“Every work of sculpture is, and must be, an act of praise, an awareness of man in his landscape.”
—Barbara Hepworth

 

Elegantly realised in highly polished bronze, the smooth, elongated forms of Four Figures Waiting perfectly captures key aspects of British sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s pioneering practice. Showcasing Hepworth’s experimental approach to space, the opening of sculptural form, and her sensitivity to the tactility of her chosen materials, Four Figures Waiting also highlights the artist’s persistent fascination with the natural world, and of our relationship to it. Recalling at once the curved forms of the human figure and the prehistoric menhirs or ‘standing stones’ found throughout the Cornish landscape where Hepworth made her home from 1939, the work is both timeless and strikingly modern, perfectly synthesising tensions between form, volume, and abstraction.  

 

Idealised Abstraction

 

Demonstrating a radical simplicity in her approach to form even in her early, figurative work, by the 1930s Hepworth’s visual language had evolved, her facility for direct carving and more poetic interest in questions of structure leading her into newly abstract territory. As the painter Paul Nash perceptively described in 1932, for Hepworth ‘Each form is purely sculptural – the embodiment of an idea neither literary, naturalistic, nor philosophical, but simply formal; its meaning is itself, itself the only meaning.’ⁱ Living in Hampstead amongst a circle of artists, architects, and intellectuals during this period, Hepworth was immersed in contemporary currents of European modernism that would profoundly shape her thinking about materials and sculptural form. An important trip to Paris in the early 1930s further crystallised these ideas; Hepworth visited to modernist sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp and began exhibiting with the avant-garde artist’s society Abstraction-Création.   

 

In Brancusi especially, Hepworth found ‘the miraculous feeling of eternity mixed with beloved stone and stone dust […] this complete unity of form and material’ that would come to define her own work.ⁱⁱ Although Hepworth herself would not start working in bronze until the mid-1950s, in the sleek surfaces, purified forms, and thrusting verticality of Four Figures Waiting we can trace the important early influence of Brancusi’s simplified but highly sophisticated bronzes. Going significantly further in her investigations of sculptural space, Hepworth’s introduction of the pierced form during this early period allowed her to radically open her forms, embracing the compositional possibilities granted by abstraction.

 

Conceived and cast in 1968 – the same year as a major retrospective of her work was mounted at the Tate Gallery in London - Four Figures Waiting belongs to a period of growing international acclaim for the artist, who was selected to represent Britain at the XXV Venice Biennale in 1950, and was the focus of major retrospectives, public commissions, and awards throughout the decade. As Hepworth consciously forged this reputation, she also continued to experiment with her materials and sculptural practice, and in 1956 she made the decisive move to start working in bronze. Instead of modelling in clay or wax as is historically more typical of sculptors casting in bronze, Hepworth worked with plaster, allowing her to continue to develop a mode of direct carving that she had used to such effect with her work in wood and stone. Conceiving of this in fleshy, very human terms, Hepworth described building her skeletal armatures ‘and then putting the plaster on […] like covering the bones with skin and muscles. But I build it up so that I can cut it. I like to carve the hard plaster surface.’ⁱⁱⁱ

 

This new development in Hepworth’s practice enabled her to ‘create much more open, linear, transparent forms that would have been impossible to realise in stone or wood’, and allowed her to work both at a much larger scale, better suited to the public commissions and, on the other hand, to create limited editions of her smaller pieces, making her work more commercially viable for collectors, and allowing her to reach an even wider audience.^iv

 

 While Hepworth had started to reintegrate the figure in her more abstract compositions of the 1940s, the introduction of bronze casting into her practice allowed her to experiment with groups of upright forms and radically extended her long-standing ‘obsession with the standing figure in landscape.’^v While for Hepworth the standing form always reflected what she described as ‘the translation of my feeling towards the human being standing in landscape’, her mature work shows a deepening interest in the interactions and ‘tender relationship[s] of one thing living beside another’, culminating in enigmatic pieces such as The Family of Man. Almost identical, their tapering forms incorporating rounded and flattened elements, the close arrangement of Four Figures Waiting speaks to this tension between human presence and the more symbolic or mystical forces of the ancient landscape that is so characteristic of her late work, the slight variations in their individual silhouettes animating the figures with a striking vitality and elegance.

 

Barbara Hepworth, Figures in a Landscape, 1953

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• On of the most celebrated sculptors of the 20^th century and a defining figure of international modernism, Barabra Hepworth carved in wood and stone, casting in bronze later from the mid-1950s.

 

• The subject of major international exhibitions, commission, and accolades during her lifetime, her work has been exhibited all over the world, with one major retrospective currently on view at Tate St Ives, also home to the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. Last year, her work was the focus of a solo exhibition with Heide Museum of Modern Art in Victoria, Australia. 

 

• Cast in 1968, the present work is one of an edition of ten, with other examples held in the collections of the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan, and the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery, Bedford.

 

ⁱ Paul Nash, ‘A Painter and a Sculptor’, The Week-End Review, 19 November, 1932, p. 613.

ⁱⁱ Barbara Hepworth, Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, London, 1952, n.p.

ⁱⁱⁱ Barbara Hepworth, quoted in Alan G. Wilkinson, ‘Cornwall and the Sculpture of Landscape: 1939-1975’, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, Liverpool, 1994, p. 102.

^iv Barbara Hepworth, quoted in Alan G. Wilkinson, ‘Cornwall and the Sculpture of Landscape: 1939-1975’, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, Liverpool, 1994, p. 102.

^v Alan G. Wilkinson, ‘Cornwall and the Sculpture of Landscape: 1939-1975’, in Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective (exh. cat.), Tate Liverpool, 1994, p. 79.