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拍品專文
‘Sculpture born in the disguise of two dimensions’ was how Hepworth described her drawings to the art historian E.H. Ramsden in 1943 (B. Hepworth, quoted in A. Wilkinson, The Drawings of Barbara Hepworth, Farnham, 2015, p. 69). Rarely plans or representations of sculptures – these were scribbled ‘on bits of scrap paper or cigarette boxes’ – her drawings were an explorative practice, a search for rhythms, curves and forms that resonate through subsequent sculptures. In Two curved forms on a grey ground a fine pencil line swings across the surface in rhythmic arcs, overlapping and intersecting to form elliptical shapes in between. In the upper form two sections are coloured in bright yellow and blue, becoming focal points in the picture, while a fan of lines resembling her stringed sculptures twist across the right hand side of the form.
The present work was executed in 1946, in the midst of Hepworth’s most prolific decade of drawing. With materials for carving difficult to obtain in the early years of the war and little space and time with four young children, Hepworth turned to drawing with renewed focus, which gathered momentum as the decade progressed. Between 1940-1942, Hepworth made a remarkable series of abstract drawings, depicting crystalline forms composed of intersecting lines, which over the 1940s evolved into the more organic forms evident in the present work.
Two curved forms on a grey ground is indicative of Hepworth’s adaption of earlier abstract theory and constructivist principles to accommodate her response to landscape, which became a central theme of her practice from this time. When Hepworth arrived in Carbis Bay, bordering St Ives in West Cornwall with Ben Nicholson in 1939, she had thus far pioneered a sculptural practice influenced by Constructivism and the abstraction of the Parisian avant-garde. The present drawing is comparable to the Constructivist sculptures of Naum Gabo, who lived close to Nicholson and Hepworth in Cornwall, notably Construction in space with crystalline centre, which Hepworth photographed overlooking the Bay of St Ives. Meanwhile her use of colour recalls Piet Mondrian’s gridded compositions, with whom Hepworth again enjoyed an engaging discourse. In 1942, she and Nicholson moved into a house high on the clifftop of Carbis Bay, and her work increasingly echoed a growing engagement with landscape. Two curved forms on a grey ground integrates constructivist ideals with an organic response to landscape, reflected in seminal carvings of this time such as Pelagos, 1946 (Tate), and Pendour, 1947, which shares a resemblance to the elongated forms of the present work. The same year Hepworth made this drawing, she explained:
‘I have gained great inspiration from the Cornish land- and sea-scape, the horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one’s sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a great whole. This relationship between figure and landscape is very important to me. I can not feel it in a city’ (B. Hepworth, quoted in A. Wilkinson, op. cit. p. 58).
We are grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness and Jenna Lundin Aral for their assistance with the cataloguing apparatus for this work. Dr Sophie Bowness and Jenna Lundin Aral are preparing the revised catalogue raisonné of Hepworth’s paintings.
The present work was executed in 1946, in the midst of Hepworth’s most prolific decade of drawing. With materials for carving difficult to obtain in the early years of the war and little space and time with four young children, Hepworth turned to drawing with renewed focus, which gathered momentum as the decade progressed. Between 1940-1942, Hepworth made a remarkable series of abstract drawings, depicting crystalline forms composed of intersecting lines, which over the 1940s evolved into the more organic forms evident in the present work.
Two curved forms on a grey ground is indicative of Hepworth’s adaption of earlier abstract theory and constructivist principles to accommodate her response to landscape, which became a central theme of her practice from this time. When Hepworth arrived in Carbis Bay, bordering St Ives in West Cornwall with Ben Nicholson in 1939, she had thus far pioneered a sculptural practice influenced by Constructivism and the abstraction of the Parisian avant-garde. The present drawing is comparable to the Constructivist sculptures of Naum Gabo, who lived close to Nicholson and Hepworth in Cornwall, notably Construction in space with crystalline centre, which Hepworth photographed overlooking the Bay of St Ives. Meanwhile her use of colour recalls Piet Mondrian’s gridded compositions, with whom Hepworth again enjoyed an engaging discourse. In 1942, she and Nicholson moved into a house high on the clifftop of Carbis Bay, and her work increasingly echoed a growing engagement with landscape. Two curved forms on a grey ground integrates constructivist ideals with an organic response to landscape, reflected in seminal carvings of this time such as Pelagos, 1946 (Tate), and Pendour, 1947, which shares a resemblance to the elongated forms of the present work. The same year Hepworth made this drawing, she explained:
‘I have gained great inspiration from the Cornish land- and sea-scape, the horizontal line of the sea and the quality of light and colour which reminds me of the Mediterranean light and colour which so excites one’s sense of form; and first and last there is the human figure which in the country becomes a free and moving part of a great whole. This relationship between figure and landscape is very important to me. I can not feel it in a city’ (B. Hepworth, quoted in A. Wilkinson, op. cit. p. 58).
We are grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness and Jenna Lundin Aral for their assistance with the cataloguing apparatus for this work. Dr Sophie Bowness and Jenna Lundin Aral are preparing the revised catalogue raisonné of Hepworth’s paintings.