Between 1956 and 1964, two principal visual components defined Barbara Hepworth’s abstract ‘drawings’. First, a painterly ground was improvised, with warm and cool colours scumbled together to create complex layers with an ambivalent sense of depth and surface. She explained in 1961: ‘When I am making a drawing, I like to begin with a board which I have prepared with a definite texture and tone. I like to rub and scrape the surfaces as I might handle the surface of a sculpture.’ In contrast to her use of flat, opaque colour in drawings of the forties, Hepworth came to treat oil paint as a palpable, translucent medium. Washes of colour might allude to landscapes veiled in mist or cloud, and loaded, gestural brushstrokes of bright colour evoke the interior or exterior faces of massive, impermeable forms. Second, the mass of colour and painterly texture was organised and shaped by lines and arcs drawn with singular precision using a hard, sharp pencil. ‘The surface takes my mood in colour and texture, then a line or a curve made on it has a bite rather like cutting into a slate.’

The string-like spiral motif that occurs in many of Hepworth’s drawings suggests a twisting motion. She sometimes referred to this as a ‘turning form’, and one of her earliest works of this kind was made in 1946 (British Council Collection). In Stringed figure with yellow, pointed, wing-like forms are created from shallow arcs likely drawn with the aid of a compass. Five of these lines span the entire width of the board to produce an expansive, horizontal emphasis. The configuration of the arcs creates overlapping ellipses, the flattened, weightless quality of which relates to Hepworth’s string and curled brass sculptures such as Stringed figure (Curlew) (fig. 1). As with most of Hepworth’s paintings and drawings, Stringed figure with yellow can be interpreted to depict a concrete, volumetric sculptural form translatable into three dimensions. While the spiral pattern suggests a stringed element, the remaining pencil lines define the contours of solid planes. These planes are apparently transparent, which permits an uninterrupted view of the strings. This transparency recalls the example of the sculptor Naum Gabo, Hepworth’s friend and erstwhile fellow resident of St Ives, whose own stringed sculptures were often made of transparent Perspex.

Stringed figure with yellow was one of nine oil and pencil works by Barbara Hepworth included in Galerie Charles Lienhard’s exhibition Accrochage in August 1962. All of them were made in 1960. The exhibition had mostly abstract paintings and works on paper by an eclectic mixture of British, European and American artists including Karel Appel, Kenneth Armitage, Julius Bissier, Lynn Chadwick, Alan Davie, Sam Francis, Hans Hartung, Asger Jorn, Peter Lanyon, Robert Motherwell, Ben Nicholson and William Scott. Hepworth’s inclusion reflected the eminent position she had achieved not just in Britain but more generally across continental Europe.