(You
guessed it, another art exhibition reviewed after its over)
Among
the Carvers
If
you bothered to read the critics, you'll know this show was given a
poor press. Some of that thunder can be dismissed as simple art
snobbery. Hepworth, as we’ll see, progressed from high-minded
Modernism to the best form of populism. In other words, she let the
rabble in. Jonathan Jones’ review falls into that category, even if he shies
from saying so outright. (But then he's... oh,just see for yourself. It's not a parody. It just reads like
one.)
But
the most common diss is to claim a disservice is being done to her.
Which suggests the real target is curator and now outgoing Tate
Director Penelope Curtis. Who, true enough, at times staged some high-concept and quite spectacularly ill-advised shows.
And this is but one example of her preference for sculpture, which
seems to have have irked those who don’t share it. Yet she was also
Director, for example, for the highly successful British Folk Art show. The real reason
for the knives is almost certainly down to some London arts scene
version of office politics, which the rest of us can safely
disregard. Nevertheless, just for once let's take the critics as a
starting point.
For,
while not necessarily co-ordinated, the attacks take on a remarkably
similar form. Laura Cumming indulges in one of the typical laments: “her
works are heavily alarmed or locked away in glass cases so that you
can’t touch them, as Hepworth strongly urged… [while] the more
austere her work, the more sterile it looks in the subterranean
galleries at Tate Britain. The groupings of pristine abstract forms…
look especially stark and unnatural in the artificial lighting.”
And this from critics who said not a word when Joseph Cornell's interactive assemblages were kept behind glass!
Beneath
those vitrines the first room shows the 'direct carving' movement of
the Tens and Twenties. Practitioners included Eric Gill, Jacob
Epstein, Henri Gauider-Brezeska and Hepworth's first husband John
Skeaping. Which is fine company. Certainly its enough to get the
critics fulminating. Alistair Sooke writes in the Telegraph: “By (rightly) making the
point that Hepworth and Moore weren’t the only artists innovating
during this period... the show reconsiders her early contribution as
less pioneering, and more in keeping with a trend. At a stroke, her
artistic courage is undermined.”
Sorry,
what? It's acknowledged that this was a movement,
but we shouldn't be allowed to say so? You can of course stuff any
artist with pioneering courage by disregarding their context or their
contemporaries. Picasso would have sole credit for Cubism if we
eliminate Braque, Dali for Surrealism if you drop Ernst and so on.
But the point is we can talk about Braque and still see Picasso as an
important artist. Sooke is in essence suggesting Hepworth's artistic
reputation can only be maintained by denial. In short, he's the one
doing the undermining, even if its cloaked by gallantry. Besides
which, artists developing through movements, through reflecting
current circumstances and influencing one another, even if its not
always formalised or made up into a manifesto... this is news to some
people?
Analogously,
in the vidclip below, Sooke praises the show for minimising the
comparisons between Hepworth and Henry Moore. Yet, both Yorkshire
born, they met young at the Leeds School of Art and, to quote Wikipedia, “established a friendly rivalry that
lasted professionally for many years”.
Let's
move on to the thing itself. Sculpture, and direct carving in
particular, was then seen as “lower in status” than painting, as
more of a craft rather than an art. ('Art sculptors' often worked
only on the maquette, or template model, leaving the creation of the
actual sculpture to assistants.) And much of this movement seems to
be about a contrary luxuriating in the low status, in being an artist
willing to get your fingers dirty.
But
the desire to get your hands on the materials also shows an interest
in the materials themselves. They're not considered incidental to the
subject, like the proverbial blank canvas, but inexorably tied up
with it. Notably the subjects are often animals, and the titles
simply descriptive. The human subjects are often similarly impassive,
defined by what they are doing – see for example Hepworth's
'Musician' (1929/30, below). Things are simply
what they are. As the show says, there is often some of the “hieratic
and stately” quality of ancient Egyptian and Mexican carvings.
The
wide variety of materials on display suggest an interest in different
forms of wood and stone, as if they were your real subject. Hepworth herself said at the time "carving to me is more interesting than
modelling, because there is an unlimited variety of materials from
which to draw inspiration. Each material demands a particular
treatment and there are an infinite number of subjects in life each
to be re-created in a particular material. In fact, it would be
possible to carve the same subject in a different stone each time,
throughout life, without a repetition of form.”
The
show talks of her “allowing the natural form of the wood to shine
through her carving”. And indeed, in a work like 'Torso'
(1932, below) the base of the sculpture remains a rough wood block.
But there's also a paradox where the material cannot be too dominant.
The two have to blend together. Whereas the patterned lapiz-lazuli of Skeaping's' Buffalo' (1930) becomes obtrusive and distracting.
As
might be suggested by the method, the success of the art often comes
from reduction – from chiselling away until you're left with the
essence of a thing. Epstein's' Doves' (1914/15) are sweeping blocks of stone with the
merest hint of dove about them, an assured triumph. While Skeaping's 'Fish' (1929/30) gives his subject an almost cartoony circle for an eye.
(And keep that eye in mind.)
Nevertheless,
there is something of a Year Zero approach to direct carving. As
ever, you go back to basics when you feel you've taken a wrong turn.
And once you've realigned yourself, you head off again in a fresh
direction. The musical comparison might be the blues boom of Sixties
Britain, which allowed bands to head off into psychedelia, hard rock
and other frontiers.
Conjoined
With Nicholson
Next
up is Nicholson. By '31 Hepworth had separated from Skeaping and was
sharing both her studio and life with Ben Nicholson. At which point
you might start to wonder if the more feminist-minded critics start
to have a point. Victoria Sadler, for example, complains “the effect is to
undermine Barbara completely by defining her by who she was in a
relationship with rather than on her own terms”.
It
might sound counter-intuitive, but actually the answer is no. In
fact, if paradoxically, this focus on her husbands is arguably too
kind to Hepworth. It takes the emphasis away from Naum Gabo, which
was using both stringed and pierced forms before her. (This fixation
with linear innovation within Modernism always seems to me to be
something of a trap. Yet it is the language these retrospectives
often deal in, with the neat chronologies they throw up on the
walls.)
But
most important was Nicholson's take on Modernism. It then often felt
like a continental import to Britain; like olives or camembert
cheese, a product which simply didn't grow here. So British Modernism
tended to be merely imitative of continental innovations. Whereas, to again quote Wikipedia, Nicholson's “gift... was the ability to
incorporate… European trends into a new style that was recognizably
his own.”
Tate
Brit's previous ’Picasso and Modern British Art’ was anchored to one of Penelope
Curtis' more hopeless conceits, and for the most part to get anything
out of it you needed to blinker the intended through-line from your
sight. But Nicholson was one of the few British artists able to
ingest Picasso without becoming a mere disciple, and so emerge from
it unscathed. Works such as 'Au Chat Botte' (1932) display a Horlicks-drinking,
raincoat-wearing English take on Modernism – almost numinously
drab. And, not unassociatedly, Wikipedia also mentions “he believed
that abstract art should be enjoyed by the general public”, rather
than be uber-fashionable continental chic for elite metropolitans.
(As with the fish eye, watch out for that one.)
Plus,
unlike Skeaping Nicholson was not a sculptor but a painter – making
it unlikely Hepworth would simply absorb his influence directly. Hepworth herself said of their relationship "as painter and
sculptor each was the other's best critic." A comment perhaps
embodied by her 'Two Heads' (1932, above). While
Moore was ceaselessly carving Mother and Child figures, Hepworth
fuses together two adults. Its hard not to see the figures as
Nicholson and herself. Similar profiles of the male head seem to have
been recurring figures for Nicholson. While the incised, cartoony eye
recalls the round fish eye of earlier. And, while the male head does
dominate, its presented as a joining of minds as much as bodies.
The
Limits of Abstraction
As
the Thirties progressed, Modernism came more and more to have its
head. And it decided that head was square. Or pure oval. Possibly
triangular. Certainly anything but head-shaped. The show does
describe the appeal of this tendency to 'pure form' very well, as “an
idealist belief in the universal language of abstraction as the
appropriate response to the rise of a right-wing totalitarianism in
Europe”. In short, Esperanto for the eyes. And the rise of fascism
threw up opportunity alongside motive, as continental artists
increasingly needed to flee persecution. They'd figuratively, and
sometimes literally, turn up on Hepworth and Nicholson's doorstep.
The
problem is that aesthetically this was an ill wind which almost
beached Modernism. Nicholson, by the time of his white-on-white reliefs, is a good example of an artist who
had painted himself into the corner of pure form and lost everything
that was once interesting about him.
But the ill wind swayed Hepworth herself. 'Three Forms'
(1935, above) is an example of a less effective, less resonant work
of art which at least we get to blame on the Nazis. If the direct
carving works seemed merely formative, merely the start of something,
'Three Forms' seems its end. I confess I'd like to
draw three cartoony faces on it in the manner of 'Two
Heads'. In a sadder universe Hepworth might well have ended
down that cul-de-sac, with only perfect spheres for company.
”The
Sea Is Never Far”
Happily
for our world, she not only sprang back but into her mature phase.
Reports seem to vary as to when she moved to the town with which
she’s most associated – St. Ives on the Cornish coast. Wikipedia
suggests either 1939 or 1949, while her dedicated website weighs in on the second. Perhaps she settled there
gradually. Whichever, it was Hepworth the St. Ives artist who endured
over the abstract internationalist. And this seems the place where
her mature phase as an artist begins. Earlier on, it is likely this
show lied not and she was merely one among many, perhaps even a
disciple to Epstein and others. No longer.
The
sea might seem the least sculptural subject of all. Imagine the
pointlessness of a bronze of rolling waves. Yet Hepworth used this to
her advantage. The BFI film 'Figures in a Landscape', shown as part of the
exhibition has a fruity voice-over by Cecil Day-Lewis which
frequently tips over into self-parody. But when he says “the sea is
never far, it shapes the rocks, hollowing those caves” he makes a
valid point - the sea itself acts as a sculptor. And more important
still, she sought to capture the sea without slavishly duplicating
its surface features. And a feature of this work is the way it never
quite resolves into either abstract form or naturalism – its, to
coin a phrase, 'just abstract enough'.
It
often reminds us of the way nature can give us geometry, in its
stones and seashells. The trademark holes in her work she called
“caves” and “hollows”. The bold colours of a work like
'Sculpture in Colour (Deep Blue and Red)' (1940,
above), recall the way an exposed interior of a stone or piece of
wood can be be a strikingly brighter colour, before the sun wears it
down. (She said herself “except in two instances I have always used
colour with concave forms. When applied to convex forms I have felt
that the colour appeared to be 'applied' instead of becoming inherent
in the formal idea. I have been very influenced by the natural colour
and luminosity in stones and woods.”) Even her radiating spoke
strings, perhaps the least naturalistic element of her work, still
suggest the ribbing patterns on seashells.
And
perhaps she was almost poised for this. The cartoony features of
earlier never return. But they always acted as a cross between a
counter-weight and an anchor rope – pulling her art back from
toppling irrevocably into the neat geometry of pure form.
And
more than we notice any of this we sense it, so we
don't react to these works as something abstract, austere or removed
from our lives. Yet its just as important that these suggestions
never become more than that. We find we can relate to the work
without ascribing a fixed meaning to it. 'Pelagos'
(1946, above) is described by the Tate's website as potentially resembling “a shell,
a wave or the roll of a hill”. When Hepworth spoke of it resembling
“the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the
hills” the important word is “tension”.
Let's
do the very thing Alistair Sooke told us not to, and compare Hepworth
with Henry Moore. Rather than diminishing her or making her his
understudy, this brings out everything that's singular about her. As
is well known, both Moore and Hepworth disliked galleries and
preferred their work to be shown in situ. But from that point, they
may well differ. As said over his own exhibition, Moore's work has an
autocthonian dimension. While Hepworth's muse may well have been the
sea. To this day Moore has a sculpture park set in the Yorkshire
countryside, and Hepworth on the Cornish coast. As Herbert Read said
in 'Modern Sculpture' “She has gone directly to
nature, to crystals and shells, to rocks and the form-weaving sea”.
Further,
while there are some reclining figures, mostly early on in this show,
there's nothing to Moore's degree. Its like two painters, one working
in landscape and the other portrait. (Or at least square format.) And
Hepworth uses this to group her figures. Of course all artists
benefit from having their work accumulated, that's why everyone wants
a solo exhibition as soon as they can get one. To get an idea what an
artist is doing, you need some dots to connect. But there's something
more with Hepworth. Her works don't accumulate so much as gang
together.
There
are sometimes several forms on one base as in 'Group
(Concourse)' (1951, above), like semi-abstraction's answer
to a crowd scene. The mere act of placing forms together is almost
enough to make them more figurative. Try imagining one of the forms
in 'Forms in Echelon' (1938, also above) taken in
isolation, and the effect would be quite different. As the show says
“she liked to display her sculptures as if in conversation with
each other, so that they become more of a group than an example of
individual figures”. And this changed relationship between them
changes their relation to us. They don't belong on some high Olympian
plinth, but set in surroundings. They need to have a place in the
world.
For
all that Moore was willing to plasticate or even break apart the
human form, Hepworth had a greater tendency to abstraction. This
could be down to the way the 'pure' human form is assumed to be male.
Give it any female attributes and in the popular imagination it
becomes 'womankind' rather than 'humankind'. For example Moore's 'Family Group' (1949), part of Tate Britain's permanent
display, identifies the mother primarily by her skirt and longer
hair, and the father simply by the absence of these. Formally
speaking, they're not that different to the identifying figures we
find on loo doors. There is admittedly no firm evidence for this
theory, and it may merely be projecting more contemporary thoughts
back in time. But for Hepworth semi-abstraction might have been a
route out of a man's world.
Art
For A Modern World, A Modern World For Art
Ironically
the two great post-war British sculptors are also known for each
creating an important set of drawings. You could perhaps play compare
and contrast endlessly between Hepworth’s Hospital and Moore’s
Shelter series. For example, both are built up through shading and
contour lines. Yet Moore's wartime shelter drawings looked back to
the underworld of Greek mythology, it's faceless figures shades.
Whereas in 'Concentration of Hands II' (1948,
above) the surgeons are masked but in the way a superhero might be
masked, so they can stand for a concept. The composition means the
picture's emphasis falls not on their faces but their working hands,
the masks just de-emphasises them further.
But
this time the differences aren’t so much the differences between
the two artists. Though separated by only five or six years,
everything had changed in the meantime - they effectively belong to
different eras. The NHS was bright and newly born when Hepworth drew
it. As the Doctors work on the human body, so does post-war politics
on the body politic and the sculptor on her block. (A comparison made
directly in some of the other drawings, such as 'Fenestration of the Ear', 1948). Like the NHS, Hepworth sees art as
playing a public role.
In
these days of blockbuster shows and Tate expansionism its difficult
to reconstruct just how much Modernism was initially shunned by a
distrustful British public. Taking up internationalism meant quite
literally to abandon nationalism – to turn against any possibility
of a sizeable domestic audience. And yet, both Moore and Hepworth
broke this bind to become popular artists. The show presents Hepworth
as quite single-minded in her career, careful in how both her work
and her own image were presented. (For example arranging her studio
to be more photogenic. Film of her also excluded her assistants,
fitting the 'single-handed genius' notion many then had of artists.)
But while she might have helped herself along, that hardly seems the
whole story.
Neither
did Hepworth or Moore blunt their edge out of careerism. Firstly
while their work can be talked about it doesn’t require
explaining in the way, say, Cubism might. And people
generally sense that it’s okay to look at a piece and simply say
whether they like it or not. The public has a way in. But further, in
a rare case of the ‘avant garde’ actually behaving the way its
supposed to, it would be truer to say Britain finally caught up with
them. There was a widespread post-war feeling that merely defeating
fascism wasn’t enough - people didn’t want to go back to the way
things were. Benevolent public institutions seemed our antidote to
the ego of wartime dictators. This was to be the era of the Common
Man.
So,
living in a newly invented world, they needed a newly invented art to
go with it. And alongside this reimagined nation, the
internationalism of the Abstract Modernism era returns – only in a
more optimistic, less defensive way. Hepworth submitting designs for
the rebuilt Waterloo bridge and exhibiting in the 1951 Festival of
Britain, celebrating post-war reconstruction, must be seen in this
context. As Fiona McCarthy says, she was “eager to take an active
part in Britain's postwar reconstruction - by making public sculpture
for new schools, for civic centres, taking art out of the studio.”
The
show displays 'The Quarrel With Realism', Le
Corbusier's article from 1941 from the magazine 'Circle'.
(Co-edited by Nicholson and with Hepworth was heavily involved.)
“What will become of painting and sculpture? It would seem that
these two major arts should accompany architecture. There is room for
them there.” While Hepworth herself said in 1946 “one of the
functions of sculpture is to fulfil the demands and conditions of a
given site. Present conditions restrict this idea so that the
sculptor works mainly in his studio and eventually, if he is
fortunate, a suitable place is found for the sculpture by somebody
who has the money to buy it. This means that the creation of large
sculptures is restricted; but is partly compensated for by the growth
among all kinds of people of a love for sculpture.... This kind of
appreciation will help to develop the sense of form (nearly atrophied
in Western civilization) until it becomes a part of our life in the
way that poetry, music and painting have been and are increasingly
part of our life.”
And
the new taste for public projects proved both a context and a market
for large, site-specific sculptor. Once a hospital might have hung in
it's lobby a broad oil of its generous benefactor, for the rest of us
to walk respectfully beneath. The creation of institutions such as
the NHS allowed for sculpture to celebrate the doctor or surgeon, or
perhaps just the idealised human form.
Perhaps
the crescending example of this is her largest work, the 6.4 metre
tall 'Single Form' outside the UN Secretariat Building in New York. It
was built to commemorate the former Secretary General (and personal
friend of hers) Dag Hammarskjöld, but of course is not at all a
personal portrait. Speaking at its unveiling in 1964 she commented “the United
Nations is our conscience. If it succeeds, it is our success. If it
fails, it is our failure." (Moore similarly created a work for
the UNESCO building in Paris in 1958.)
That
much of the public art of this era, donated to public bodies or
spaces, is now being sold to private hands or (yes really) carted off by banks encapsulates perfectly the difference between
their era and ours. Everything not bolted down is now to be flogged
off and everything bolted down to be unbolted on order for it to be
flogged off. (It is of course worse when day centres close or one of the world’s richest countries leaves people to die of destitution. But that’s not a defence, just a way of
reframing the same critique. Since when was that made the choice we
had to make?)
As
part of her plan to take art out the gallery and studio Hepworth made
collage cut-outs of her sculptures, against both natural and
architectural environments. (Some of which have only recently been rediscovered.) Being more
abstract than Moore, her work perhaps fitted the urban environment
better. But perhaps what's most surprising is how adaptable they are.
The
snappily titled 'Photo-collage with Helicoids in Sphere in
the Entrance Hall of Flats Designed by Alfred and Emily Roth and
Marcel Brewat, Zurich' (1939, above), which was used for
the poster image (up top) sees one of her works plinthed in a sleek
Modernist pad, the sort of thing we saw Jacob Shulman photographing in 'Constructing Worlds'. A modernist work in a modernist environment - of
course it fits! But when you see 'Photo-Collage with
Helicoids in Sphere in the Garden of Redleaf, Penshurst'
(1938, also above) it also fits - so well it takes you a moment to
realise they're the same work. Similarly the later 'Theme on
Electronics (Orpheus)' is shown at Mullard Electronics
Centre in 1957. Yet there's also a photo of it from the previous
year, in her garden. Hepworth's motive may well have been commercial,
enhancing sale potential by expanding reach. But we're less
interested in intent than effect. This ambidextorousness of her work
is in itself a feature of her popularising of Modernism.
One
Last Twist
In
the mid-Fifties Hepworth made a series of works using the tropical
hardwood Guarea. They're considerably larger works given a room of
their own, recalling the Elm Figures of the Moore retrospective. And
like the Moores they seem grand and ostentatious rather than potent.
They look tasteful, like heirloom furniture. At the time I called the Moores “reassuring”. By that
point he was washed up. But with Hepworth there's almost literally
another twist.
The
following room is given over to the bronzes she exhibited at the 1965
Kroller-Muller Museum in the Netherlands. Much effort is put into
recreating the once-outdoor pavilion indoors, even down to
wallpapering the back wall with a forest scene. This is pointlessly
gimmicky, but it doesn't matter much when the new material gives
Hepworth such fresh life.
After
the perfect geometry of earlier, surfaces are now roughly textured.
If you encountered their mottled copper greens while walking
outdoors, you'd be hard pressed to figure how naturally weathered
they were. Spoke strings vanish while holes multiply and almost take
over. Hepworth stretches and twists the material, in a way simply not
possible with wood or stone. 'Oval Form (Trezian)'
(1961/3, above) looks almost like an enlarged twist of tagliatelli.
Other works seem to evoke geometric symmetry only to bend their way
out of it, such as 'Curved Form (Trevalgan)'
(1956, below). It's a long way from the direct carving days. The
works don't necessarily look like they were made,
it seems entirely possible they might have grown that way. Perhaps
they were once purer forms, but were hurled into Hepworth's elemental
sea and emerged looking like they do. They were compared at the time
to the younger generation of sculptors associated with the term Geometry of Fear, such as Eduardo Paolozzi or William Turnbull.
Fiona McCarthy writes of the tendency of critics to place
Hepworth in Moore's shadow. “When his triumphant 1948 exhibition at
the Venice Biennale was followed by Hepworth's lower-key showing two
years later, the international critics assumed she was his pupil.”
And in some ways this continues. Though we may be less negative about
women artists these days, perhaps Hepworth has been running with that
handicap since then. Moore's most recent Tate retrospective was five
years before this, without critics savaging it in the same way.
Yet
however great an artist Moore was, Hepworth was almost certainly
better. If the task of an artist is to capture their era, Hepworth
took that task on more successfully. Yet paradoxically her art is
also more fluid, less tied to a fixed meaning or set of meanings. And
she carried on creating innovative works after Moore's effective
career was over. She was Britain's best post-war sculptor.
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