Barbara hepworth short biography

Summary of Barbara Hepworth

Barbara Hepworth distinguished herself as a world-recognized sculptor in a period where female artists were rare. She evolved her ideas and her work as an influential part of an ongoing conversation with many other important artists of her time, working crucially in areas of greater abstraction while creating three dimensional objects. Her development of sculptural vocabularies and ideas was complex and multi-faceted. This included the use of a wide range of physical materials for sculpting and an unprecedented sensitivity to the particular qualities of those materials in helping decide the ultimate results of her sculptures, the investigation of "absence" in sculpture as much as "presence," and deep considerations of the relationship of her sculptural forms to the larger spaces surrounding it. Though her forms in their larger outlines tended to possess the clean lines of modernist aesthetics, she complicated these with different textures, an effect described by one reviewer as "sensuous and tactile" that "quickened the pulse".

Accomplishments

• She helped shift three dimensional art works into greater abstraction as she herself moved from creating work mingling figurative forms with abstraction in her earlier sculptures to almost entirely abstract, non-representational later works.
• Hepworth was a key figure among modern sculptors in responding to the physical characteristics of whichever material was chosen to work with in order to resolve appropriate forms for the finished works, rather than simply mold material to fit some pre-determined shape.
• Though she developed a long series of highly abstract pieces, the greater trajectory of her work was imbued with underlying aspects of nature, which she brought out more explicitly in the sculptures of her later career. "All my sculpture comes out of landscape," she wrote in 1943. "I'm sick of sculptures in galleries & photos with flat backgrounds... no sculpture really lives until it g

What inspired her work?

Why did she make holes through her sculptures?

What other sculptures did she make?

Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth, born in Wakefield, England in 1903, was a sculptor whose works were among the earliest abstract sculptures produced in England. Her lyrical forms and feeling for material made her one of the most influential sculptors of the mid-20 century.

Fascinated from early childhood with natural forms and textures, Hepworth decided at age fifteen to become a sculptor. In 1919, she enrolled in the Leeds School of Art, where she befriended fellow student Henry Moore. Their life-long friendship and reciprocal influence were important factors in the parallel development of their careers.

Hepworth’s earliest works were naturalistic with simplified features. Purely formal elements gradually gained greater importance for her until, by the early 1930’s, her sculpture was entirely abstract. Works resembled rounded biomorphic forms and natural stones; they seem to be the fruit of long weathering instead of hard work with a chisel. After the end of her marriage to sculptor John Skeaping, Hepworth married the English abstract painter Ben Nicholson is 1933. It was under his influence that she began to make severe, geometric pieces with straight edges and immaculate surfaces.

As Hepworth’s sculpture matured during the late 1930’s and 1940’s she concentrated on the problem of the counterplay between mass and space. Her works became increasingly open, hollowed out, and perforated, so that the interior space is as important as the mass surrounding it. Her practice, increasingly frequent in her mature pieces, of painting works’ concave interiors further heightened this effect, while she accented and defined the sculptural voids by stretching strings taut across their openings. In 1947 Hepworth made a design for the celebrated fabric designer Zika Ascher. 

During the 1950’s, Hepworth produced an experimental series called Groups, c

English artist and sculptor (1903–1975)

Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth (10 January 1903 – 20 May 1975) was an English artist and sculptor. Her work exemplifies Modernism and in particular modern sculpture. Along with artists such as Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, Hepworth was a leading figure in the colony of artists who resided in St Ives during the Second World War.

Born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, Hepworth studied at Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art in the 1920s. She married the sculptor John Skeaping in 1925. In 1931 she fell in love with the painter Ben Nicholson, and in 1933 divorced Skeaping. At this time she was part of a circle of modern artists centred on Hampstead, London, and was one of the founders of the art movement Unit One.

At the beginning of the Second World War Hepworth and Nicholson moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where she would remain for the rest of her life. Best known as a sculptor, Hepworth also produced drawings – including a series of sketches of operating rooms following the hospitalisation of her daughter in 1944 – and lithographs. She died in a fire at her studio in 1975.

Biography

Early life

Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth was born on 10 January 1903 in Wakefield, West Riding of Yorkshire, the eldest child of Gertrude and Herbert Hepworth. Her father was a civil engineer for the West Riding County Council, who in 1921 advanced to the role of county surveyor. Hepworth attended Wakefield Girls' High School, where she was awarded music prizes at the age of 12 and won a scholarship to study at the Leeds School of Art from 1920. It was there that she met her fellow Yorkshireman, Henry Moore. They became friends and established a friendly rivalry that lasted professionally for many years.

Despite the difficulties of attempting to gain a position in what was a male-dominated environment, Hepworth successfully won