DIVIDED CIRCLE -BARBARA HEPWORTH AT THE HEONG GALLERY
Forms in Movement (Galliard) 1956 artist’s copy
Slip through the iron gates of Downing College, out of the cacophony of Cambridge’s own Regent Street, and turn into the tranquility offered by Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures – and paintings – in the cool Heong Gallery. It is a transformational experience designed for these weeks in January where the ‘deeper unspoilt beauty of the world’ is sharpened by the contrast with the hubbub of store sales. Here is a show designed to counter in Hepworth’s own words ‘all the rushing and confusion we suffer from’. And it does just that. I stress tested it on Saturday afternoon after a hectic shop in John Lewis intensified by a boisterous break in their (very nice) panoramic coffee bar. Just yards away from clattery commerce, the late legacy of someone acclaimed as the most successful woman artist in the world, waits silently in the modernistic monuments of her final creations.
Barbara Hepworth in her last years stepped away from the natural stone and wood of her work into new materials. She started using bronze for the first time “ I like to create the armature of a bronze as if I’m building a boat, and the putting the plaster on is like covering the bones with skin and muscles. I like to carve the hard plaster surface. Even at the very last minute I take a hatchet to it”
And she moved on to other media including aluminum. Still committed to carving in wood and stone, she nevertheless embraced some large-scale commissions in metals. Here John Lewis plays a part. Barbara created ‘ Winged Figure’ for their flagship store on Oxford Street. It emerged from her collaboration with Naum Gabo, an artist interested in mathematical models. Mounted triumphantly only 13 feet above the heads of shoppers below. it leans at an intriguing angle to the famous street. She wanted to capture ‘the greatest variety of light and shadow from morning sun, afternoon reflected light and night floodlighting ‘ she imagined the figure ‘ free enough to fly straight up to Marble Arch and home again’. If you’ve never noticed it before, Oxford Street will never be the same again.
It is from this astonishing period of her last creativity that this thrilling exhibition in the Heong emerges
Hepworth went larger higher more ambitious still with a monument for oustisde the doors of the United Nations in New York - Single Form a memorial to Dag Hammerarsskjold its tragically killed president a man who was an admirer of her work.. At this point she was ascendant and in full imaginative flow, undeterred by cancer, undaunted by the size of her task (the New York piece is colossal) she pressed on into a final phase of creativity. She had a clear idea of what she was doing.
“The story is still the same as that of the Greeks or of any other culture. I mean it does not matter what religion or philosophy, we must be aware of this extension of our knowledge of the universe and must utilize it in the service of the continuity of the human spirit’’
In the Heong you will walk slap bang into this florescence of artistic genius, almost literally. They have secured a permanent loan of the artist’s famous massive bronze Two Forms (Divided Circle) a work the viewer can pass through and round all the time immersed in the artist’s vision reaching for ‘the surface and size finding out which spiral goes which way. Realizing the differences between the parts’ It is outside the gallery on the lawn and it awaits any visitor’s own personal immersion in its mysterious forms ‘you want to go in and out as you look’ Hepworth said of her bronzes – and at Downing you can.
Iinside, the other exhibits, some solid gold, some bronze or other metal await scrutiny. From the calm of Winter Solstice painting to the rugged black Irish marble of ‘Two Stones’ Hepworth reaches out in her generous eminently feminine embrace.
Do get down there -it finishes on 6th February.
Immerse yourself in the Divided Circle as the artist hoped you would.
