Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective

Barbara Hepworth's career spanned five decades, from 1925 to 1975. Her style moved from figuration, through geometric and organic abstraction, to the internationally acclaimed grandeur of her large-scale, post-war work. Her best known sculpture is associated with the landscape around St. Ives in Cornwall: 'I used colour and strings in many of the carvings ... The colour plunged me into the depths of water, caves or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves. The strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hills.'This publication focuses on Hepworth's unique carvings. It reassesses her reputation in the light of attention recently paid to her contemporaries, Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore and offers the opportunity to look afresh at a major British artist.