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Lot Essay
We are very 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.
Executed in 1960, Hepworth’s Turning form (blue) is characteristic of the artist’s sculptural approach to her drawing. Through a harmonious web of intersecting parallel and curvilinear lines, Hepworth creates a network of layered planes which give the impression of space. Interlocking and spiraling, the formations flow and surge with movement that mirrors the aims of the constructivist ethos, championed by Naum Gabo, who lived in St Ives alongside Hepworth and Nicholson during the Second World War.
Hepworth described how ‘abstract drawing has always been for me a particularly exciting adventure. First there is only one’s mood; then the surface takes one’s mood in colour and texture; then a line or curve which, made with a pencil on the hard surface of many coats of oil or gouache, has a particular kind of ‘’bite’’ rather like incising on slate; then one is lost in a new world of a thousand possibilities because the next line in association with the first will have a compulsion about it which will carry one forward into completely unknown territory. … Suddenly before one’s eyes is a new form which, from the sculptor’s point of view, free as it is from the problems of solid material, can be deepened or extended, twisted or flattened, tightened and hardened according to one’s will, as one imbues it with its own special life. The whole process is opposite to that of drawing from life’ (the artist quoted in A. Bowness, Barbara Hepworth, Drawings from a Sculptor’s Landscape, London, 1966, pp. 19-20).
While Hepworth’s draughtsmanship appears geometric, the curved lines and coloured elements are inspired by her interest in the colour and forms of the Cornish landscape. It is within this balance between organic and geometric forms in Turning form (blue) that Hepworth channels our primitive relationship to the natural world around us.
Executed in 1960, Hepworth’s Turning form (blue) is characteristic of the artist’s sculptural approach to her drawing. Through a harmonious web of intersecting parallel and curvilinear lines, Hepworth creates a network of layered planes which give the impression of space. Interlocking and spiraling, the formations flow and surge with movement that mirrors the aims of the constructivist ethos, championed by Naum Gabo, who lived in St Ives alongside Hepworth and Nicholson during the Second World War.
Hepworth described how ‘abstract drawing has always been for me a particularly exciting adventure. First there is only one’s mood; then the surface takes one’s mood in colour and texture; then a line or curve which, made with a pencil on the hard surface of many coats of oil or gouache, has a particular kind of ‘’bite’’ rather like incising on slate; then one is lost in a new world of a thousand possibilities because the next line in association with the first will have a compulsion about it which will carry one forward into completely unknown territory. … Suddenly before one’s eyes is a new form which, from the sculptor’s point of view, free as it is from the problems of solid material, can be deepened or extended, twisted or flattened, tightened and hardened according to one’s will, as one imbues it with its own special life. The whole process is opposite to that of drawing from life’ (the artist quoted in A. Bowness, Barbara Hepworth, Drawings from a Sculptor’s Landscape, London, 1966, pp. 19-20).
While Hepworth’s draughtsmanship appears geometric, the curved lines and coloured elements are inspired by her interest in the colour and forms of the Cornish landscape. It is within this balance between organic and geometric forms in Turning form (blue) that Hepworth channels our primitive relationship to the natural world around us.