Barbara Hepworth

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specially chosen programmes from the BBC Archive.

In the courtyard of a new building in London stands a sculpture.

Some people admire it, some are puzzled.

Many wonder whose work it is.

In fact, it's the work of Barbara Hepworth,

for many years a leading personality

amongst artists who have pioneered modern art in Britain.

She was trained at the same art school as Henry Moore.

Her work has been shown all over Europe

and in North and South America.

She has received many of the honours

which come to artists whose fame and distinction are international.

Here, her powerful sculpture enlivens the towering walls of the city.

But she herself still works

in the surroundings she chose more than 20 years ago,

at St Ives, near Land's End in Cornwall.

CHURCH BELL TOLLS

SHIP'S HORN BLARES

HAMMERING

Barbara Hepworth works with wood, stone and metal.

Her work fills three or four studios round her house.

The weight of the great blocks and the storing of her sculptures

are amongst the greatest problems she has to face.

Some of her work is small and intimate in size,

but much of it is massive and monumental.

Arranging an exhibition involves the packing and the transport

by rail, by air and by sea

of a mass of sculpture weighing more than the contents of an average home.

The shapes of her sculptures

may remind one of the shapes of hills and trees.

Their contours flow in the rhythms of the sea, of the beach, of sand dunes,

of birds in flight or of the human figure.

Her sculpture may call these things to mind, but it never describes them.

Their meaning is ambiguous.

The rugged landscape of Penwith in Cornwall

is where Barbara Hepworth has worked for many years.

But she was born in a Yorkshire town,

where the mill chimneys and the stone-cobbled streets

were a harsh contrast to the open moorland round about.

Her feelings for the contrasts of the Yorkshire scene

are part of her earliest childhood recollections.

BARBARA HEPWORTH: All my early memories

are of forms and shapes and textures.

I remember moving through the landscape with my father in his car,

and the hills were sculptures.

The roads defined the forms.

There was the sensation

of moving physically over the fullness of a moor

and through the hollows and slopes of peaks and dales,

feeling, seeing, touching through the mind, the eye and the hand...

..the touch and texture of things...

sculpture, rock, myself and the landscape.

This sensation has never left me.

I, the sculptor, am the landscape.

BERNARD MILES: Barbara Hepworth's love for this Cornish landscape

is complete.

She feels for its history, its geology

and every part of its varied geography.

Though her work is abstract,

her sculptures often bear the old Cornish names

given to the features of an ancient kingdom,

names like Trevalgan or Trenona or Pendour.

WAVES CRASH

The Penwith landscape is dominated by the sea.

But behind the sea, the hard features of the land

are concealed beneath a profusion of growth.

This almost-tropical luxury is in extreme contrast

to the wild and elemental nature of the hills and the coast.

A brilliant light clarifies every colour and every image.

Standing in the garden by her studio,

one can believe that one is living in a Mediterranean country.

The precise forms of her sculpture have the clean-cut beauty

of Greek or Italian art.

BARBARA HEPWORTH: It took a long time

for me to find my own personal way of making sculpture,

a long time to discover the purest forms

which would exactly evoke my own sensations

and to visualise images

which would express the timelessness of primitive forces which I felt...

and the constant urges towards survival and growth

which I knew to be fundamental both to the human being

and to the landscape in which we stand.

I have always loved the joy of carving

and the rhythm of movement that grows in the sculpture itself,

just as I like dancing or skating.

I like the relaxation of sound and movement.

When I am carving or when I am listening to someone else carving,

I know what is happening not by what I see but what I hear.

The tools a sculptor uses become his friends,

and they become intensely personal to one,

the most precious extensions of one's sight and touch.

The right hand is the motor in carving,

and the left hand is the thinking, feeling hand...

..feeling the use of the gouge, the chisel,

the adze, the point.

All these tools have their special uses,

and the left hand senses the organic structure of the material

as it feels its way about the form.

BERNARD MILES: Although her earliest sculpture was realistic,

it already had a strong feeling for monumental shapes

and for surfaces which were characteristic

of the materials from which they were carved.

But increasingly, she worked with more freedom as her ideas developed.

Her sculptures became more abstract,

but their reference to the human figure still remained.

Then, the human figure was used to express the artist's deepest feelings

in the sculptural language of shapes and forms.

BARBARA HEPWORTH: It is difficult to describe in words

the meaning of forms,

because it is precisely this emotion which is conveyed by sculpture alone.

Our sense of touch is a fundamental sensibility

which comes into action at birth...

..the ability to feel weight and form and assess its significance.

The forms which have had a special meaning for me since childhood

have been the standing form...

which is the translation

of my feeling towards the human being standing in landscape...

..the two forms, which is the tender relationship

of one living thing beside another...

..and the closed form, such as the oval, spherical or pierced form,

sometimes incorporating colour...

which translate for me

the association and closeness of the human figure to landscape.

These forms also translate for me the closeness of mother and child

or the feeling of the embrace of living things

either in nature or in the human spirit.

In all these shapes, the evocation of what one feels about man and nature

must be conveyed by the sculptor

in terms of mass, inner tension and rhythm,

scale in relation to our human size

and the quality of surface,

which speaks through our hands as well as eyes.

BERNARD MILES: Not all of Barbara Hepworth's work is abstract.

Often, an artist feels the need to work in a realistic way,

and realistic paintings and drawings are complementary

to the carving and modelling of abstract work.

One series of such pictures were studies of the hands and figures

of nurses and surgeons at work in a hospital operating theatre.

The artist was making a record

of a subject which she had seen in reality.

But the artist can do more than record in a pictorial manner,

for this artist is a person who can project her feelings

into the materials she is using

until they correspond to the reality of her imagination

and so make us feel what she felt.

SEAGULLS CRY

BARBARA HEPWORTH: Many people select a stone or a pebble

to carry for the day.

The weight and form and texture felt in our hands

relates us to the past and gives us a sense of a universal force.

The beautifully shaped stone washed up by the sea

is a symbol of continuity,

a silent image of our desire for survival, peace and security.

BERNARD MILES: A group of the stones

which Barbara Hepworth found on the beaches around St Ives

looks like an imaginary landscape.

We don't often look at things as closely as the artist does.

The artist trains us to use our eyes.

A crystal of quartz is one of Barbara Hepworth's most valued possessions,

just a lump of mineral found in the ground,

but its delicate beauty stirs her imagination,

and it stirs ours, too.

The sculptor sees the beauty of nature

and has the intuition and the skill to pin it down in concrete terms.

This is sculpture which is composed much as music is composed,

and abstract sculpture is a kind of visual music.

FOOTSTEPS

Barbara Hepworth is convinced of the value of our response

to the shapes, textures and rhythms of the world about us.

She believes that in our materialistic age,

this response to the qualities and values of things

is particularly important,

for painting and sculpture appeal to the roots of our being.

To many people, the importance of abstract art is not at all clear,

for we have been accustomed

to a kind of art which sought perfection in pictorial realism.

Barbara Hepworth's art cannot be read or understood in those terms.

Her work may follow nature, but it never imitates it.

From her materials, she has made sculptures of the finest workmanship

whose shapes and surfaces have a great beauty.

The natural qualities of stone, of wood or metal

have been completely revealed.

She has manipulated volumes and spaces into complex constructions

whose lines and surfaces flow with an unbroken subtlety and grace.

Instinctively, she seems to have discovered

compositions and proportions as satisfying as any we have known.

The spaces and volumes of her sculptures seem inevitable.

She has created beauty...

and who can do more than that?

BARBARA HEPWORTH: It may be that the sensation of being a woman

presents another emphasis in art and particularly in terms of sculpture,

for there is a whole range of perception

belonging to feminine experience.

So many ideas spring from an inside response to form...

..a nut in its shell or a child in the womb

or the structures of growth in shells and crystals,

the hidden energy and rhythms of wood and stone

and the pure and gentle quality

of reflected light on the surfaces of natural material

which produces sensations of vitality, security and calm.

When I'm making a drawing, I like to begin with a board

which I have prepared with a definite texture and tone.

I like to rub and scrape the surfaces,

as I might handle the surface of a sculpture.

The surface takes my mood in colour and texture.

Then a line or a curve made on it has a bite,

rather like cutting into a slate.

Then one gets lost in a world of space and creation,

with a thousand possibilities,

because the next line one draws in association with the one before

will have a compulsion about it

which will carry one forward into unknown territory.

The conclusion will be reached by a sense of balance.

Suddenly, before one's eyes, is a new form

which, from a sculptor's point of view,

can be deepened or extended,

twisted, tightened, hardened, flattened

according to one's will,

as one brings to it one's own special life.

And in this kind of nonrealistic art,

the artist is free to follow his imagination

and to create precisely to his will.

What one does springs from a profound response to life itself.