04/09/15
Barbara Hepworth: Representing the Work and the Self through
Photography
Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World
Tate Britain
24 June – 25 October 2015
Hepworth in Yorkshire
The Hepworth Wakefield
16 May – 6 September 2015
A Greater Freedom: Hepworth 1965-1975
The Hepworth Wakefield
18 April 2015 – April 2016
Much as I love looking at the sculptural work of Barbara
Hepworth (1903-75), I also love looking at photographs and film footage of the
sculptor herself, both at rest and, even more so, at work. Perhaps this quote,
from the mouth of the artist herself in 1961, goes some way towards explaining
this predeliction: “I, the sculptor, am the
landscape. I am the form and I am the hollow, the thrust and the contour.”
This summer sees three shows dedicated to the
sculptor: Penelope Curtis’s final offering at Tate Britain and two smaller, but
equally rigorous and delightful, exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield, home to
the Hepworth Family Gift, a collection of 44 of the artist’s surviving working
models for her bronze sculptures.
While Tate’s exhibition unsurprisingly largely comprises
sculpture, it dedicates one worthy section – Staging Sculpture – to photographs
taken by both Hepworth and others, showing her work in the landscape. Many of
these, including a series of photo-collages, cutting out photographs of
existing sculptures and pasting them on to new backdrops, including a house
designed by Richard Neutra in Los Angeles and the interior of flats designed by
Alfred and Emil Roth and Marcel Breuer in Zurich, have never been shown before,
except for when published in Architectural
Review in April 1939. Fired by her ambition to work on a larger scale,
Hepworth made these composite images to show how her work might enrich an
architectural or natural setting. Photography enabled her to explore such sculptural
ideas and only partly came out of economic necessity.
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