Landscape, Colour and String

Hepworth retrospectively connected the departure from London with the first of her ‘sculptures with colour’, which include Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) (1940). The 'sculptures with colour' introduced two new elements into her work: colour and strings.

‘I was not able to carve at all; the only sculptures I carried out were some small plaster maquettes for the second ‘sculpture with colour’, and it was not until 1943, when we moved to another house, that I was able to carve this idea, and also the first idea for sculpture with colour of 1938’

~Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, 1952

Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) is one of five successively larger plaster versions of the same work. Hepworth’s use of plaster was likely adopted due to the shortage of available materials in the wartime period. During the war she also lacked a proper studio space. 

‘In the late evenings, and during the night I did innumerable drawings in gouache and pencil – all of them abstract, and all of them my own way of exploring the particular tensions and relationships of form and colour which were to occupy me in sculpture during the later years of the war.’

~Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, 1952

Unable to carve, Hepworth instead immersed herself in drawing. As with the plaster maquettes, she similarly introduced colour and string-like patterns into her drawings, stating that ‘they are my sculptures born in the disguise of 2 dimensions’.

This idea of drawing as a two-dimensional sculpture can be seen through a visual comparison of Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) and Drawing for Sculpture (1941). The drawing’s brightly coloured segments of colour and crystalline forms echo the plaster's dark blue painted interior and strung form.

Hepworth’s use of these naturalistic colours for the interiors of her sculptures coincides with a period in which she began to synthesise elements of the landscape around her into her work. 

She began to develop the recurring form of a hollowed out ovoid or sphere encircled by spiralling arms, which she associated with the coastal landscape of West Penwith: 

‘looking straight towards the horizon of the sea and enfolded (but with always the eye straight out to the Atlantic) by the arms of the land to the left and the right of me’

~Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, 1952

Ten years later, Hepworth returned to this fusion of hollowed out forms and painted interiors in a very different landscape – Greece. In August 1954 Hepworth’s longstanding friend Margaret Gardiner invited her on a holiday around the Greek islands.

‘The forms, the mountains, the valleys – the colour and silence, were such a part of my life [...] It is deeply part of my work’


~Barbara Hepworth, October 1964

A year after carving Curved Form (Delphi), Hepworth returned to the ‘curved form’ theme, this time in bronze for Curved Form (Trevalgan) (1956). Again the sculpture is associated with a specific named location, Trevalgan, a hill between St Ives and Zennor.

'Standing on the hill...where the land of Cornwall ends and the cliffs divide as they touch the sea facing west...facing the setting sun across the Atlantic, where sky and sea blend with hills and rocks, the forms seem to enfold the watcher and lift him towards the sky.’
 
~Barbara Hepworth, Text on the sculpture Curved Form (Trevalgan) (1956)

Though very different landscapes, Cornwall and Greece evoked for Hepworth this same sense of an enclosed form – what she would later identify as ‘the closed form’. She would return to this same form using different materials throughout her life.