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拍品專文
The hollowed out ovoid is one of the defining forms of Barbara Hepworth’s oeuvre. Inspired by the dramatic, undulating landscape of her home in St. Ives, Cornwall, and demonstrating her innate understanding of her materials and her ability to carve, shape or sculpt them, for Hepworth, this motif had a universal resonance. As she described, “the closed form, such as the oval, spherical or pierced form (sometimes incorporating color) which translates for me the association and meaning of gesture in landscape; in the repose of say a mother and child, or the feeling of the embrace of living things, either in nature or in the human spirit” (quoted in P. Curtis and A.G. Wilkinson, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Tate Gallery Liverpool, 1994, p. 82).
Conceived in 1966, Elegy III was cast from a wood carving executed the previous year: Hollow Form with White (BH 384; Tate, London). Cast in an edition of seven, with this work Hepworth harnessed the aesthetic potentials of bronze. The polished elm wood surface of Hollow Form with White has been transformed into the gleaming, timeless metal, and the white painted interior replaced with a richly evocative green-blue patina. Other casts of Elegy III reside in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo and the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, University of California, Los Angeles.
Elegy III is the third and final work of a closely related trio of sculptures, all of which share the same title. The first two, Elegy and Elegy II (BH 131 and 134; Private collection and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh), are wood carvings executed in the mid-1940s. With their pierced ovoid forms, these works reflect an essential shift that occurred in Hepworth’s work at this time. In July 1942, Hepworth and her family had moved to a new, larger house on Carbis Bay in St. Ives. Though the war raged on, Hepworth now had the space to begin carving again. “A new era seemed to begin for me… There was a sudden release… now I had a studio workroom looking straight towards the horizon of the sea and enfolded (but with always the escape for the eye straight out to the Atlantic) by the arms of land to the left and right of me” (quoted in ibid., p. 81).
From this point onwards, the Cornish landscape played an essential role in Hepworth’s sculpture, as Elegy III demonstrates. She began not only to hollow out and pierce forms, imparting a sense of the rolling hills, cavernous cliffs, and rugged coastline, but also to incorporate the colors of the world around her into her work. “The color in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves, or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves,” she once explained (quoted in ibid., p. 82). The luminous aqua-toned hollows of the present work conjure the ever-changing turquoise flecked Atlantic that bordered her Cornish home.
The title, Elegy, also adds a poignancy to this work. Hepworth had first used this title in the middle of the Second World War, reflecting perhaps the melancholy that pervaded these years. In returning to this title, Hepworth was possibly, Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens have written, reiterating her “belief in the affirmation of abstract form in contrast to the destruction of war” (Barbara Hepworth, Works in the Tate Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum St Ives, London, p. 2001, p. 232).
Conceived in 1966, Elegy III was cast from a wood carving executed the previous year: Hollow Form with White (BH 384; Tate, London). Cast in an edition of seven, with this work Hepworth harnessed the aesthetic potentials of bronze. The polished elm wood surface of Hollow Form with White has been transformed into the gleaming, timeless metal, and the white painted interior replaced with a richly evocative green-blue patina. Other casts of Elegy III reside in the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo and the Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, University of California, Los Angeles.
Elegy III is the third and final work of a closely related trio of sculptures, all of which share the same title. The first two, Elegy and Elegy II (BH 131 and 134; Private collection and Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh), are wood carvings executed in the mid-1940s. With their pierced ovoid forms, these works reflect an essential shift that occurred in Hepworth’s work at this time. In July 1942, Hepworth and her family had moved to a new, larger house on Carbis Bay in St. Ives. Though the war raged on, Hepworth now had the space to begin carving again. “A new era seemed to begin for me… There was a sudden release… now I had a studio workroom looking straight towards the horizon of the sea and enfolded (but with always the escape for the eye straight out to the Atlantic) by the arms of land to the left and right of me” (quoted in ibid., p. 81).
From this point onwards, the Cornish landscape played an essential role in Hepworth’s sculpture, as Elegy III demonstrates. She began not only to hollow out and pierce forms, imparting a sense of the rolling hills, cavernous cliffs, and rugged coastline, but also to incorporate the colors of the world around her into her work. “The color in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water, caves, or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves,” she once explained (quoted in ibid., p. 82). The luminous aqua-toned hollows of the present work conjure the ever-changing turquoise flecked Atlantic that bordered her Cornish home.
The title, Elegy, also adds a poignancy to this work. Hepworth had first used this title in the middle of the Second World War, reflecting perhaps the melancholy that pervaded these years. In returning to this title, Hepworth was possibly, Matthew Gale and Chris Stephens have written, reiterating her “belief in the affirmation of abstract form in contrast to the destruction of war” (Barbara Hepworth, Works in the Tate Collection and the Barbara Hepworth Museum St Ives, London, p. 2001, p. 232).