BARBARA HEPWORTH AT KETTLES YARD
Barbara Hepworth © Bowness. Photo: Kettle's Yard
In her wonderfully elegant - and super legible handwriting, Barbara Hepworth wrote to Jim Ede in 1968 in response to his request for one of her works. Bit of a cheek really since by that time, Hepworth had worked in painting and sculpture for decades. She hints at how long it was in her charming reply “‘Nobody was more aware than I of your generosity & love & inspiration in face of lack of money & yet with the exquisite presentation of real beauty for all to share’, but confessed, ‘in my heart I longed to have a work of mine in your house & in the lovely company of paintings by Ben Nicholson, Winifred, Kit, Wallis & so on’.
The correspondence is at the heart of a quirky mini-exhibition in Kettles Yard . It appears small and it is shelved on their first floor, but here is a delightful show that shines a torch on British mid-century art - and the friendship and good will that underpinned it .
This exhibition is so worth a visit. The personality of Barbara Hepworth - she worries about how much to charge Ede for an acquisition, ( and carefully doesn’t say ‘ now that I’m famous). But she cheerfully becomes part of the stunning new extension of the gallery, by David Owers .Where would Kettles Yard be without that fabulous artistically handled space with its grand piano, its fitted white clad furniture and its brick and stone materials? When the world admires the Kettle Yard style, it is surely this they are thinking of.
Three Magic Stones, a maquette of the sculpture
The Festival of Britain 1951 was an exciting post-war amalgam of creative arts, cuisine, music and architecture, stages on the South Bank of the Thames to which Barbara Hepworth was a major contributor.. The Festival Hall is the only survivor of all the buildings and projects the Festival generated. . Despite the huge popularity for the Festival and its ambitions , the incoming Conservative government took an axe to the project and its post war socialist ambitions.
Barbara Hepworth was just one of the exhibitors .The image above is a maquette of 1972 linked to an ambitious moving sculpture, the three immense figures outside the Festival restaurant on the Thames where adventurous cuisine made an appearance and exuberant young people danced til dawn. No wonder it all got the chop from the Churchill led recidivism of the new government.
Kettles Yard features a section on Contrapuntal Forms, the largest sculpture Hepworth had attempted in 1951, and marked the first time that she took on permanent assistants. Carved from two monumental blocks of Irish blue limestone, the sculpture shows two separate abstract figures ‘blended into one carved and rhythmic form’ (Barbara Hepworth, 1952). At the Festival, Contrapuntal Forms was sited near the Dome of Discovery and Skylon on London’s South Bank. When the Festival closed, the Arts Council presented the sculpture to Harlow New Town in Essex. In common with many of the New Towns, Harlow acquired and commissioned works of contemporary sculpture for its civic spaces. Contrapuntal Forms was transferred to the Glebelands housing estate, where it has remained ever since
Kettles Yard has much to show us about the origins of modern art internationally and in our own patch. It is so worth a visit. Kettles Yard is open between noon and 5 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday
