Page 38 - Studio International - January 1966

Barbara Hepworth
Wave forms (Atlantic) 1964
Oil and pencil
30 x 40 in.
By courtesy of Gimpel Fils

Barbara Hepworth impassive monument of the body in the Seated Figure
Skiagram 1949 of 1930, or again, the anonymous heads that appear
Oil and pencil
211 x 141 in. in his drawing of Two Standing Figures which was
Collection Sir William Worsley, Bt.
made as late as 1961.
Moore's art concentrates continually upon the idea of
'the family'; not any particular family, but the family of
man. And it is in the shelter drawings especially, with
their marvellous and ennobling feeling for the sharing
of common experience, that the inevitability of Moore's
sculptural destiny is most shiningly revealed : not only
the crucial monumentality of his vision and the power
of his philosophical serenity, but also a totality in the
forms of drawing which is complete and absolute in
itself. It is one thing for the sculptor to make drawings
which portend the actual achievements of sculpture—
drawings which are stepping-stones towards the clay,

stone or bronze; it is a quite other and more astonish-
ing achievement for the sculptor to have realised in his
drawings so profound a degree of sheer monumentality
that the act of modelling or carving would be super-
fluous to this expression. There could hardly be any
clearer evidence of the relationship between drawing
and sculpture, although the work of Barbara Hepworth
also exemplifies this organic rapport, especially in the
series of hospital drawings which she made in 1947. n

Mervyn Levy is currently working on a book that will enlarge
on the theme of this article.