Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden
The Barbara Hepworth Museum has a special place in my heart.
In August 2019 I had packed up my life in London a month earlier, and was in between staying with my best friends in Manchester and doing some last minute traveling before heading back to Australia.
Before meeting my friends in Cornwall for a long weekend, I had spent the previous two weeks in Cambridge. I’d finally ticked off something I’d always wanted to do - study at Cambridge University. It was only a Summer Course but it was everything I’d dreamed it would be. I stayed in a dorm room, ate my meals in a hall and met the most glorious people; people who had quickly become friends because of our common interests and decision to use our precious holiday time to study creative writing. When the two weeks were up I was heartbroken. I didn’t want to leave. I had genuinely felt like I belonged there, with the friends I had made from all around the world who I knew - despite the pleas we’d all stay in touch - I was never going see again.
On the train from Cambridge to Cornwall via London I felt drained, like I was heading away from where I wanted to be. Over the five hour journey, I tried to write something new, but all I could write was about my time in Cambridge. And it was the same for the rest of the trip too. All I could think about was Cambridge. I read my friends my stories, I wore my Cambridge University jumper everyday and I carried around my class notes everywhere we went. And then I saw the Barbara Hepworth Museum. It had been one of the class prompts of the day for a story we’d had to write. A picture of her studio. I hadn’t picked that prompt myself, but it didn’t matter, here was something that connected Cambridge and Cornwall.
Barbara Hepworth (1903 - 1975) and her second husband, the artist Ben Nicholson, moved to St Ives at the outbreak of World War II with their children. She found and bought the studio on Barnoon Hill in 1949 where she would live the remainder of life and would later become the site of the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Gallery.
In her early life Hepworth had won a scholarship to study at Leeds School of Art in 1920, where she met lifelong friend and sculptor Henry Moore. They also both continued their studies the following year at London’s Royal College of Arts. While there she competed for the Prix de Rome, a French scholarship that allowed the winner to study in Rome. However she lost out to John Skeaping, who would shortly become her first husband. They moved to Rome together and it was there she first learnt to carve with stone.
It is estimated that over her fifty year career, Hepworth produced over 600 sculptures. In 1932 she created Pierced Form, made from pink alabaster and her first work with a carved hole. From then on her sculptures became increasingly abstract and would often include hollowed out shapes. Hepworth experimented with various materials over her long career including Serravezza marble, silver, Burmese wood, limestone, and bronze. She also used strings, an element that added a sense of delicacy and suggested musical instruments. In 1936 the Museum of Modern Art purchased its first Hepworth piece following on from her exhibition with the Parisian Abstraction-Creation group which connected her with Picasso, Kandinsky and Mondrian.
At home in Cornwall she created the Penwith Society of Arts with Nicholson and Peter Lanyon. Several museums held retrospectives of her work, firstly in 1943 at Temple Newsam in Leeds, and later Whitechapel Gallery in London during the early 1950s. In 1965 she became both a Dame and the Tate’s first female trustee. In 1975, frail and suffering from mobility issues, she fell asleep in her studio while smoking a cigarette and died in the fire.
Learning about Hepworth while at the museum and when I got upstairs, seeing the gardens and her sculptures for myself, I completely forgot about Cambridge. I just wanted to know all about the woman who had created this beautiful space.
Sources:
https://barbarahepworth.org.uk/st-ives/
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-barbara-hepworth-modern-master-sculpture
https://mymodernmet.com/barbara-hepworth
https://www.guggenheim-venice.it/en/art/artists/barbara-hepworth/
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/dame-barbara-hepworth-1274/who-is-barbara-hepworth