Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975)

To escape the onset of war Hepworth and Ben Nicholson left London for Cornwall with their three children in August 1939. They initially stayed with the painter Adrian Stokes but by the end of the year they had moved into their own house, named Dunluce, in Carbis Bay near St Ives. The house was small and the lack of space, combined with the wartime scarcity of raw materials, meant that Hepworth produced no sculpture between 1940 and 1942. Instead she turned her attentions to drawing. An important influence for Hepworth during this time was Naum Gabo, a fellow wartime resident of Cornwall. Alan G. Wilkinson remarks that 'in Hepworth's abstract drawings of 1940-42, she was concerned, as in her carvings of the mid-1930s, with exploring geometric forms that were self-sufficient, without any references to either landscape or the human figure. They are among the most beautiful and austere of all her abstract drawings' (exhibition catalogue, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, Liverpool, Tate Gallery 1994-5, p. 80).

We are very grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness for her assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.