Campus sculpture: Barbara Hepworth

Sphere with Inner Form

Closer to home, however, our own beloved university has a connection to this talented figure of British art history.

Quite probably you have heard of her, and even if you haven’t, the likelihood –nay, certainty! – is, that you will have unwittingly strolled passed a Hepworth sculpture at some recent point in your life.

Quite possibly you will even know her story, but for those of you who don’t, here it is:

Joclyn Barbara Hepworth, a Yorkshire girl, was born in Wakefield in 1903: a child who would grow to be a star of the art world. She won a scholarship to the Leeds School of Art at the age of sixteen where she completed the two year course in a year; a year which won her a further scholarship at the Royal College of Art in London.

Had she been alive today, the name ‘Hepworth’ would have been blazoned across the pages of gossip magazines.

Had she been alive today, the name ‘Hepworth’ would have been blazoned across the pages of gossip magazines. Twice married; a European jet-setter; she lived in Bohemian poverty and mingled with the art world ‘it’ crowd of her day.

In Siena in 1925 she married a fellow student from the Royal College of Art, sculptor John Skeaping. The couple holidayed with Henry Moore, who Hepworth knew from Leeds, and Ben Nicholson who was later to become her second husband.

She and Nicholson travelled to Paris in the 1930’s. They were not married until 1938, as Nicholson was still married to his first wife until that year. However, he and Hepworth scandalously had triplets together in 1934. In Paris the pair made acquaintance with Picasso, Brancusi, Braque, Kandinsky and Mondrian. Later, when the couple moved to Saint Ives, they befriended and worked alongside Naum Gabo.

Although she was diagnosed with cancer in 1965, ten years later, in 1975, Hepworth died an infamous death. Reportedly, having smoked a cigarette in bed, her sheets caught fire and she died in the flames.

Perhaps, as is the case with many celebrated artists, this dramatic exit from the world has helped to keep Hepworth a figure of public interest so many years on. However, it must not be forgotten that first and foremost she was not a talentless, scandal-mongering celebrity, but was a skilful artist. Indeed, long before she died she reached international fame.

Winged Figure

Her sculptures can be seen all over Europe, in Japan, in Canada and Israel, even as far away as Australasia. On Oxford Street in London, there is the bronze ‘Winged Figure’ 1963, on the outside wall of John Lewis. One of her most famous works, Single Form, 1963, stands outside the United Nations building in New York.

But aside from her Yorkshire childhood, why is she of any relevance to us in old York?

In 1969, Hepworth created a sculpture called Antiphon. The sculpture is a bronze of a wooden carving she made in the fifties which now stands in the Ashmolean in Oxford. The bronze, however, stands on our very campus, beside the Jack Lyons Concert Hall.

Dedicated to the university by Lady and Lord Crosthwaite, Antiphon has inhabited several spots since it first arrived at the University of York. Now, up against a wall, in a flowerbed, disguised in the vegetation by its patina, Antiphon is all too easy to miss.

However, this situation is not dissimilar to the way Hepworth’s sculptures are displayed in her sculpture garden in Saint Ives. Her sculptures, which are inspired by the scenery, the light, and the coastline off Saint Ives, stand in the open air in a Cornish landscape of their own.

Whilst the wall of the Jack Lyons Concert Hall is hardly such a fitting landscape, the sculpture is none the less one of the high points of the of the sculpture park that is our campus.

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