Aegean was made at an early stage of Barbara Hepworth’s exploration of bronze as a sculptural medium. She had worked almost exclusively in carved media of wood and stone until 1956, at which time she began to exploit the potential of sheet brass and bronze cast from carved plaster models. As with her cut and rolled brass sculptures Curlew and Orpheus, also made in 1956, Aegean uses metal as a thin and curvaceous substance. The fluid treatment of a firm, rigid material was original to Hepworth, and it heralded new possibilities in abstract metal sculpture that were developed by the ‘new generation’ sculptors in the sixties. The title of Aegean evokes the sea, as do the crest-like folds at the outer reaches of the form, reminiscent of wave forms, and the green, oceanic patination of the metal. The curving shape of the sculpture encircles a negative space at its centre which is animated and articulated by the pierced, rippling forms.

Following Hepworth’s visit to Greece in 1954, she made many bronze sculptures with Greek titles that evoke her experience of the sea. Her tour included the Greek mainland, several islands in the Aegean Sea and part of the Cyclades. The tensile strength of cast bronze allowed Hepworth to conjure extended, rippling shapes that mimic the motion of rippling waves. When Aegean was exhibited by the Scottish Arts Council in 1978, the curator Douglas Hall explained Hepworth’s move into metal sculpture: ‘Above all it was in the fifties that Hepworth started making sculptures in plaster round an armature, preparatory to casting them in bronze, instead of always carving them. The new freedom of form that this gave her is amply demonstrated in works like Aegean.’ As with Aegean, a closely related bronze sculpture called Curved form (Trevalgan) (1956) [BH 213] (fig. 1) evoked the swaying motion of the sea with a grand, upward sweep of two encompassing arms. These sculptures were made in the same year and witness Hepworth exploring the possibilities of using metal sculpture to evoke the sea. Another sculpture made two years later, Sea form (Porthmeor) (1958) [BH 249], again used a thin shell of metal to create pierced, scooped and curved lip forms.

This distinctive new sculptural idiom in bronze suggested to Hepworth an experience of the sea, its ceaseless movement, its elasticity, the breaking of waves on a shoreline, and so on. She regularly compared her home in St Ives to the climate of Greece, and this imaginative link enabled Hepworth to invest sculptures made in Cornwall, such as Aegean, with a Grecian flavour. Tellingly, the titles of similar-looking works—‘Aegean’ and ‘Trevalgan’—refer both to Greece and Cornwall. In Hepworth’s imagination, the two places were narrowly similar and closely related. Although the title ‘Aegean’ evokes the warm, clear waters of southern Europe, it was at once inspired by the cooler, glum waters of the Cornish coast.

Another cast of Aegean from the edition of six is owned by the British Council Collection.