Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth: In Equilibrium

Heide Museum of Modern Art
by •
22 November 2022
Barbara Hepworth, Eidos 1947, National Gallery of Victoria
‘I do not want to make a stone horse that is trying to and cannot smell the air,’ quipped the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth in 1934. What Hepworth meant by this cryptic statement is that she did not wish to be an artist making figurative sculptures of recognisable subjects but instead to distil her deep sensitivity to the natural world into a language of living things that could themselves breathe, palpitating with a sense of their own inner vitality. ... (read more)

Barbara Hepworth: Art and life by Eleanor Clayton

by •
October 2021, no. 436
Gregory Day reviews 'Barbara Hepworth: Art and life' by Eleanor Clayton

Constantin Brâncuşi famously said that making a work of art is not in itself a difficult thing: the hard part is putting oneself in the necessary state of mind. Eleanor Clayton’s new biography of English sculptor Barbara Hepworth is in its own way a celebration of just how devoted Hepworth was to maintaining that elusive state of mind to which Brâncuşi referred. Unlike Sally Festing’s Hepworth biography, A Life of Forms (1995), Clayton eschews any attempt to narrate or analyse Hepworth’s private feelings or emotional make-up. Instead she narrows her focus most austerely to the practice of the working sculptor, her aesthetic philosophies, and the compelling yet subtle variations of her output.

... (read more)