Page 42 - Studio International - June 1966

Barbara Hepworth in her times

by Gene Baro

Barbara Hepworth is one of a few remarkable artists who foreign ideas, to reconcile them to some of their own
developed in England in the late 1920's, and especially aspirations, and to accommodate them in their practice.
during the 1930's, in opposition to then-dominant English In the main, these ideas had to do with the expressive
modes, already some thirty or forty years out of date. and structural uses of abstraction, though also with the
The Continent had been moving ahead in the arts. unconscious sources of artistic imagery. They provided
Moving ahead covers a multitude of sins; but here at Barbara Hepworth and other young English painters
least no value judgement is implied; I mean merely to and sculptors of those days with an enlarged frame of
indicate the unwillingness of young artists in France, reference. They began to test their perceptions against
Germany, and Italy to repeat the successes or accept the what was new elsewhere and not only against received
reasoning of their seniors. New concepts and directions, local opinion. What they knew of the art world abroad,
both technical and philosophic, were being explored in or what they heard about it, encouraged them to relate
these countries and were enlarging and exciting the sen- their feelings to it; they had the sense of an exciting
sibilities of a growing public. In these societies, there was world, speculative and contentious, in which the artist
also hostility to the new art, but there was no indifference was a shaping force, an interpreter of reality, and not
Marble with colour to it. The fatigued English response to innovation was simply the guardian of a fixed standard of taste or way
(Crete) 1964 lacking. of seeing.
White marble
Height 54 in. The distinction of some of Barbara Hepworth's con- The revolution that took place in English art in the late
Collection: the artist temporaries was to be sympathetic to a number of these 1920's and during the 1930's can best be explained as a
generation's release of imagination and, subsequently, of
individual energies. Conditions existed that prompted
the young to think for themselves and to give up their
traditional conservatism—and there was also something
to think about. Cubism and Surrealism were crossing the
Channel. Though generally unwelcome in England, and
all but universally misunderstood, they were not ignored
by the young English artists—those who made the modern
movement in this country. These foreign developments,
which had nothing to do with English art, nevertheless
appeared to some a criticism of what was happening at
home. Next to these importations—whether works or
systems of ideas—contemporary English art seemed intel-
lectually feeble, undisciplined, sentimental, and easy.
Paul Nash voiced the avant-garde concern when he wrote
in Unit One (London : Cassell, 1934) :
With a few exceptions, our artists have painted 'by the
light of nature' .. . This immunity from the responsi-
bility of design has become a tradition; we are frequently
invited to admire_ the 'unconscious' beauties of the
British School—'so faithful to Nature'. Nature we need
not deny, but art, we feel, should control.
Though Nash's comment is more applicable to British
painting, sculpture is not immune from the implications.
Curiously enough, British art in the 1930's develops pre-
cisely in line with this criticism of it. Contact with the
major innovations of twentieth-century art produces
principally a tougher British romanticism. The landscape
is found to have sinews. Sutherland in painting and Moore
in sculpture are the pre-eminent figures in what is essen-
tially a renovation of feeling, a hardening of attitude.
Moore's aesthetic, with its insistence upon the integrity
of materials and the implicitness of form, can be read as
a will to self-discipline—a species of asceticism that does
not preclude flights of fancy. One might say that Moore
lays down the law to intuition; he provides himself with
a standard for choosing one intuition over another. This
is a very different procedure from conceptualizing, where
formal problems—by their very arbitrariness—are in-
separable from aesthetic ones.
The presence in England during the 1930's of such fig-
ures as Gabo, Moholy-Nagy, Mondrian, Gropius, and
Breuer, and their association with the English artists
centred around Axis, Unit One, and Circle, was of the first