by JEANETTE WINTERSON
Infant, 1929 PHOTO/© Bowness
Barbara Hepworth liked to say, “There is no landscape without the figure.”
She was born in Wakefield, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in 1903. What she saw, the earliest imprints on her retina, were dramatic forms: outcrops and crags, peaks and escarpments. Weather and time sculpting the rocks that are the spine of the place. She was born amid the monumental.
Hepworth believed that sculpture was first and foremost an outdoor art. For her, a sculpture was a mediating form that made a connection between our inner and outer worlds.
It fascinated her that from earliest times, humans quarried stone, dragged its reluctant mass to some sacred place, carved it, worked it, and raised up those stones to stand as signals of human endeavour. Standing stones are public monuments in the truest sense, a collective enterprise made out of necessity; not the necessity of survival – a daily preoccupation for our ancestors – but the necessity of the soul.
Hepworth never accepted that art of any kind was a diversion or a luxury – how could it be when it springs so early from a uniquely human wish to make a pause in the relentless struggle to exist? A place of commemoration and contemplation.
Hepworth’s own public commissions have a strong sense of this shared enterprise – this public good.
When, in 1961, she was commissioned to create a piece to stand outside the United Nations Building in New York City, she wanted something that people would actually look at, rather than walk past, a piece where the meaning was inherent, rather than representational (statues of great men) or symbolic (cenotaphs).
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This shining child, free of associations of black or white, posed upright but with the horizontality of a sleeping baby, arms above his head, offers what Hepworth called “the emotion of a thing”. She felt that emotion happened more powerfully when the object was not too faithfully rendered. Abstraction, for her, avoided what she called “particularisation”. We know what she means. Who cares about snapshots of people we don’t know? We are indifferent to the minutiae of lives dear to others. Faithful representation does not, by itself, bring us up close, or cause us to feel anything. Think of the real-life atrocities we see on the daily news – and forget about.
Hepworth understood the Modernist move away from representation to abstraction as a step toward greater feeling and truth. As a woman, and as a mother, she brought warmth and intimacy to this project. Art is not gender neutral. That fact is a strength.
Hepworth though, like many other women artists, had to cope with the fact of her femaleness automatically interpreted as a weakness.
The Telegraph for more