Barbara Hepworth

(England, 10/01/1903 - 20/05/1975)

Parent I (from 'The Family of Man series) (1970s)

At seventeen years old, Hepworth began her academic studies at the Leeds School of Art in 1920 where she won a scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art the following year. Completing her studies in 1924, she travelled to Florence, coming runner-up in the prestigious Prix-de-Rome and studying Romanesque and early Renaissance art and architecture, later learning to carve marble from the master-carver Giovanni Ardini.

Hepworth was the first to sculpt the pierced, organic figures that have become synonymous with her work and, later, that of her friend and fellow artist Henry Moore. Beginning in 1931, carving holes and hollow spaces into plaster, wood, stone and bronze, sometimes incorporating strings, wires, and colored paint, she aimed to emulate the shapes of her environment growing up surrounded by the rolling hills of the north of England.

Natural landscapes and the world around her would continue to inspire her throughout her career, wanting to capture how it felt to be in both the ancient landscape and in the modern world. By the 1930s, this had developed into purely abstract work and made her a pioneer of British modernist sculpture.

In 1933 Hepworth became one of the founders of the Unit One movement, which sought to unite Surrealism and Abstraction in British art, something that her contemporaries had struggled to do.

During the 1950s, Hepworth’s reputation grew exponentially: she was the first woman to represent Britain at the 1950 Venice Biennial and won a first prize at the Biennial in São Paolo; she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1958 and was later awarded the rank of Dame in 1965. That same year, she became the first woman to be appointed Trustee of the Tate Gallery, which she maintained until her death in 1972.

Intent on showing the rough and smooth textures of her organic surfaces, Hepworth continued to hand-carve her structures right until the end of her life, as if to deliberately display an imperfect, human quality.

Image: Barbara Hepworth, Parent I (from 'The Family of Man series) (1970s). Bronze, 277 cm high. The Fitzwilliam Museum, U.K.