{"id":1025464,"date":"2026-06-14T05:24:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T05:24:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1025464\/"},"modified":"2026-06-14T05:24:17","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T05:24:17","slug":"did-barbara-hepworth-really-neglect-her-children","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/1025464\/","title":{"rendered":"Did Barbara Hepworth really neglect her children?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In photographs, films, and even a Punch cartoon from 1954, \u201cour leading woman sculptor\u201d \u2013 and just as often \u201csculptress\u201d \u2013 Barbara Hepworth<\/a> is rarely without her tools, a flicker of satisfaction playing at her lips as she taps away with her mallet and chisel, at what might be four tonnes of marble.<\/p>\n

Though \u201csculptress\u201d is a term now laughably antique, and one that understandably irritated Hepworth, there\u2019s still a lingering and at least partly sexist fascination with the genteel and diminutive figure of the sculptor fully absorbed in hard manual labour, her red lips and bright clothes flashes of colour among her neutral-toned stones. Hepworth\u2019s irresistible glamour, which somehow bestows rather than compromises her gravitas, is no accident: from her London years before the Second World War, and during her subsequent life in Cornwall<\/a>, Hepworth carefully managed her image, shaping what would be her enduring identity as the very definition of an avant-garde sculptor.<\/p>\n

A pair of new exhibitions at the Courtauld Gallery in London shed new light on aspects of Hepworth\u2019s carefully honed artistic persona. Hepworth in Colour is the first exhibition to explore colour in her sculpture, which she first introduced in 1939, in a piece she was working on as she and her family left London for Cornwall: \u201cFive days before war was declared, I took the maquette with me, also my hammer and a minimum of stone carving tools,\u201d she later wrote.<\/p>\n

Hepworth\u2019s use of colour was, she said, \u201caccepted, but never understood\u201d, and she is best known for large-scale, abstract and usually monochrome forms, often pierced, that took inspiration from the Cornish coast where she lived for half of her life.<\/p>\n

\"HepworthAbove: \u2018Eidos\u2019 (1947) (Photo: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne)<\/p>\n

A small but fabulous display of sculptures and drawings from the 40s and beyond is likely to surprise even Hepworth aficionados, who may be prepared for duck-egg blue, but not for ultramarine, red and yellow \u2013 colours that Hepworth applied to herself too, in vivid combinations of trousers, headscarves, smocks and shirts. In the 60s, as colour supplements livened up the otherwise entirely monochrome Sunday papers, it was Barbara Hepworth herself who featured more than once as an eye-catching splash of colour.<\/p>\n

In black and white, Hepworth is every bit as engaging, perhaps even more so, because many such photographs were directed by the artist herself. Among the very best of these are a series of images by fine art photographer Paul Laib, a selection of which are on show as a supplementary, but not-to-be-missed display. Taken between 1932 and 1936 at 7 The Mall, the purpose-built Hampstead studio home that Hepworth shared with her partner, the painter Ben Nicholson, the photographs capture an environment of relaxed but rigorous bohemianism, in which art and life were entirely and mutually entwined.<\/p>\n

Hepworth was manifesting her ideal self: these images of artistic utopia gloss over the reality of a disappointingly conventional relationship dynamic that left Hepworth in almost sole charge of four children, of which the youngest were triplets. Always mindful of her reputation, it\u2019s no surprise that Hepworth \u2013 who would surely have been a brilliant Instagrammer \u2013 invested time, effort and money in images that asserted her status as a leading figure in modernist Britain, and that published in catalogues, or shared within their artistic circle, helped to secure her position and define her identity.<\/p>\n

Many artist women<\/a> of Hepworth\u2019s generation felt the pressure to choose art or family, but Hepworth saw it differently: \u201cOne must sacrifice a lot to be a sculptor,\u201d she said in 1960, \u201cbut one doesn\u2019t lose by looking after children \u2013 that is if one accepts this as part of one\u2019s enriching experience and uses it to its best advantage and do not, as so many women, try to reject it.\u201d She might well have been putting a brave face on it, and why should she not? Sympathy for a woman attempting to \u201chave it all\u201d could hardly have been overflowing, and she was certainly accused of neglecting her children, not something ever levelled at the fathers.<\/p>\n

\"Hepworth\u2018Curved Forms with Green\u2019 (1943), a pencil and gouache drawing by Barbara Hepworth (Photo: Alistair Peebles \/ Pier Arts Centre, Stromness)<\/p>\n

The triplets were \u201cabsolutely lovely\u201d, wrote Hepworth in an anguished letter to Nicholson, who was in an open marriage with another woman, and 12 weeks after the triplets\u2019 birth had left London for Paris to be with her and his other children. But though she was clearly devoted to her children, Hepworth\u2019s unwillingness to give up her career has been harshly judged. \u201cI am so deeply happy about the babies & want them with me all the time but I am also so deeply unhappy about not working,\u201d she wrote. <\/p>\n

The evidently heart-wrenching decision to send the babies to a residential nursery (a widely accepted practice in those days) has been interpreted as neglect, despite a long list of anxieties that include the small, damp Hampstead flat, and the difficulty of providing good food and fresh air. \u201cThe gas is leaking the boiler\u2019s leaking & the window falling in!!!!\u201d, she wrote. Saddest of all is her loneliness: \u201cI do wish you were here, the responsibility of making decisions alone is awful,\u201d she wrote to Nicholson.<\/p>\n

There were plenty of other prejudices too, and despite an uptick in women sculptors in the early part of the 20th century, the notion that sculpture, especially in stone, was a masculine occupation, persisted. In fact, it seems quite likely that Hepworth\u2019s initial hesitation to work in wood was in part due to its \u201cfeminine\u201d associations \u2013 as a softer material, wood, like clay, was often regarded as a more manageable material for a woman.<\/p>\n

Hepworth fielded endless curiosity about her physical capabilities, and in one interview from 1973, her impatience is unmistakable: \u201cI noticed from time to time that people look me up and down and say, \u2018Oh, we thought you\u2019d be a very large, hefty woman.\u2019 This irritates me vastly [\u2026] You don\u2019t need huge muscles, great strength. In fact, if you have that and misuse it you\u2019re going to damage the material. It\u2019s absurd. It\u2019s a rhythmical flow of an idea whichever sex you are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hepworth pushed back, the way that she presented herself in photographs and in interviews a very conscious assertion of the physical nature of her art. Just as she liked to be filmed hard at work, photographs often feature her tools, while in interviews she defines herself as \u201ca carver\u201d and speaks at length both about the technical processes of carving and the almost primal (and therefore entirely natural and almost sacred) act of communion with her materials that her practice entails.<\/p>\n

\"HepworthHepworth\u2019s carving studio at 7 The Mall, the purpose-built Hampstead studio home she shared with her partner, the painter Ben Nicholson (Photo: Paul Laib \/ The de Lazlo Collection)<\/p>\n

Inevitably, there was much interest in her hands, which Hepworth seems happy to have leaned into, not least because it was a fascination she shared, and would explore in depth in the 50s when she made a series of drawings of surgeons\u2019 hands. Co-curator Chloe Nahum says: \u201cAs a woman carver, Hepworth\u2019s hands had always provoked especial interest \u2013 one journalist had written in 1932 of her \u2018hands made strong and stiff as a man\u2019s by using hammers and wielding tools, so that she has had to give up piano playing and has turned to the concertina\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

Photographs of Hepworth\u2019s hands, and Nicholson\u2019s, are included among the Laib pictures currently on show, and form part of a series commissioned for a 1934 book on Unit One, the short-lived but influential group of modernist artists founded by painter Paul Nash in 1933, and which included Henry Moore<\/a> as well as Hepworth and Nicholson. Holding a striped pencil and alongside a stone, they feature as a still-life composed of the sculptors\u2019 tools.<\/p>\n

\u201cOther photographers would later ask to photograph her hands at work,\u201d says Nahum. \u201cWhen Cornel Lucas did so in 1959, Hepworth was pleased with some of the images that she felt had attained \u2018the feeling of work\u2019, but believed that half of the images failed to \u2018ring true\u2019. It was of great importance to Hepworth that photographs of her at work captured her truly immersed, rather than appearing to have been staged.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such concern for her image was almost certainly perceived by some as unbecomingly \u201cambitious\u201d, and may have been one reason for the accusations of \u201ccoldness\u201d that were levelled at her, and which really were misogyny masquerading as art criticism. But Hepworth\u2019s careful cultivation of her image, from fearless modernist pioneer, to the quasi-mystic \u201cFigure in a Landscape\u201d that developed in Cornwall, has undoubtedly helped to secure her rightful place as the most famous and best loved female British sculptor of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

\u2018Hepworth in Colour\u2019 and its accompanying exhibit \u2018Hepworth and Nicholson: The Hampstead Studio Photographs\u2019 are on at the Courtauld Gallery, London, until 4 October (courtauld.ac.uk<\/a>)<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In photographs, films, and even a Punch cartoon from 1954, \u201cour leading woman sculptor\u201d \u2013 and just as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1025465,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[7757],"tags":[748,393,4845,4884,257,16,15,161249],"class_list":["post-1025464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-london","tag-britain","tag-england","tag-exhibitions","tag-great-britain","tag-london","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-visual-art"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116746798391568217","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1025464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1025465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1025464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1025464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1025464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}