It’s emphatically abstract in its design yet has an undeniable naturalistic quality to it. Inspired by a view of the coast at St Ives in Cornwall, Pelagos means sea in Greek, and that marine influence is evident in the shape of the carving, bringing to mind a wave or the curve of a headland that’s been shaped by the rhythmic force of nature.

Humans Reimagined 

Though often abstract, Hepworth’s work had a human heart. Sculptures like Mother and Child (1934) and Two Forms (1969) have a sense of empathy and physical presence, while her use of negative space invites viewers to see sculpture as a living relationship between shape, light, and viewer. She once wrote, “I rarely draw what I see – I draw what I feel in my body.”

That sensitivity is on show in the several mother and child sculptures she produced in 1934 while pregnant with triplets. Showing a reclining mother and a child on her thighs, Mother and Child blends abstract elements and figurative interpretation, showing the mother and child as separate, but intimately involved entities. She once stated that “there is an inside and an outside to every form, [and sometimes] they are in special accord, as for instance a nut in its shell or a child in the womb.”

It was in the 1960s that Hepworth reached an artistic peak, as she recalled, “I at last had space and money and time to work on a much bigger scale. I had felt inhibited for a very long time over the scale on which I could work … It’s so natural to work large – it fits one’s body”. This can be seen in Two Forms (Divided Circle) 1969 and a series of smaller asymmetrical sculptures in Cornish slate that Hepworth designed to involve the viewer in the work. “You can climb through the Divided Circle – you don’t need to do it physically to experience it.”

As the decade moved into the seventies, Hepworth’s figures maintained a level of abstraction, but with an added individual figurative element, as seen in The Family of Man (1970). Wanting to create a family of figures on a hillside, Hepworth’s representation of a family is one of her last major works, depicting different stages of life across nine sculptures. It’s been on public display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the north of England since 1980, while other series of the family produced by Hepworth have proved extremely popular at auction.

Involving the Whole Body

Recognized as a Commander of the British Empire in 1958 and a Dame – equivalent to a knighthood – in 1965, Hepworth was fundamental in establishing a characteristic vocabulary of modern British sculpture, while a permanent reminder of her work stands as a legacy outside the United Nations building in New York.

Alongside her contemporary and friend, Henry Moore, Hepworth was influential for her approach to process and materials, which influenced the likes of Eduardo Paolozzi and Anthony Caro, while her position as a pioneering female artist in a male-dominated art world has been cited as a source of inspiration to Tracey Emin.

Fifty years on, her home and studio in St Ives is now the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, attracting thousands of visitors every year. And her influence has been felt by fellow sculptor, Sir Antony Gormley, who said, “Barbara Hepworth’s work remains a luminary example of both an engagement with modernism and a return to direct carving.”

Hepworth’s visual language is testament to her deep respect for the rhythms of the natural landscape, and her work remains as vital and dynamic as it did 50 years ago. At once abstract, figurative, personal, detached, tactile, involving, and separate, Hepworth imbued a piece of whole self in her sculptures to carve Modernism into stone. But she put it best when she said, “the strokes of the hammer on the chisel should be in time with your heartbeat. You breathe easily. The whole of your body is involved. You move around the sculpture, and the whole of you, from the toes up, is concentrated in your left hand, which dictates the creation.”