Transcription
[Music] This is Barbara Hepworth, who in her lifetime was called the first great woman sculptor.
[Music] She began working in the 1920s, when women had only just won the right to vote. A mother of four children, her determination to make her mark in an art world dominated by men led to accusations of ruthlessness and neglect of her family. Barbara Hepworth was a pioneer, but in spite of her achievements as an artist, her reputation has been tainted by controversy. Why? Because she tried to have it all.
[Music] I've always loved this garden that Barbara Hepworth made at her home in St. Ives and filled with her sculptures. It may be abstract, but it's not difficult to enjoy. It invites us to touch. Over the last few weeks, I've been discovering more about the woman who could conjure shapes out of feelings.
[Music] Art in 1920s Britain was largely traditional in style and content. After the violence of the Great War, there was no wish for painting and sculpture to provoke or disturb.
[Music] The movement in Europe towards an abstract art, led by men like Picasso and Brancuzi, had yet to make much impact here. And the idea of a woman being an abstract sculptor was almost unimaginable. So Hepworth had to fight tradition and prejudice to gain recognition. She'd start work generally at about 8, and then she would work all the way through the day on, uh, carving, and then in the evening she would draw. So she generally put in, I would say, looking back, a 12 to 14-hour day, every day. And her struggle wasn't just to establish herself as an artist. With four children to raise, the all-consuming physical demands of making sculpture clashed with her role as a mother.
>> She was a ruthless person about her work, very dedicated, but she probably had to compromise a bit more. Her awful challenges in her work and her personal life. Her broken marriage affected her seriously.
>> Yet out of the struggle of her daily life came formidably ambitious art. It might seem extraordinary to us now, but this was a woman who believed that art could change the world.
[Music] She was born in 193 into a middle-class family in Wakefield in Yorkshire.
[Music] Her father, Herbert, was technically minded. Her mother, Gertrude, artistic. Hepworth remembered her childhood as a mixture of stern frugality and lavish love. Both parents encouraged her artistic streak. At the age of seven, she watched her head mistress deliver a slideshow on Egyptian art. This ignited a passion for sculpture and the urge to be a sculptor herself.
[Music] [Music] Trips out into the Yorkshire countryside with her father, a county surveyor, were another early influence. She'd sit next to him in his car, and it was the memory of moving through the landscape that stayed with her. She later recalled:
>> There was the sensation of physically moving over the contours, feeling, touching, seeing through mind in hand and eye. This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape.
[Music] On holiday as a teenager at Robin Hood's Bay on the Yorkshire coast, she'd slip out early each morning to collect stones and seaweed and to draw. "I always felt like a bird flying over magnificent sculptures. The shapes, the rocks on the coast, everything was so clear in my mind. And I think all the ideas for my sculpture were developing down below."
Then >> in 1921, she began studying at the Royal College of Art in London. And it was here that she met the charismatic John Skeaping, a fellow student.
>> He was very funny, very good company, um, flirtatious, I think, with ladies, and, um, charming, too. Altogether a delightful man.
When Skeaping won a scholarship to travel and work in Italy, Hepworth managed to get one too. And in May 1925, they were married in Florence. They worked side by side for a year, learning to sculpt. In those days, the tradition was to make a small clay model first, which would then be handed over to craftsmen to reproduce full scale in stone or bronze. Hepworth found it a frustrating process. In Italy, she learned a new working method: how to carve stone, cutting directly into the block. She'd worked this way for the rest of her life.
[Music] Back in London, she and Skeaping eventually set up studio together in Hampstead. And in 1929, a friend from art school, Henry Moore, came to live nearby.
>> I think Barbara remained very close to Henry as a working partner, really, following the same ideas, and, um, it's very important for young artists to have people to look at their work, to criticize, to discuss their ideas, and Henry played that very important role.
All three decided to carve directly in stone.
[Music] They wanted to extend the language of sculpture, to open it up to the influence of other cultures, not just the European classical tradition handed down from ancient Greece and Rome. They wanted their materials, stone and wood, to express memory and feelings.
[Music] Barbara Hepworth's attitude to her work was always uncompromising. There'd been women painters before her, but very few sculptors. So, she knew that to be taken seriously, she would have to be utterly single-minded. She once said, "I intend to play it hard."
"I think the commitment that she had to have to a career was a necessary thing in the period she belonged to, because it wasn't natural for a woman to be successful, let alone up in the front. And to do that, you had to do it twice as hard, uh, in order to be taken seriously and not be called, you know, the woman artist, you know, i.e. several notches down from all the other artists who were men. So I think the fierceness about her career was a was a necessity in a way. It would not have been if she was my age, say. It's a different world now."
[Music] She continued carving right up until the birth of her first son, Paul, in August 1929. Afterwards, she went straight back to work.
[Music] She lived for making sculpture. It was a daily physical obsession. Though she loved being a mother, she could never have given up work. Instead, she tried to juggle work and motherhood. She sculpted with her baby Paul on a rug by her feet. And for a while, it seemed she had the balance right. Hepworth's sculpture was selling well, but by the end of the 1920s, her marriage to John Skeaping was in trouble.
>> Quite suddenly, we were out of orbit. I had an obsession for my work and my child and my home. John wanted to go free. There was no ill feeling. We fell apart. My impression of him is that he was very debonair, rather fun-loving, great sportsman, very good at almost anything he did, but in the end, probably not very serious. And I think that Hepworth and he were fundamentally opposed because she was so serious and earnest. And in the end, she was too earnest for him.
>> Oh, baby, baby, I want to be with you tonight.
>> In September 1931, Hepworth invited a group of friends to join her on holiday in Norfolk. Henry Moore was amongst them, and so was another up-and-coming young artist, the painter Ben Nicholson.
[Music] "Never have such lovely things happened, Ben. And all the time I'm longing to work because of them. I've never felt like this before. Your dear head is like the most lovely pebble ever seen."
She and Nicholson became lovers, and early in 1932, he moved in to live and work in her Hampstead studio. Though he'd periodically disappear off to Paris to visit his wife and children, Nicholson was the son of a successful Edwardian painter, and like Hepworth and Moore, he embraced the new movements in art, design, and politics.
>> If I could be with you.
His landscapes had absorbed the latest ideas of French modern art. And now, Hepworth's profile featured over and over again in his work. "I want you to know I wouldn't know until you told me, honey, why I love you so."
It seemed the perfect match. The passion of the early years of their relationship fueled their art.
>> Everything I touch and see or hear has a new lease of life and grace because of you, baby.
One of Barbara Hepworth's innovations was to tunnel right through her sculptural form. Now, Henry Moore is often credited with this, but he didn't actually take this approach in his own work until a couple of years later. It's not the first time that a female artist has been overshadowed by a male contemporary. This is Hepworth's first pierced sculpture. It was later destroyed in the war, though she did take this photograph of it.
>> I think what was so exciting about the, um, piercing a hole right through the form was that it, it extended the sculptural language. It made it more interesting because you had this interplay between the inside of the form and the outside of the form.
In 1932 and '33, Hepworth and Nicholson traveled to France to meet Picasso and Braque and other pioneers of 20th-century modern art. "After Easter, we saw Picasso in his studio. I shall never forget the afternoon light streaming through the window onto a miraculous succession of canvases which Picasso brought out to show us, and from which emanated a blaze of energy in form and color."
The sense that they were part of a European movement strengthened their ambition to make their work more fully abstract.
"There was, I think, there was a group of artists like Picasso or Braque who would have shown someone like Hepworth the importance of individual freedom and creativity, and how you could invent your own language."
"And they did have this very strong feeling that, um, somehow or other, there was a new art just there to be found. They didn't quite know what it was, and, um, there is a lot of searching for it going on in the work that they did."
There was something heroic about their single-mindedness. In the wake of the Wall Street crash of 1929, the London art market had collapsed. And anyway, the market for avant-garde art in those days was tiny. There were few millionaire collectors and nothing like the media interest in young British artists. But there is today.
To keep themselves afloat, Hepworth and Nicholson designed fabrics. She also designed coffee cups, and he took on advertising work. But she continued to make her own sculptures. She was working on a series of mother and child figures when, in 1934, she became pregnant for the second time. What happened next was to throw her life into turmoil.
"Certainly, my father rang this good friend, wonderful friend to the family, Margaret Gardner, um, at some time in the early hours of the morning to say, 'Margaret, it's not one, it's three. Could you possibly help?' And she said, 'For goodness sake, Ben, I don't like your jokes at this time. Dare put the photo.' But it must have been an awful shock."
Though twins had been a possibility, they hadn't been able to afford the £5 fee for an X-ray and had planned for only one baby. The arrival of triplets seemed disastrous. The confident, driven Barbara Hepworth felt that she was losing control. To suddenly have four children under five in a basement flat with little regular income must have been terrifying. She spent days in tears. She was clearly suffering from severe postnatal depression. But this, remember, was in the 1930s, when there would have been far less understanding of her condition.
"I knew fear for the first time in my life, as I was weak and wondered how on earth we were to support this family on the carving I was doing."
Shortly after the birth, she returned to work, just as she had after the arrival of her first child, Paul. "A woman artist is not deprived by cooking and having children; one is in fact nourished by this rich life, provided one always does some work each day, even a single half hour, so that the images grow in one's mind." Both Hepworth and Nicholson wanted to go on working, and she felt she had to work for the sake of her sanity. The solution to their dilemma was dramatic and unconventional.
"I don't think she knew what to do or how to cope. And this came up as a possibility, and it seemed to be the very best thing she could do for us at the time."
They deposited the triplets at the Wellgarth Nursery Training College in Hampstead. Though Hepworth and Nicholson visited them regularly, the children, Sarah, Rachel, and Simon, were to remain there for 3 years.
"She must have been a target for discussion from a lot of people's point of view. A disgraceful thing, putting your triplets in this place and that place, and visiting them and making hers when they could visit her in the studio. But she, that's what was so fantastic. She had the courage to do all that. I remember her telling me she was proud to be a woman, but she wanted to be considered an artist. She had this inner impulse, and she followed it, and that is fantastic. Men can do it far more easily."
Though they made the decision together, it has been Hepworth's reputation that has suffered.
>> "People are always interested to know whether Barbara Hepworth was a monster or a horrible person. And what they really mean is, why didn't she spend more time looking after her family, and why did she spend so much time on her work? Which infuriates me because we don't ask that kind of question of male artists. It's just so irrelevant in terms of looking at art and talking about artists, and it only seems to happen when we're looking at one of the few artists in Britain in the 20th century who was female and successful."
[Music] "When I started carving again, my work seemed to have changed direction. The work was more formal, and all traces of naturalism had disappeared."
[Music] "I find it quite extraordinary the way in which the two artists, he and Nicholson, interact on one another. It's very difficult to say that there is a stronger influence one way than the other. And I think they too would have felt it was this particular mutual giving to one another that made such a difference for them. I mean, the whole concept of the relief painting, which was three-dimensional, that is basically a sculptural idea, and I don't believe Nicholson would ever have moved through to that had it not been for living with a sculptor."
By the mid-30s, Hepworth and Nicholson were at the forefront of a movement of intellectuals who believed that art could be a constructive force in society. As fascism was taking root in Europe, they held the fervent conviction that harmony and proportion could point the way out of the chaos of their age towards a better future. Now, we might see her pieces in museums or galleries or in private collections, and they look very refined, distant, and you might say uncommitted. But for her, they were like models or sketches for a new life. I think it's quite hard for us to understand that now. But these were sculptures which represented the possibility of society changing.
Everywhere, there seemed to be abundant energy and hope, and a developing interest in the fusion of all the arts to some great purpose. But world events were to engulf them.
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
>> Will this ever happen over London?
Gas mask factories are working overtime. And even in the London nightclubs, the glamour girls are doing something about it. Convinced that bombing raids would immediately follow the declaration of war, at the end of August 1939, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson packed their children into a car and left London for Cornwall.
"We were not at that time prepared to admit that it was a movement in flight. But because of the danger of impending war, all of us worked the harder to lay strong foundations for the future."
Barbara Hepworth never returned to live in London. The Cornish landscape would become a source of inspiration for her for the rest of her life. But in wartime, it was hard to find the concentration she needed to sculpt. They moved about, trying to find a house big enough for them all to live and work in. Ben Nicholson joined the local Home Guard, while she tried her hand at vegetable gardening.
[Music] "Mercifully, by 1943, we found a large and very shabby old house at Carbis Bay. This was wonderful. It gave Ben a reasonable studio, one for me near the kitchen, and room for the children. Our work began to flow again."
When she returned to work, she found new ways of expressing herself. She used color to evoke the sea and string to represent her connection to the natural world.
"I think that Hepworth is probably one of the first sculptors to really use landscape in her sculpture. And I think when you go to Cornwall and you experience the bays, that sense of the curvature of the landscape, you understand better what she's trying to do in her own sculpture."
"There was a stream of people who came, and the conversations about communism and socialism and and and anarchism, and and how they would affect the arts, and and how they would affect the creative side of artists, was the critical thing that she was involved with in all these conversations, and they impacted on her work, made her more steady, more convinced that what she was doing was the right path for her."
1948 saw the start in Britain of a great social experiment: the National Health Service, a state medical service which everyone in Britain is entitled to use.
Despite living far from the center of things, she remained politically engaged. And in 1948, the establishment of a welfare state seemed to promise a new and more just society, something she'd long argued for. That year, she made drawing after drawing of surgeons in action in the newly established National Health Service.
"It had been suggested to me that I might be interested in watching an operation in hospital. At first, I was very scared, but then I found there was such beauty in the coordinated human endeavor in the operating theater, that the whole composition, human in appearance, became abstract in shape."
The grace and dedication of an operating team working to save lives seemed to her to be like an animated sculpture. Her drawings are to the early National Health Service what Henry Moore's tube shelter drawings were to the experience of the Blitz: images of compassion and collective purpose.
[Music] In 1950, Barbara Hepworth was chosen to represent Britain at the prestigious International Venice Biennale exhibition.
[Music] When she was in Venice, she was very impressed by the sight of people moving across the piazza.
"And I think the 'Concourse' sculptures are very much a reaction to that, um, movement of people across a, a public square, and the relationships between those people as they move."
She'd gone there and been tremendously affected by her experience of people walking through that space, and she felt that they were all walking taller and with straighter backs. "I think it's all wrapped up with her idea that, you know, if we had more beautiful cities, we would feel better in them, which I'm sure is true."
International recognition in Venice should have been a cause for celebration and contentment, but her second marriage was in trouble.
>> "After 20 years of family life, everything was to fall apart."
[Music] "I think she was forced to face up to the fact that she couldn't provide the role of wife and mother and be a full-time successful sculptor with two of you making art all day long, and something has to give."
Ben was traveling more and more to London and elsewhere, spending less time with her and the children. So, I guess she felt rather beleaguered, but she wasn't going to complain. And it's clear that Hepworth never stopped loving Ben Nicholson. But you also get the sense that she annoyed him more and more and more. And the more she wanted to please him, the more she annoyed him.
In 1951, after a 2-year separation, Barbara Hepworth's marriage to Ben Nicholson was dissolved.
>> "She was tremendously devastated by it. I think I would carry messages back and forth. Uh, Ben's to Barbara were mostly rather sarcastic messages. Um, he knew exactly how to needle Barbara, and Barbara would send messages to Ben that had to do with the children or had to do with somebody who was coming to visit or something like that. She didn't exactly weep, but she went into herself. She went into a deep shell. And the sculptures that she carved after that, at that period, were shrouded sculptures. And there was one sculpture, and she asked me what I thought it was. And I said, 'It seemed to me that it was a figure drowning.' And she said, 'You're right. It's a figure drowning.'"
Two years later, in 1953, she suffered a further blow when Paul, the son from her marriage to John Skeaping, died in a plane crash at the age of 23. She poured her feelings into a Madonna and Child for the parish church in St. Ives.
"She spoke with great sadness of, of, of his death and how he got killed. And it, I think, was very deep feelings in her emerged, perhaps for the first time verbally, when she spoke about him. Well, I think she wanted to express something that was just him. And to do that, she needed the physical form of the human being rather than one of her abstracts. Um, it, it was to do with him, not to do with her and her career, to make him remembered rather than make her remembered."
"Barbara was always very conscious of her role in the community, and it was a gesture, in a sense, that, um, she made something which she felt could show the local community that she could also speak directly to them. She wasn't just talking to her, um, her artist peers."
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
"It took a long time for me to find my own personal way of making sculpture. A long time to discover the purest forms which would exactly evoke my own sensations." Wishing to explore more fluid shapes, in 1956, she turned to a new material. She began to experiment with metal sculpture, using at first sheet metal and then also using bronze.
"Now, bronze is the great traditional material of sculpture. It's the ideal material for any sculpture because it, it lasts so well. You work in clay or in Barbara's case, in plaster, and then you send that to a foundry which casts it in bronze."
"We were like a factory with, uh, because she wanted to work very fast and have a continuous flow of plaster, and there was a very precise way in which she wanted the plaster mixed, and never to deviate by an iota, because she was using it almost, as I remember, she used the word herself, as handwriting. So, it needed to be just at the right point when she used it, and then to pick up with the next bowl while she was still moving with the previous one."
By the 1950s, with the increased demand for her work, Hepworth was employing several young assistants. She demanded seriousness throughout the day.
"Shall I say that she indulged a sense of humor when she was down with me working on correspondence, and Terry and Dennis and and Johnny were upstairs and were supposed to be carving. There would be gales of laughter. Her staircase was like a ladder, and so she'd go up this ladder and out into the garden to find out why they were laughing, and they were always working away. She could never, she could never catch them not working. It was, it was just, uh, she, she was very suspicious of of laughter, in case it was breaking the tension of focus."
Working with her assistants, Hepworth produced the monumental sculpture 'Single Form', commissioned for the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. It was a culmination of her thinking about art and politics and the part sculpture could play in city spaces.
"Barbara was a political animal. She was, um, not beyond sending telegrams to the Prime Minister. She cultivated her friendship with Harold Wilson, for example. Very few things gave her as much satisfaction, I think, as being able to make a sculpture for the United Nations."
"It was, it was a big monster growing inside that building, uh, and then released into the sunshine suddenly when it was moved out onto the trucks. It, I mean, the difficulty was not so much putting it on a truck, but how the trucks were going to move through the streets."
At the unveiling ceremony in 1964, she warned:
"The UN is our conscience. If it succeeds, it is our success. If it fails, it is our failure."
[Music] [Applause] [Music]
Barbara Hepworth had always been interested in what younger artists were up to, but she drew the line at Pop Art. As a trustee of the Tate, she was unhappy with the gallery's decision to buy 'Whaam!'.
"The whole of Hepworth's philosophy and her art is based on a belief in reaching for the universal and the ideal, whether it's a spiritual ideal or a timeless relationship between humankind and the landscape. And Pop represented the complete antithesis of that. It was a celebration of the ephemeral, the man-made, the recent, the kit, as opposed to the, um, highbrow, if you like."
[Music] She was now no longer at the cutting edge of the art world, but large-scale exhibitions of her work continued, and honors accumulated. In 1965, she became Dame Barbara Hepworth. Though she kept on making work, the last decade of her life was overshadowed by illness. In 1965, she contracted cancer of the tongue. It was successfully treated, but two years later, she fractured her hip. She came to rely increasingly on whiskey to ease the pain.
>> "I think she quite isolated herself, and I think she was very lonely. I got that impression, and I'm beginning to understand it as an elderly woman myself, that that you do isolate yourself. It's because of energy and and concentration on work and priorities. She was a very dedicated person about her work, but she probably had to compromise a bit more."
She'd always been shy and intensely private, but in the early 1970s, Barbara Hepworth allowed the BBC to interview her at work.
>> "Well, I think I've got the hang of this piece, which is quite new to me. I've not carved it before. It's very beautiful, quite temperamental in the way it works, but it's very sound. You heard me tapping it to hear what was going on, um, 'cause then one could sense if there's a fracture or something. But it's rather lovely and very pleased. Perhaps this is one of the most, um, passionate ideas of life, that we should have a containment. The various creatures being contained, they could fly away. In fact, this one has, but it might come back, you know. And, um, they're all touchable. I hadn't before tried several different materials, but I think the colors are worked out rather nice, you know. This is Irish. This is Cornish slate. This is marble. And this is Derbyshire limestone. But they seem to all fit together."
[Music] >> "It was the, the serene, timeless, classical quality of her work which meant most to her, and I think which means most to people who come across it today."
"I think her character was 100% in those works, which is perhaps why they work so well, because there's not a moment's dishonesty in them. The true, um, true voices from the inner part of her. It was her fanatic, ruthless obsession with her work that was an inspiration to me because I'd never met a woman who took her work so utterly seriously. But how she managed to be a mother and a wife and and an artist, with proper word artist, it's, it's formidable and wonderful."
[Music] Barbara Hepworth died in 1975 at the age of 72, in a fire at her studio, almost certainly caused by a late-night cigarette left to burn. It was a terrible end to her life.
[Music] "When I look at the photographs of her, I get a sense now that maybe somewhere, she was perhaps sad that it was so difficult to do both things. Be what she, I think must have known that she was a great sculptor, and try to bring up so many children. I think there may have been a regret that she didn't have more time."
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