{"id":698701,"date":"2026-06-12T00:24:09","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T00:24:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/698701\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T00:24:09","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T00:24:09","slug":"hepworth-in-colour-review-salty-cornish-seascapes-compressed-into-immaculate-sculptures-barbara-hepworth","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/698701\/","title":{"rendered":"Hepworth in Colour review \u2013 salty Cornish seascapes compressed into immaculate sculptures | Barbara Hepworth"},"content":{"rendered":"

They say in St Ives that if you put your ear to a Barbara Hepworth<\/a> sculpture, you can hear the waves breaking on Porthmeor beach. Well, maybe they do say that and maybe they don\u2019t. But the sea definitely roars in the ravishing sculptures at the heart of this small survey of just one aspect of her work: her use of colour.<\/p>\n

Hepworth\u2019s favourite colours turn out to be \u2013 wait for it \u2013 blue and white, the colours of the sea: the white foamy breakers and the rippling waters that swaddle the Cornish fishing town where her home and studio are proudly preserved.<\/p>\n

Lucid, geometrical beauty \u2026 Turning Form (Atlantic), 1961. Photograph: courtesy of Bowness<\/p>\n

And they haunt Hepworth\u2019s rounded, pierced, convex and concave tabletop sculptures. In the first and most beautiful room, a series of objects the size and shape of geodes are displayed on pedestals. The rounded, white plaster objects are cut open to reveal deep blue interiors that seem immemorial, although Hepworth has simply painted them. Across the blue illusionistic depths, red-painted strings are tautly fixed. The red strings might suggest seaweed if, like me, you can\u2019t get nature out of your head looking at these abstract yet evocative works.<\/p>\n

Is it OK to see Hepworth as an artist of salty seascapes? The Courtauld frames her in a more formalistic, high modernist way as a pure abstract creator. Around her vivid sculptures, in which so many wild windswept walks by the sea seem compressed, the gallery walls are hung with her precise designs. They feature carefully calculated curves and radiating, intersecting lines that map out a lucid, geometrical beauty.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s interesting to see these drawings, at least at first. But the obligation to keep looking from Hepworth\u2019s captivating, self-contained sculptures to her studies starts to feel like a chore. The argument of the exhibition is a bit empty, anyway: this famous British artist used colour. Is that a surprise? It seems reductive that a couple of pieces \u2013 a curvaceous, holey stone with a splash of yellow paint and a tall, graceful monolith that resembles jade \u2013 seem to be here simply to show Hepworth didn\u2019t think in monochrome. They surely deserve better than to be chucked in as evidence that she enjoyed her colours.<\/p>\n

But Hepworth is such a great sculptor, perfect and immaculate. Her 1946 elmwood carving Pelagos curls over like an especially elegant wave, the kind that surfers wait for off St Ives. Hepworth must have watched waves for hours, for years, to be able to visualise this graceful, smooth curve of gathered force, which she has painted white on its underside. Red strings, again, are suspended between the double curve, creating an almost cinematic sense of movement. They add to the sense that Hepworth doesn\u2019t only work with colour but sound, too.<\/p>\n

An especially elegant wave \u2026 Pelagos, 1946. Photograph: Bowness<\/p>\n

The strings make her sculptures resemble the Aeolian harp, an instrument that can be played by the wind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had one and wrote: \u201cHow by the desultory breeze caressed \u2026 the long sequacious notes \/ Over delicious surges sink and rise.\u201d In this windowless room in central London, Hepworth\u2019s stringed sculptures may not sing in the wind but they resonate in your mind.<\/p>\n

Mysterious \u2026 Sculpture With Colour (Eos), 1946. Photograph: Bowness<\/p>\n

Hepworth\u2019s passion for the forms created by the wind and waves fills this exhibition with blues and blue-greens. Her oil and pencil sketch Turning Form (Atlantic) is a rolling white misty spray in a spattered blue ocean, while Sea Form (Porthmeor) suggests those same wild waters in a wide horizon of green bronze. Most mysterious and lingering of all is Sculpture<\/a> With Colour (Eos). This upright oval was carved from Hopton Wood stone in 1946. Hepworth dug a hole into it and painted it blue. The resulting oceanic oval recess in the miniature monolith resembles a huge staring eye: is it the eye of Eos, the Greek goddess of dawn?<\/p>\n

I never thought of Hepworth as a mystic. But the calm and stillness her art creates feels spiritual. When you gaze at the upper and lower curves of her work Wave, time stops, as for a surfer on the water.<\/p>\n

Hepworth\u2019s art does not depict nature. Instead, it makes you feel the solitude, peace and the immensely long, dwarfing time cycles of nature: the time it takes for the sea to make a cave in a cliff, or for rain to sculpt a peninsula. The sculptor\u2019s chisel has often been imagined as a penetrating, aggressive tool, shaping stone into convex, upright figures. Hepworth releases concavities, liberates holes. Maybe exhibitions of her art are often careful and fussy, as this one is, because they are a little intimidated by the sheer power of British art\u2019s nature goddess.<\/p>\n

At the Courtauld, London<\/a>, from 12 June to 6 September<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"They say in St Ives that if you put your ear to a Barbara Hepworth sculpture, you can…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698702,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":["post-698701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698701\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}