As Piano Nobile opens Barbara Hepworth: Sculpting & Painting at TEFAF New York, InSight considers how Hepworth responded to new technologies of her age.
InSight No. 191
Barbara Hepworth, Two rotating forms II, 1966
In the twenty-first century, the river of innovation is wide and fast flowing. In every compartment of technological advancement—robotics, computing, materials, etc.—the rush of progress has become constant, and changes are too numerous to be isolated, parsed and understood. By contrast, Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) lived through a period in history when technological change was slow enough to be discernible. She remembered a time before the First World War and the thrill of riding in a motor car as it passed through a landscape: ‘Perched up in front of one of those early types of car I followed the contours of the superb Yorkshire dales.’ Advances, which happened less often, could be savoured.
Hepworth’s modernist persuasion attuned her to the technology of movement. As a young girl she witnessed the advent of motorised traffic, and during her lifetime rocket and jet engines opened new horizons. New destinations—even outer space—could be reached more quickly than ever. She made several sculptures in her career that revolved either by the touch of a hand or the show-room pirouette of an electric motor. In these cases, movement symbolised modernity, but also eternity: the rise and fall of tides, the movement of celestial bodies. Before her sculptures were set in motion, Hepworth made drawings that suggest forms caught in the act of revolution. Turning form (1946, British Council Collection) is composed from arcs, tapered shapes and a spiral of straight lines, and these components intersect and synchronise with a sense of rhythm akin to that of dance or music.
After the Second World War, a younger generation of modernists interpreted the technologies of movement as glamorous emblems inseparable from the mass media (of advertising, film and television, etc.) by which they became familiar. Such is the subject of Richard Hamilton’s painting Hers is a Lush Situation (1956) or his carefully orchestrated Self Portrait (1963), in which slick American automobiles entwine with the erotic form of a woman’s body. Both Hepworth and Hamilton had a formative interest in D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s book On Growth and Form (1917), which explored the underlying patterns in nature produced by physical laws. But while Hamilton’s art would articulate the design and psychology of modern life, Hepworth digested technology, movement and machines within compact, serene forms that seemed at once ancient and modern.
Hepworth carved alabaster in extended phases throughout her career. During the first, between 1929 and 1934, she chose grey, mottled pink or darker (Cumberland) alabaster. Later, in the years after 1958, she returned to alabaster and preferred to use stones of a lighter colour. In the second phase, many of the sculptures were composed of two parts such as Goonhilly September (1963). This work, named in reference to the large rotating satellite receiver dish near Hepworth’s home in Cornwall, included a rotating form. Hepworth annotated her record of this sculpture, ‘the oval form turns’. She was invited to visit the new satellite in the Lizard peninsula when it first began to operate (and rotate), and she later recalled: ‘it was so magical and so strange. I find such forms of our technology very exciting and inspiring.’
In 1966, Barbara Hepworth made two works called ‘Two rotating forms’. Both were made from alabaster. In both cases, the subtle variance of the grain between the two forms creates a family resemblance redolent of that between siblings or, as Hepworth said, ‘a basket of eggs: you never find two eggs of the same shape.’ Unlike the oval form in Goonhilly September, which was loosely bolted to the base so it might be turned, none of the ‘rotating forms’ in these two sculptures of 1966 actually rotate, nor were they ever intended to rotate. The title is suggestive rather than descriptive, and the implied movement may have connoted for Hepworth space, flight or the orbit of celestial bodies.
‘Hand-sized’ sculptures such as these distilled many of Hepworth’s concerns of the period: the evocation of movement, a relationship between forms, the invitation to touch. In Two rotating forms II, the larger of the two forms is pierced with an aperture. This opening animates the form and invests it with a perspective; it seems to meet one’s gaze or, at least, to interact with its smaller partner. The relationship implied by the arrangement of two or more forms was an important and recurrent concern in Hepworth’s late work. At this period she began to create more extended, family-like groupings of four or more forms, most notably The Family of Man (1970) and Assembly of sea forms (1972, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena). A work such as Six forms in echelon (1965–65), which is composed from six upright, pale, polished alabasters of a similar kind to those used in Two rotating forms, may suggest a parallel concern with group relationships in these contemporaneous two-part sculptures.
Even as Richard Hamilton and others bounded towards Duchampian conceptualism, Barbara Hepworth continued with the practice of stone carving that she began four decades earlier. But she remained sensitive and receptive to change. Even as Goonhilly September or Two rotating forms have a strong formal continuity with her earlier work, Hepworth loaded them with new and exciting connotations. With an open mind and an unfailing appetite to carve, she continued to produce modern art that vibrates with both the roar of engines and the music of the spheres.
Images:
Rover 8 (HP), first manufactured in 1904
Barbara Hepworth, Turning form, 1946, pencil and oil on board, 39.5 x 29 cm, British Council Collection © Bowness
Goonhilly Earth Station, Cornwall
Barbara Hepworth, Two rotating forms II (detail)
