Barbara Hepworth By: Jim Lane Stringed Figure by Barbara Hepworth 1956, Tate Museum, St. Ives (Click on picture for more of (artist's) work.)

Every artist has a favorite medium. It's usually the one in which he or she is strongest. It's usually the one the artist finds most expressive, sometimes most salable, and usually the one for which he or she is most noted professionally. But the mark of a truly exceptional artist is found in the ability to move effortlessly from one art medium to another, from 2-D to 3-D and back again, often expressing the same subjects, thoughts, or feelings in both, interchangeably. Picasso did it. Lichtenstein has. So did Warhol. And of course, the Renaissance masters, Leonardo and Michelangelo in particular, practically invented the practice. Perhaps it might be called the defining difference between an "artist" (in the classic sense of the word) and a mere painter or sculptor. In this past century, another who did this and did it well, was the British artist, Dame Jocelyn Barbara Hepworth.

Like so many artists of her time, Hepworth began studying art as a painter. Sculpture is seldom an art one attacks in early adolescence. She was born in 1903 in Wakefield, Yorkshire, England. Coming from a reasonably well-to-do family she was encouraged in her creative pursuits at a time when women were only JUST beginning to enjoy any kind of professional status in art. She studied for two years at the Leeds School of Art before being admitted in 1921 to the Royal College of Art in London (run by the Royal Academy). There she met two men, both fellow students, both of whom were to be quite important in her life. Their careers paralleled her own. One was a fellow sculptor, the other a painter. One was Henry Moore. The other was Ben Nicholson. One was a lifelong friend, the other a lifelong husband. In 1931, she married Nicholson.

As for Moore, it's tempting to compare Hepworth to him...also easy. It's more revealing, however, to contrast them. Moore's work is physically larger, more monumental in it's impact, usually more figurative, more literal, perhaps less probing, less profound, less emotional. Hepworth's sculpture seems more intuitive, more concerned with inner shapes, inner feelings, inner relationships, both human and natural. Moore's work seems naturally more male, even when he's dealing with essentially female shapes. Hepworth's is more elegant, more refined, more abstract, and more sensitive--and of course not surprisingly, more female.

Art historians will argue forever which of them "discovered" the "hole" first. By hole, I mean the exploration of negative space within their work. Sometimes small, sometimes large, sometimes empty, sometimes adorned, this space within a shape, especially in Hepworth's work, often seems more important than the shape which defines it. Her Stringed Figure (above) is an example. (Click on that image for an even better example in Hepworth's Two Figures.) In fact, Hepworth repeatedly challenges the definitions of the two elemental terms, shape and space. Traditionally, shape is considered positive, space negative but in studying many of Hepworth's works, one has to wonder if the enclosed spaces aren't in fact, negative shapes while the masses which enclose them couldn't be considered positive spaces.

Traveling with her husband to Italy on a scholarship in the early 1930s, Hepworth studied all the classic sculptural work she found, especially falling in love with that of Masaccio even though he was primarily noted for his painting. She also learned stone carving. Returning home, she became probably the only female sculptor in stone, certainly in England, perhaps in all the world. Her early work was figural, but from about 1931 on, as she began to explore in stone and wood the smooth, sleek, carved simplicity of her spatial relationships, her work, even more than Moore's, became totally abstract with only occasional reference to the real world. During the 1930s, she and her husband were at the heart of the avant-garde art world in London. Then in 1934 she became the mother of triplets. And by 1939, with the Blitz heating up, the art world, perhaps even their WHOLE world as they knew it in collapse, they quickly decided London was no place to raise a family. So, they moved to St. Ives in Cornwall to raise the children and run a nursery school. Times were tough, quarters were cramped, even for a spunky female stone cutter, the demands upon her physically and emotionally were onerous. She all but gave up her art.

After the war, as England once again discovered art, her groundbreaking sculpture, painting, and prints once more moved her into the forefront of British art. She and her husband bought a larger home with studio facilities on the Bay of St. Ives. She represented Britain in 1950 at the Venice Biennale and later, spent time in Greece, the Aegean, and the Cycladic Islands--all influences which, along with those of her native Cornwall, dominated her work for the remainder of her life. After her death in 1975, her home and studio became the St. Ives branch of the Tate Museum which, through purchases, loans, gifts, and works confiscated by the British government in lieu of estate taxes, has come to have a HUGE collection of her work in stone, wood, bronze and on paper...in effect, a multimedia, visual biography of her life.

Jim Lane is fifty-ish, balding, bearded, bespectacled, professorial, outgoing, knowlegable about a lot of things, expert on a very few. He grew up in the small town of Stockport, situated on the Muskingum River in Southeastern Ohio. He graduated from a un-noteworthy business college in Cincinnati, from the U.S. Air Force, and from Ohio University where he also obtained a masters degree and wracked up several hours of post-graduate work as well. For most of his professional life he's run a portrait business out of his home, specializing in sports portraits done in pencil and colored pencil.

Happily married for 30 years, Jim taught elementary and high school art for 26 years and also spent many enjoyable hours in the front of a local community college classroom. Recently he has retired from teaching in favor of painting, traveling, writing, designing web pages, and "...doing things I've never done before."

E-mail Jim at: jimlane@jimlaneart.com

Visit The Jim Lane Collection at:   http://www.jimlaneart.com

Or Jim Lane's Arty-fact Archives at:   http://www.1st.net/users/jimlane/Archive.html