Art and medicine have a long history. From the wounds of
Christ to Rembrandt’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Tulp’, from miracle healings to
the casualties of war and the faces of the insane, the subjects of art invite
us to look with an eye at once compassionate and forensic at the vulnerable
body and mind. In the series of 70 drawings by Barbara Hepworth of
operations in a hospital theatre the artist and the doctor come particularly
close . These works originated in the friendship of Hepworth and Exeter orthopaedic
surgeon Norman Capener, who in 1944 treated Hepworth’s daughter Sarah, who
suffered from osteomyelitis (now treated with antibiotics, but then requiring
complex surgery). A lifelong friendship followed. Capener was himself an
amateur artist and Hepworth taught him sculpture; Capener in turn designed some
surgical instruments based on Hepworth’s sculpting tools. Between 1947 and 1949
Hepworth witnessed, and drew, operations performed by Capener and colleagues.
The drawings bring out the remarkable connections between artist and surgeon:
Capener was devising his own ‘philosophy of the hand’ and the drawings show
hands in the actions in the actions of praying, blessing, probing,
exploring - each action echoed by the
act of drawing, or rather incising, as Hepworth cut her way with a scalpel-like
pencil into a board prepared with a gesso layer. This is a technique we
associate with Renaissance drawing, and the groups of figures in these works
look like the nativities and pietàs of renaissance art: clinical procedures
assume the grace and gravitas of spiritual rituals. The quality of absolute attention – from
surgeon to patient, from artist to surgeon - draws in our own gaze, while at
the same time the white masked bodies of the doctors appear to us transfigured into the
pure shapes of Hepworth’s sculptural forms.
