Preparation is a significant, canonical example of Barbara Hepworth’s ‘hospital drawings’. It was widely exhibited and illustrated in the artist’s lifetime, and it is recorded in the complete list of Hepworth’s hospital drawings published in 2012. Preparation depicts the recumbent form of a patient surrounded by four medical staff—the surgeon to the right, two nurses or orderlies to the left and an anaesthetist whose hands hold a mask to the patient’s mouth at the lower left-hand corner of the image. The patient is viewed from behind the head and the length of their swathed figure rests on an operating table stretching diagonally upwards across the picture. The patient’s unconscious state is made apparent by a remarkable sense of physical lightness, even weightlessness, in strong contrast to the alert, beatific figures around them. This picture depicts a hip operation and a closely related work was titled Smith-Petersen Pin—a reference to the surgical nail used to stabilise fractures.

Between 1947 and 1949, Hepworth made a cycle of work depicting surgeons and surgical operations. She used studies made in situ as the basis for nuanced, studio-based works that married pencil drawing with ethereal washes of thinned oil paint. In total she produced just over seventy works that came to be known as ‘the hospital drawings’. In 1952, Hepworth described the circumstances in which she began making them. The meaningful coincidence of ‘physical and spiritual’ was strikingly apparent to Hepworth from the skilled, precise movements of a surgeon interacting with the inert, unconscious form of a patient. Hepworth was profound and normative in her art, and her creative activity reflected this serious intent. In relation to the interaction of patient and surgeon, she reflected, ‘to produce a culture we have to understand all the attributes of a proper co-ordination between hand and spirit in our daily life.’

Hepworth appreciated surgical operations for their suggestion of harmony or ‘co-ordination’ between human and spiritual spheres, but all the more so because this forum belonged to ‘our daily life’. Hospital surgery happens in the realm of recognisable, prosaic human existence rather than that of the esoteric or semi-religious. In this respect, it had a powerful resonance for Hepworth whose practice was sensitive to the conditions of modern life, even as she reached for vocabularies of form to express timeless values of higher importance.

The initial suggestion that Hepworth ‘might watch an operation in a hospital’ was made by her friend Norman Capener. The hospital where he worked was the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Hospital in Exeter, and she would observe many more operations there and in London at the National Orthopaedic Hospital and the London Clinic. For Hepworth’s solo exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery in April 1948, Capener contributed an anonymous foreword (it was signed simply, ‘A Surgeon’). His interest in art is well evidenced by a loan exhibition he helped to organise at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter, held in 1960. In the catalogue preface he wrote: ‘We should not always look for a story in pictures or sculpture: ideas and patterns of thought may be mirrored in the colours and patterns of abstract painting: in sculpture tactile as well as visual qualities may reveal aesthetically satisfying features of intellectual as well as of anthropomorphic interest.’ Capener owned works by Hepworth and he loaned these to the exhibition, including a cast she made of his hand. He was a surgeon by profession specialising in hands and joints, publishing occasionally in the Lancet and the British Medical Journal from 1944 onwards including notices about Leonardo da Vinci’s left hand and ‘fingers, compensation and King Canute’. He was instrumental in facilitating Hepworth’s access to the hospital operating theatre, encouraging her to make the cycle of work that came about over two years.

Sometime around 1953, Hepworth gave a lecture to a group of surgeons in which she offered ‘the artist’s view of surgery’. Preparation and the closely related work Smith-Petersen Pin were both reproduced in Hepworth’s talk and she gave this description of them:

"An operation which gave me intense pleasure was the ‘Smith Peterson [sic] Pin’ – the title of the 2 (two) which follow. It appealed to me as a sculptor rather specially. This is a colour reproduction from my monograph – I am only too sad that all the others are black and white photos, because without the colour, some of the meaning is lost. […] In this operation I was more aware of the figure of the patient – the whole thing had a feeling of magic about it!"

As this final remark suggests, the hospital drawings related to the artist’s renewed appetite for depicting human figures. As with her second husband Ben Nicholson, after she had developed an abstract idiom Hepworth was able to work concurrently in both abstract and representational modes. Especially in the years after the Second World War, when she was making the hospital drawings, Hepworth’s drawings were especially varied, as Alan Bowness wrote: ‘From about 1947 onwards for several years different kinds of drawing exist together. Figure drawings take on a new importance and a new variety; there is a major series of hospital studies executed in 1948-9; and the abstract drawings become more exploratory than ever.’ David Baxandall elaborated on this point in his introduction to Hepworth’s large retrospective at Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1954:

"This was a complete change from the purely abstract drawings and sculpture of the previous twelve years. The reawakened interest in the human form, which also led to many figure drawings, brought about a change in the later sculpture. In many of the carvings of the last six years, pure abstraction has been replaced by a suggestion of the human form."

Notwithstanding their relation to a broader revival of interest in the human body, the hospital drawings are exceptionally naturalistic in Hepworth’s oeuvre. They originated from direct studies made when Hepworth was observing live operations; this is unlike most of Hepworth’s work, and she remarked in 1966 that ‘I rarely draw what I see’.

When Preparation was exhibited in 1950 at Lefevre Gallery, Hepworth’s London dealer, it was categorised with other ‘drawings’—a phrase that does not adequately describe the complex material make-up of this and other similar works. Atmospheric clouds of fluid thinned down oil paint were developed on the board over an extended period. The layering of colour to create rich glazes would have required long drying periods between each new application. The pencil drawing, made on top of this complex painterly ground, was indeed a central aspect of the artwork—but the drawing was then further enhanced with overlaid gouache-like areas of textured, thinned white paint. When Preparation was shown by the British Council at the Venice Biennale in 1950, a more sophisticated distinction was made about the different varieties of Hepworth’s two-dimensional work—works were split between sculpture, abstract drawings, operating-theatre drawings and figure drawings. Although David Lewis in his short catalogue note took the drawings to ‘represent the laboratories in which emotions and basic structures are tested before she commits them to stone or wood’, the exhibition included a larger number of ‘drawings’ than sculpture—21 to 36—and it is apparent that these works had their own distinctive artistic merits apart from Hepworth’s sculpture.

Preparation belonged to the artist until 1961, when Hepworth consigned it to an auction held for the financial benefit of the London Library. (In 1956, Inland Revenue decided that the library should no longer be exempt from paying rates, causing a financial shortfall that the auction was intended to help resolve.) A large number of contemporary artists also consigned art to be sold including Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, Augustus John, Henry Moore, John Piper and Graham Sutherland. It was a cause célèbre and the Queen Mother also consigned something to the sale—a Sheffield plate wine-cooler. Other eminent donors included the Queen herself, Kenneth Clark, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, Roland Penrose, Evelyn Waugh, the Duke of Wellington, and many others besides.


Appendix 1
Barbara Hepworth’s account of the ‘hospital drawings’ (1952)

[…] in about the middle of 1947, a suggestion was made to me that I might watch an operation in a hospital. I expected that I should dislike it; but from the moment when I entered the operating theatre I became completely absorbed by two things: first, the extraordinary beauty of purpose and co-ordination between human beings all dedicated to the saving of life, and the way that unity of idea and purpose dictated a perfection of concentration, movement, and gesture, and secondly by the way this special grace (grace of mind and body) induced a spontaneous space composition, an articulated and animated kind of abstract sculpture very close to what I had been seeking in my own work.

[…] A particularly beautiful example of the difference between physical and spiritual animation can be observed in a delicate operation on the human hand by a great surgeon. The anatomy of the unconscious hand exposed and manipulated by the conscious hand with the scalpel, expresses vividly the creative inspiration of superb co-ordination in contrast to the unconscious mechanism. The basic tenderness of the large and small form, or mother and child, proclaims a rhythm of composition which is in contrast to the slapping and pushing of tired mother and frustrated child through faults in our way of living and unresolved social conditions.

For two years I drew, not only in the operating theatres of hospitals, but from groups in my studio and groups observed around me. I studied all the changes and defects which occurred in the composition of human figures when there were faulty surroundings or muddled purpose. This led me to renewed study of anatomy and structure as well as the structure of integrated groups of two or more figures.


Appendix 2
Norman Capener’s foreword to Barbara Hepworth’s Lefevre Gallery exhibition (1948)

Little perhaps do surgeons realise the classic beauty of their surroundings, a beauty based upon perfect architectural conditions – designed for a purpose; the focal point within a space which, whatever its shape, becomes converted visually and mentally into a circle or sphere, a group of individuals, a massing of structures all arranged with simple economy, all with a movement towards one object, one purpose, all coordinated rhythmically and in harmony. Rarely has an artist been found with both stamina and vision who can perceive and portray the sincerity and harmony, the power and beauty, the rhythm and tenderness and the simple drama of the operating theatre. Barbara Hepworth has, in these surroundings, shown us the possibilities of symphonic groupings both physically and psychologically; the spirit of enquiry, the intensity of proper solicitude, the power of the craftsman, unhurried activity, energetic poise. And an uncanny sense of the unseen; indeed, the sense of the good surgeon himself – always conscious of the unseen ‘person’ beneath his hands and never callous of his ‘material’.