Barbara Hepworth, Curved Form with Line and Hollow, 1959

1959

Medium

white alabaster

Dimensions

4 × 14 cm

Status

In Gallery Collection

Collect24 Art ID

C24-153527

By the late 1950s, Barbara Hepworth had achieved international acclaim. In 1958, she was awarded a CBE and received a major commission for State House in High Holborn, London, and in 1959, she won the Grand Prix at the fifth Bienal de São Paulo, organised by the British Council. Throughout the decade, Hepworth was highly productive, making 109 sculptures in total – comprising carvings, in a variety of woods and stones and, after 1956, editions in bronze. Of these 1950s carvings, 15 were made in different types of alabaster and Curved Form with Line and Hollow is one of a group of seven white alabaster carvings that Hepworth made in 1959 alone. Two of these seven carvings were exhibited at the Galerie Chalette, New York, that October, while another two (including the present work) were exhibited at the Laing Galleries in Toronto the following month.1 Hepworth had learnt to carve from a marmista (master-carver), named Giovanni Ardini, as a student in Rome, and she remained committed to this classical practice throughout her career. As early as 1932, she declared her passion for carving. ‘The sculptor carves because he must. He needs the concrete form of stone and wood for the expression of his idea and experience, and when the idea forms, the material is found at once. […] I have always preferred direct carving to modelling because I like the resistance of the hard material and feel happier working that way.’ 2 Hepworth favoured alabaster for both its luminosity, and its softness, a characteristic which enabled her to experiment freely with more abstract and complicated forms. Over the course of her career, she made as many as 70 carvings in the material, her first experiments dating from 1928 – 29 (bh 16 and bh 19). By the time she came to carve Curved Form with Line and Hollow, Hepworth had been working with alabaster for some 30 years and, as such, would have approached the block with a clear understanding of the unique properties of the stone. Her confidence and familiarity with the material is reflected in her masterful execution of this highly unusual asymmetrical form. This sequence of alabaster carvings would have been made in Hepworth’s Trewyn studio in St Ives, where she had worked since 1949 – a complex of buildings that included a stone-carving workshop and a carving yard beside it. On receiving stone blocks in the yard, Hepworth would ‘stalk around them as though they are a flock of sheep,’ 3 in order to get to ‘know every one of them: what’s inside the block.’ 4 In a letter dated 20 May 1960, to the then owner of Curved Form with Line and Hollow, Hepworth stated: ‘The original piece of alabaster was quite simply four square and not at all like the finished shape.’ Not only could she clearly envisage the form of a new sculpture just by looking at an uncut block, but, once imagined, she would not deviate from her initial idea during the carving process, saying ‘the idea of changing is terrible to me.’ 5 Carving was an intensely physical process for Hepworth, who insisted on working gradually, rhythmically and laboriously without the use of mechanical tools. By 1959, she was no longer able to stand carving all day and needed to use assistants to rough out the initial form of sculptures for her, but she would always carry out the crucial and delicate stages of the carving herself and usually entirely alone. Although Curved Form with Line and Hollow is undoubtedly abstract, there are clear references to found natural objects and the Cornish landscape, Hepworth’s immediate surroundings inevitably informing much of her work. The sculpture’s organic shape, a variation on an ovoid, can be likened to a mound, an egg, a large pebble or stone, and its smooth surface, gently rounded contours and shallow recesses give the impression that the form has been shaped by nature over time.