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拍品专文
Stone sculpture, reclining figure was created following a period of intense draughtsmanship in Hepworth’s career. At the beginning of the Second World War, Hepworth and Nicholson had moved to St Ives, providing their young family with a safer place to live. In those unsettled days, however, Hepworth was forced to interrupt her sculpture, thus focussing on drawing. Remembering the early 1940s, Hepworth commented: ‘In the late evenings, and during the night I did innumerable drawings in gouache and pencil – all of them abstract, and all of them my own way of exploring the particular tension and relationship of form and colour which were to occupy me in sculpture during the later years of the war’ (B. Hepworth, quoted in H. Read, (ed.), Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, London, 1952, n.p.). In 1943, in fact, Hepworth started carving again, exploring in sculpture what she had studied in her 1940-42 drawings. Works such as Stone sculpture, reclining figure, executed in 1947, provided further means of exploring new sculptural forms and expanding the research begun at the outbreak of the War.
The present work belongs to a series of works executed in 1947, whose rigid angularity seems at odds with the figure studies and medical drawings of that time. However, the form appears to relate to Hepworth's studies and maquettes for a large carving for Waterloo Bridge, a commission which she was undertaking during that year. Although the Waterloo Bridge pieces are more sinuous, there are similarities in the overall forms and shapes. The reference to a 'reclining figure' in the title is redolent of Henry Moore's sculpture before the War, emphasising the anthropomorphism within the work.
Speaking of the drawings executed after the Second World War, Hepworth explained: ‘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’ (B. Hepworth, quoted in ibid., n.p.).
We are grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness for her assistance with the cataloguing apparatus for this work. Dr Sophie Bowness is preparing the revised catalogue raisonné of Hepworth’s paintings and drawings.
The present work belongs to a series of works executed in 1947, whose rigid angularity seems at odds with the figure studies and medical drawings of that time. However, the form appears to relate to Hepworth's studies and maquettes for a large carving for Waterloo Bridge, a commission which she was undertaking during that year. Although the Waterloo Bridge pieces are more sinuous, there are similarities in the overall forms and shapes. The reference to a 'reclining figure' in the title is redolent of Henry Moore's sculpture before the War, emphasising the anthropomorphism within the work.
Speaking of the drawings executed after the Second World War, Hepworth explained: ‘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’ (B. Hepworth, quoted in ibid., n.p.).
We are grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness for her assistance with the cataloguing apparatus for this work. Dr Sophie Bowness is preparing the revised catalogue raisonné of Hepworth’s paintings and drawings.