BARBARA HEPWORTH was born into a sepia world before feminism was invented. As a would-be artist, she faced far greater hurdles than her male coevals and especially the sculptor Henry Moore, with whom she was compared throughout her life. However, she held on to her ambition, explaining herself in essays, manifestos and a propagandising A Pictorial Autobiography, which laid down boundaries for what future audiences could know or write about her. In middle age, she emerged into the limelight as an awkward pioneer in the history of modern art, whose signature pierced forms and expressive, dynamic public sculptures had found a new, global audience.
All this was achieved at some personal cost and by ferocious determination and control, both in her lifetime and posthumously. The measures that Hepworth took ensured that her concrete achievements remained to the fore; the familial and emotional were embargoed, together with her personal papers. She knew that to be judged as a woman on the counterweight of her private life would have provoked harsh criticism then.
After her death in 1975, control ceded to her family, particularly her late son-in-law, the curator and art historian Sir Alan Bowness, who has gradually drawn her from under Moore’s long shadow. Deftly machinating for the founding of Tate St Ives and entrusting Tate with Hepworth’s house-museum there, Bowness confirmed Hepworth’s icon status in the 1990s by endowing the HepworthWakefield in her home town with her prototypes for sculpture in plasters that still bear the textured marks of her hand tools.
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Denne historien er fra July 28, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
