Barbara Hepworth as Print Maker

Barbara Hepworth’s work in printmaking is arguably the least well-known aspect of her oeuvre, yet deserves to be seen in tandem – rather than tangential – to both her sculpture and drawing practices. 

Hepworth arrived at printmaking relatively late in life, in 1958, when Stanley Jones of the Curwen Press started a pilot scheme to establish printmaking facilities in a studio in St Ives. Here she made her first lithograph, Untitled (1958). 

This initial foray into printmaking was however to be an isolated event, which Hepworth did not return to until 1968. Some two years earlier, Curwen Press manager Herbert Simon had written to her, proposing printmaking as a viable commercial enterprise to allow ‘people of modest means to own something by Barbara Hepworth’. 

In the 1960s Hepworth was returning to the abstract forms that had occupied her 1930s sculptural output.

12 Lithographs is similarly dominated by geometric forms – squares, circles and intersecting lines. Formal resonances can be seen between individual sculptures and lithographs, such as the lithograph Oblique Forms, which recalls the earlier 1967 sculpture of the same title.

There are also connections between Hepworth's paintings and her lithographs. Sun and Moon reinterprets the earlier painting Genesis III  (1966), utilising the same red and grey circles placed at diagonal relations to one another.

It is Hepworth's 1970-71 series of lithographs, The Aegean Suite, that might be described as the culmination of her printmaking, and which arguably shows her at her most accomplished. 

As with 12 Lithographs, Stanley Jones repeated the pattern of travelling to Cornwall to work with Hepworth at Trewyn Studio. From this visit resulted nine lithographs, many of which refer to Greek place-names in their titles, as in Delos, Itea and Olympus.

In their evocation of heat, sun and water, the lithographs offer a sensuous engagement with the Greek world, one which recalls Hepworth’s own experience of Greece in 1954. 

The lithographs also reference ancient Greek civilisation, as in Fragment, where classical marble figures are translated into abstract white, overlapping semi-circles.  

The Aegean Suite was the last series of prints that Hepworth made, although she did continue to produce occasional individual lithographs and screenprints during the final years of her life.

The final prints are dominated by celestial forms and a focus on ‘magic’ stones. There is an obvious parallel with Hepworth's later carvings which explore the ritualistic properties of sculpture, such as Totem (1960-62). 

Hepworth made several late 'moon' prints which use the motif of an incised circle bisected by horizontal and vertical lines, as in Moon Play  (1972) and Moon Landscape  (1973).