Beginning in the early nineteen-thirties and for the rest of her life, Barbara Hepworth made ensemble sculptures that bring together separate but interrelated forms.
InSight No. 194
Barbara Hepworth, Four figures waiting, 1968
In 1933, Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) began to make sculptures composed of two forms on a shared base. ‘The two forms,’ she explained later, ‘is the tender relationship of one living thing beside another.’ A similar principle can be used to describe three-part sculptures, which she first made in 1935, and also the ensembles composed from a greater number of forms that she made more frequently in the decades after the Second World War. Several hand-sized sculptures of the sixties and seventies have four or more parts, the most numerous of them being Assembly of sea forms (1972, Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) and Fallen images (1974–75, Tate), which have eight and six parts respectively. Besides the polished bronze of Four figures waiting (1968) and a comparable work of polished sheet brass called Four forms (1974), between 1964 and 1970 Hepworth made four-part sculptures from slate, Seravezza marble and quartz. In each case, broad flat faces of stone or metal appear to converse, or to have turned sympathetically toward their companions.
While sculptures of two or three forms might evoke a mother or parents and child, four forms connote more diverse and less intimate social groups. Hepworth was attentive to the behaviour of individuals held together by intangible social and environmental forces. In 1952, she recalled her visit to Venice where her work was exhibited at the Biennale in 1950: ‘the most significant observation I made for my own work was that as soon as people, or groups of people, entered the piazza they responded to the proportions of the architectural space.’ Such observations informed her subsequent group sculptures, and they radiate the gravitas of deep feeling and long-sighted concerns. As with so much of her work, non-representational forms speak a language of association that has tangible reference points. In Four figures waiting, a keen interest in human relationships and their environment was transformed in subtly interrelated standing forms of brilliantly reflective metal.
In 1959, three years after she began to use bronze in earnest, Hepworth made her first sculpture with polished metal. The pale golden colour of this finish creates a precious, heightened register, but it also intensifies the interaction between a sculpture and its environment. Only under the controlled conditions of studio photography can these sculptures become self-contained and inward looking. When encountered at first hand, a panorama of reflections transforms the sculpture’s surface. Solid metal dissolves into a liquid mirror and the room, the conditions of light and one’s own body are enmeshed with the sculpture. As Hepworth remarked to the critic Edward Mullins in 1968, ‘people don’t always realise there’s no fixed point for a sculpture, there’s no fixed point at which you can see it, there’s no fixed point of light in which you can experience it, because it’s ever-changing […].’
More usually, sculptors have preferred to model for bronze using wet plaster. But Hepworth was a born carver who drew inspiration from the resistance of whatever material she worked with. She preferred to build-up an approximate plaster model in the wet and then, once dry, chisel and scrape the hard plaster until the planes were smooth and the edges crisp. This 1:1 scale model was then delivered to a bronze foundry with the artist’s clear instructions. (In a letter of 23 November 1959, Hepworth impressed on E. L. Gibbard of the Morris Singer bronze foundry how ‘terribly important’ it was ‘to keep my edges just as they are without loss of texture’.) While some of the plaster models survived the casting process and were later donated to The Hepworth Wakefield as part of the Hepworth Family Gift, many did not. The plaster model for Four figures waiting is known only from a photograph.
When gathered as an ensemble, polished bronze forms reflect not only their surroundings but—more than anything—they reflect each other. The title of Four figures waiting raises a question: for what are they waiting? It is a moot point. What matters is that they wait together. Each figure is composed from two vertical planes, one flat and one rounded. While the flat surfaces produce an even reflection, the rounded surfaces distort and steeply foreshorten the reflection like a convex mirror. The figures are arranged to produce a variety of reflected vistas, and although only one of the figures is perforated by a cylindrical aperture, this eye-like form is amplified and replicated by its reflection in the neighbouring forms.
Hepworth’s sculpture often sustains a sense of both human warmth and impersonal, classical refinement. In many cases the surface is impenetrably smooth, the contours precisely delineated, and billowing volumes contained within an harmonious silhouette. Yet these characteristics were motivated by a search for living, organic forms. Her sculptures often seem to be the seat of a rich inner life, and they do not merely receive one’s gaze but rather return it, especially those in which a perfectly circular or cylindrical aperture is formed. In many cases, a contrast of defined textures makes immaculate materials animated and lively, as in the case of Four figures waiting in which figures of polished bronze stand on a bed of coarse patinated bronze, which has the quality of pitted earth. But above all, the mood of human encounter arises in her work from the assembly of multiple forms, which are locked together in a perpetual wordless discourse.
Images:
Barbara Hepworth, Mother and child, 1934, pink Ancaster stone, 31 x 22 x 26 cm, The Hepworth Wakefield © Bowness
Barbara Hepworth, Group of four (Cornwall), 1965, slate, height 43 cm, Private Collection © Bowness
Barbara Hepworth, Four forms, 1974, brass, height 35.2 cm, edition of 9+0 © Bowness
Photograph of the plaster model for Four figures standing, c. 1968
Barbara Hepworth, Four figures waiting
