Collection Displays Autumn '11

GALLERY 1

The Sculpture of Barbara Hepworth

This gallery introduces Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture, exploring the extraordinary breadth of her work. These sculptures display her strong connection between material, method and subject matter. The pierced and stringed cast bronze of Spring, 1966, uses an innovative sculptural form that breaks open the solid object and activates it with colour. The upright carved form of Figure (Nanjizal), 1958, retains a clear relationship to the original form of the tree trunk and landscape. The vibrant green patina and concave face of Landscape Sculpture, 1944, refers to the coastal landscape, its strings describing the protective bays of St Ives. The formal clarity of Cone and Sphere, 1973, brings together abstraction with an allusion to the upright body, and the carved and painted Two Forms with White (Greek), 1963, presents two forms – both figure and object – in conversation.

GALLERY 2

Wakefield's Collection

From its opening in 1934 on Wentworth Terrace, Wakefield Art Gallery developed to become one of the most forward-thinking galleries of its time, with a national reputation that belied its provincial status. Founded in 1923 with gifts from local industrialists, the gallery and its collection went on to support and collect works by some of the most significant and avant-garde British artists of the 20th century. To celebrate the national festival of drawing, The Big Draw (1 – 31 October), this display focuses on figurative drawings from the collection. This display includes works from Renaissance artists Agnolo Bronzino (1503 – 1572) and Giulio Romano (1492 – 1546) through to the works of Barbara Hepworth (1903 – 1975), Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882 – 1957) and Henry Moore (1898 – 1986).

GALLERY 3

Hepworth in Context

This gallery explores the work of Barbara Hepworth in relation to her European contemporaries and shows the influence of direct carving on modern British sculpture. Hepworth’s changing ideas about sculpture, like many other British artists, were influenced by an awareness of artistic developments on the Continent and an increased interest in sculpture and objects from across the globe.

An earlier generation of sculptors including Constantin Brancusi (1876 – 1957), Henri Gaudier- Brzeska (1891 – 1915), and Jacob Epstein (1880 – 1959) had already broken away from the tradition of modelling and classical representation. They explored new possibilities offered through direct carving which embodied a principle of truth to materials whereby the sculpture’s form was dictated by the shape, density and integral markings of wood grain or stone.

The spirit of international artistic exchange was sustained through visits by British artists to Paris and the subsequent exile of many members of the European avant-garde seeking refuge from Nazi occupation. Artists such as Naum Gabo (1890 – 1977) lived in London in the late 1930s, where Continental Modernism intersected with a British sensibility towards the landscape and the figure. This resulted in a stylistic change in British painting and sculpture from a literal description of the subject to a concentration on simplified form and abstraction.

GALLERY 4

HEPWORTH AT WORK

This display explores Hepworth’s studio environment, her work in plaster, her collaborative relationships with bronze foundries and the monumental commissions she received in the last fifteen years of her life. The gallery introduces The Hepworth Family Gift, a unique collection of Hepworth’s working models that is on permanent display at The Hepworth Wakefield. Representing the first stage of the creative process, they offer an invaluable insight into her art and, in particular, her approach to working with plaster. The tools and materials on display were Hepworth’s own and have been drawn from her second studio in St Ives, the Palais de Danse. Also featured is a step-by-step reconstruction of the bronze-casting process, photographs of works in progress and four specially commissioned films containing archival footage of the artist in her studio.

GALLERY 5

The Hepworth Plasters Gallery

The Hepworth Family Gift is a remarkable collection of Hepworth’s surviving working models for her bronze sculptures, the majority of which were made in plaster. This generous gift was made by the Hepworth family through the Art Fund and was one of the key reasons for building a new gallery in Wakefield, connecting Hepworth’s name with the city in which she was born and grew up. The collection reflects the variety of ways in which Hepworth used plaster and aluminium. She preferred to make prototypes on the same scale as the finished sculptures and would have worked directly on the majority of these models. The centrepiece of the Gift is the aluminium prototype for Winged Figure, 1961 – 3, the sculpture commissioned by John Lewis for their flagship store on Oxford Street. At nearly six metres high, this is the only working model to survive for the monumental commissions Hepworth received in later life.

GALLERY 6

Yorkshire in Pictures and Hepworth & St Ives

Yorkshire in Pictures highlights Wakefield’s collection of architectural and landscape works, including the Gott Collection, which comprises ten volumes of images of 18th and 19th century Yorkshire. This fascinating visual resource is exhibited in this gallery and will be accessible to view via a digital catalogue. This display focuses on the natural and man-made land formations of Yorkshire, showing how man and the elements have shaped this extraordinary landscape over time.

Although Barbara Hepworth’s formative years were spent in Wakefield, her later years in Cornwall have resulted in the artist’s close association with the town of St Ives. The Cornish town has a long history as an artists’ colony dating from the late 19th century. Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Hepworth left London with Ben Nicholson and their triplets for the safety of St Ives. They found themselves within an active artistic community which included the ceramicists Janet (1918 – 1997) and Bernard Leach (1887 – 1979); the art theorist and artist Adrian Stokes (1902 – 1972) and his wife the artist Margaret Mellis (1914 – 2009) and Cornish-born artist Peter Lanyon (1918 – 1964). They were shortly followed by Naum and Miriam Gabo (1907 – 1993) and subsequently many more artists were drawn to this small town. This combination of innovative artists and inspiring landscapes led to the development of a particularly British abstraction and St Ives became an internationally significant centre for the development of post war contemporary art.