When does art become over-familiar, so ingrained that a surprise response becomes impossible? Hepworth's smooth, primal forms, Moore's landscapes morphed into human form; walking around Tate Britain, where I spent many hours many years ago, I found myself nostalgic for the time when the modern pressed itself into my consciousness, when it wasn't familiar or embalmed in reverence.
Tate Britain's Hepworth show was a fruitful re-introduction to this stern yet serene creator, giving us a clear account of stages in Hepworth's artistic career. Room One introduced us to direct carving: while the classical way was for a sculptor to model in clay and then leave it to assistants to cast the work in bronze, in the 1920s a number of sculptors (Jacob Epstein, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska among them) carved directly into stone. This method was not, it seems, all that revolutionary, and was in fact taught in art schools; but it was associated with decorative rather than fine art. This is always a tricky distinction;. Is John Skeaping's charming Fish (1929-30) a mantelpiece item, while his (attributed) torsos, because they are sort of Grecian, 'fine'? Whose values are at work here? But perhaps, albeit sceptically, one can detect a kind of higher seriousness in the austere figures which look back to archaic and classical forms next to the charming animal sculptures by contemporaries like Alan Durst, Ursula Edgecumbe, Elsie Henderson. Who were they? We wonder how fame's trail was blazed, exactly. How many artists, like Leon Underwood, were just not that interested in the networking and self-promotion that lead to a place in the galaxy? How meritocratic is the art history we tell ourselves?
Anyway, I found myself fascinated as much by the kinds of stone as by the works themselves: anhydrite, polyphant, white alabaster, Hoptonwood, Bath, Corsehill - each one suggesting something to the artist's mind by its heft, grain and texture. There is always the magic of working against the stony matter, too: hard, cool Parisian marble becomes the warm soft bodies of Hepworth's Doves (1927). There is a strong sense of contiuity with other epochs, in the seated, inwardly asorbed female figures with their ancient geometrical hair (Contempative Figure, 1928). While the block of stone is suited to bust and seated figure, its grain and curve following sometimes a twist in the body, wood tends towards the vertical. But it, too, steps out of its time: Standing Figure (1929-30), with its stylized face and blank eyes recall the kouroi of Egypt. This was a time, we remember, when artists were finding in the so-called 'primitive' a path away from the oppressive canons of academic tradition and the vacuity of modern life.
Room Two, 'Studio', is about the partnership, artistic and personal, of Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson. A work of art makes us wonder about the process of its making, and one of the best ways of tracing that process is to become, imaginatively, the artist herself. And so, in front of Head (1930-31), I feel the Cumberland alabaster in my hand, my body latched on to its vast geological history and the landscape it comes from, my skin answering to its smoothness, my mind's eye picking up the face pushing outwards from within the stone. Carving is unearthing, dis-covering. Everything leads to a kind of simplicity which resonates, which has presence. Modernity makes its mark room: in the Cubist abstraction of Two Heads (1932), in the formal experiments of the Mother and Child series (1934), or the Freudian moment in the phallic imagery of Two Forms (1933) and Standing Figure (1934). Yet at the essential, mystical level, the view is always in the direction of the primal, the prehistoric, the work which bypasses the rational historic mind and speaks to our instincts, as a cliff-face or a cloud may speak to us.
Room 3, International Modernism, puts Hepworth in the context of abstract artists of the period: Alexander Calder, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Piet Mondrian, Auguste Herbin. There are pages from the magazines through which their work became visible. And here are the kinds of pieces I auto-associate with the name 'Hepworth': smooth, polished, elemental forms (simply called 'Forms'); smooth and gleaming, like distended eggs, tapering standing figures like megaliths; distillations of sand-dunes, the undulations of landscape, forms in a rock pool. The base becomes part of the work. There is something theatrical going on, a feeling that that stones have a mysterious life and speak to each other across quiet spaces. Serenity, purity of a ritual kind takes over from the roughness and mess of ordinary life. Here, and in the next room, we find the family of wooden carvings, hollowed out, painted, strung like Aeolian harps - expressions of the feelings of a landscape, dream versions of caves, tunnels and subterranean streams.
We move into a room of larger wooden sculptures, from the hard tropical wood guarea. These are inspired by a visit to Greece, soon after the tragic death of the artist's son Paul, aged 23. We are invited to perceive a funereal quality to the sculptures, and perhaps there is one, or is that simply a case of reading what we know into what we see? Before we leave, there is a reconstruction of a pavilion for a 1965 exhibition in the Netherlands, with the bronze works exhibited there - looping and folding concentric bands, petrified ripples.
I didn't mind seeing Hepworth indoors. Of course these works take on another dimension in a landscape setting, but sculpture shouldn't depend on a particular environment, and I thought they kept their charge in the soft-toned spaces of the Tate's downstairs galleries. The main weakness of the exhibition was the rather anxious promotion of Hepworth as an international modernist - which she was, but there isn't enough here about Cornwall and the St Ive's community, as if that would make her seem parochial to London gallery-goers; and the more her modernity was stressed, the more I saw the prehistoric and the turning away from modern life. But that is a paradox within Modernism itself. More importantly, the exhibition let the sculptures do their work, speak to the spirit, and quicken our response to the earth, the land, the undulations of that wave, that hillside.
Room 3, International Modernism, puts Hepworth in the context of abstract artists of the period: Alexander Calder, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Piet Mondrian, Auguste Herbin. There are pages from the magazines through which their work became visible. And here are the kinds of pieces I auto-associate with the name 'Hepworth': smooth, polished, elemental forms (simply called 'Forms'); smooth and gleaming, like distended eggs, tapering standing figures like megaliths; distillations of sand-dunes, the undulations of landscape, forms in a rock pool. The base becomes part of the work. There is something theatrical going on, a feeling that that stones have a mysterious life and speak to each other across quiet spaces. Serenity, purity of a ritual kind takes over from the roughness and mess of ordinary life. Here, and in the next room, we find the family of wooden carvings, hollowed out, painted, strung like Aeolian harps - expressions of the feelings of a landscape, dream versions of caves, tunnels and subterranean streams.
We move into a room of larger wooden sculptures, from the hard tropical wood guarea. These are inspired by a visit to Greece, soon after the tragic death of the artist's son Paul, aged 23. We are invited to perceive a funereal quality to the sculptures, and perhaps there is one, or is that simply a case of reading what we know into what we see? Before we leave, there is a reconstruction of a pavilion for a 1965 exhibition in the Netherlands, with the bronze works exhibited there - looping and folding concentric bands, petrified ripples.
I didn't mind seeing Hepworth indoors. Of course these works take on another dimension in a landscape setting, but sculpture shouldn't depend on a particular environment, and I thought they kept their charge in the soft-toned spaces of the Tate's downstairs galleries. The main weakness of the exhibition was the rather anxious promotion of Hepworth as an international modernist - which she was, but there isn't enough here about Cornwall and the St Ive's community, as if that would make her seem parochial to London gallery-goers; and the more her modernity was stressed, the more I saw the prehistoric and the turning away from modern life. But that is a paradox within Modernism itself. More importantly, the exhibition let the sculptures do their work, speak to the spirit, and quicken our response to the earth, the land, the undulations of that wave, that hillside.
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