A poignant work of angelic humanist art by a titan of the modernist movement in Britain.
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About the Artwork
Between 1947 and 1949, Barbara Hepworth (1903—1975) made a cycle of pictures representing surgeons and hospital operations. Most consisted of firm and graceful line drawings in graphite pencil underpinned by limpid washes of thinned oil paint. She frequently juxtaposed warm and cool colours, often pale orange and pale turquoise, which she applied in layers to create richly colourful glazes. Whether showing only surgeons, surgeons and their patients, or a detailed focal point of the operation itself, Hepworth’s pictures are suffused with the lambent glow created by an intelligent layering of colour and textured white paint. In all cases, there is an atmosphere of calm elation and angelic purpose.
These works came to be known as the ‘hospital drawings’, an appellation that little suggests their painterly richness and accretions of texture. Their materials defy categorisation, as in the case of Hepworth’s other two-dimensional work, while their naturalistic imagery marked a decisive break from the purity of abstract forms that had dominated Hepworth’s output in preceding years—and her contemporaneous sculpture likewise leaned tellingly towards anthropomorphism, as with the bodily sense of torsion in Rhythmic Form. The process of making the hospital drawings began with life studies in the operating theatre, to which Hepworth was initially invited in 1947 by her friend the surgeon Norman Capener. They had met after Hepworth’s daughter Sarah was hospitalised with osteomyelitis in 1944. Over the next two years, she witnessed procedures at the Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Hospital in Exeter and, in London, the National Orthopaedic Hospital and the London Clinic.
Speaking in 1953, the artist described being in an operating theatre for the first time and how she was ‘entirely enthralled by the classic beauty of what I saw there’. In her synthesis of that ‘classic beauty’ with the acutely modern aspect of her subject, Hepworth created an art of rare quality and historical moment. In it, she simultaneously captured and transcended the moment of its creation.
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