Art & Life—What Do They Have to Do With Each Other? a discussion of the art and life of Barbara Hepworth
In his great 1950 lecture, “Weight as Lightness: Aesthetic Realism Looks at Sculpture,” Eli Siegel said, “Sculpture does represent…something fundamental in a person,” which is “desperately necessary, for a person to know about.” The work of the 20th century British sculptor Barbara Hepworth, which I care for very much, can teach us about opposites fundamental in our lives—inside and outside, hardness and softness. According to H. W. Janson in History of Art, Barbara Hepworth, who was a contemporary of Henry Moore, was: “the preeminent woman sculptor of the twentieth century.”
Hepworth brought a new relation of these opposites to the art of modern sculpture, when in 1931, she carved an opening in the center of stone allowing external space and internal form to become one thing. Known for her curvilinear abstract forms, that are warmly organic, she brought a new softness to resistant material: stone became a gracefully fluid curve softened by space, and according to the critic Adrian Stokes was “inhabited with feeling.” The density of wood became open and flowing, and in her later work with bronze, metal welcomes and contains surrounding space and is also embraced by it.
Hepworth, Barbara: Mother and Child, 1934, pink ancaster stone, 26 x 31 x 22 cm., The Hepworth Wakefield, UK. Pendour, 1947, painted elm wood, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. Figure for Landscape, 1960, bronze,106 1/2 x 53 7/8 x 28 3/8 inches, artist's base: 3 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 26 1/2 inches, Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.
In Her Art, Hardness and Softness Work for One Purpose
Barbara Hepworth said she felt happy working with “the resistance of hard material.” She loved working in marble because it was capable, she said, of great precision and had a “radiance” as it responded “to the sun.” As a young sculptor studying in Italy, she learned from the Italian master carver Ardini, that it wasn’t “dominance over material” most needed in carving stone, but an understanding, “a kind of persuasion.”
In the early work of 1927 titled Doves, there is a oneness of hardness and softness, inner vitality and outer form. I am moved by the way Parian marble becomes two throbbing, pulsating doves. “A sculptor, as he… carves,” said Mr. Siegel, “also yields.” And here we see the artist yielding, not only to the marble but to the meaning, form and life of these two birds.
Arising from rough stone, their plump, smooth, white bodies swell and undulate upward from their narrow-pointed tails. The diagonal lifts their weighty bodies into space. They snuggle together, their heads facing in opposite directions, while their beaks nestle contentedly into the soft, thick ruffs of their necks. And all lovingly carved in stone.
Doves is an example of a recurrent theme in Hepworth’s works: two forms side by side. This represented she said “the tender relationship of one living thing beside another.”
Hepworth, Barbara, Doves, 1927, parian marble,
Manchester Art Gallery, UK
As her work went more and more toward abstraction, the drama of hardness and softness, inner vitality given outside form found expression in the over 600 works she did from 1925 until her death in 1975.
The Fight in Me about Hardness and Softness
In his essay “The Drama of Hardness and Softness in Painting” Mr. Siegel said, “All art tries to show hardness and softness working as one,” and he explained, “we, ourselves, are a constant interaction of hardness and softness; and if the interaction is not so accurate, we are in a state of misfortune.” Growing up in Springfield, Missouri, the interaction of hardness and softness in me was not accurate. As a child I had a rock collection and was very interested in how rocks had different qualities of hardness and softness. But when it came to myself, the girl who could be moved to tears by an abandoned dog or cat, didn’t seem at all like the girl who could be stubborn and so insistent to get my way that I would slam my bedroom door if I didn’t, and once even broke the window of my mother’s car. I shuttled between being agreeable and going along with other people, to thinking that if I showed my feelings someone would take advantage, so I best harden myself. Increasingly I put on a show, outwardly pretending to feel things that I didn’t in order to be liked by what I saw as the right people or man. Yet inwardly I felt a pervasive emptiness and lack of feeling that worried me.
Meantime, I was also interested in art and sculpture, which I studied at Missouri State University and then at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. I would spend the entire day in the studio working with plaster, amazed by how its soft powder, when mixed with water and poured into a mold, hardened into a solid mass. What a drama of hardness and softness it was, and I felt proud trying to accurately find possibilities of form within and bring them out. But hours later at a bar I had another purpose as I used a soft voice and feminine charm to have power, get a man’s attention, and flirt, then triumphantly tell him, in pretty crude terms, to get lost. This I later learned from Aesthetic Realism was contempt, and the cause of the pain I got and gave in love. Contempt is completely opposed to art.
In an Aesthetic Realism consultation, I was asked: “You have a soft voice and don’t sound like you’re sculpting when you speak, but do you think you have used your softness to be hard?” This was true and my consultants asked: “Have you wanted to intimidate men?” I had, in fact I felt this was part of my charm, but I didn’t feel proud of it. And they asked: “Do you want to have the same purpose with a man that you have with sculpture?
I began to learn how! The purpose I most needed to have, as every woman does, is good will: "the desire to have something else stronger and more beautiful, for this desire makes oneself stronger and more beautiful." Good will is the basis of art itself. It is the desire that impelled Barbara Hepworth as artist to try to understand so deeply the nature of her material, to look and listen for where there could be faults or weaknesses inside the stone. The artist wants to know what is within, respect it, be affected by it, all in order to bring out its possibilities of form. But the mistake many women make, and I made it, is to sum up a man, manage him without wanting to know him, use his outward appearance to glorify herself, and look for faults in order to have contempt for him.
I know firsthand that when a woman is hell bent to get her way and exploits her softness to do it, she can be cruel to the person she hopes to care for and will never feel she has the kindness and sincerity she wants. Barbara Hepworth who, as one critic put it, carved stone by caress, also said “I’m glad I’m a sculptor because in anger or despair I work off steam... and swear horribly sometimes.” I think Ms. Hepworth suffered because what she did so courageously in her art—put opposites together, she didn’t know how to do in her life. This is the reason, I believe, that as her life went on and included two failed marriages and four children, she became very bitter. In her sixties she wrote: “What a bore it all is being female and alone. I want to be coddled but I intimidate…I want to be maternal but provoke violent reaction. “
I’m fortunate to be learning together with my husband, Dr. Jaime Torres in the professional classes we attend taught by the Chair of Education, Ellen Reiss, how good will is an ongoing, life-giving study. At a time that I was setting up a studio where I could do stone carving, Jaime felt I was too separate and aloof, and mentioned this in a class. Ms. Reiss said that a “woman can see her interest in a man as apart from art” and she asked if I was using “the idea of a studio to be closer or farther away” from Jaime. I saw that I felt I’d been enough affected by the world and had misused my studio to put up a barrier against having more feeling for my husband. “Do you want,” asked Ms. Reiss, “Dr. Torres to break through?” I did and I love Jaime for how he is a kind and imaginative critic of the ways I can harden myself and encourages me as I work in the studio and in our home together to be more affected by all of reality.
Art—an Honest Relation of Inside and Outside
Barbara Hepworth’s work has to do with another matter important in all art and in the life of every person, including my own: sincerity. What does it mean to be sincere? In a class, Mr. Siegel once said that the test of sincerity is whether there is a “right involvement of the depths of oneself with the outside world.” How sincere we are depends on how well we put together the opposites of inside and outside, depth and surface.
In 1931, Ms. Hepworth changed the course of modern sculpture when she carved so far and deep into stone that the inside form became outside space. I’ve asked myself, did this revolution in sculpture come from and satisfy in its form, an ever so personal need in her? Did she want to burst through something hard in herself and to feel that her most interior thoughts and feelings could be part of and related to all outside reality? Thinking of what I have hoped for, I’ve come to feel this was the reason she wrote “I had felt the most intense pleasure in piercing the stone in order to make an abstract form and space...."
As the interior space, or the “pierced form” as she called it, became predominate in her work and the interior spaces became larger, Hepworth asked: “Could I climb through and in what direction? Could I rest, lie or stand within the forms? Could I, at one and the same time, be the outside as well as the form within? “
Barbara Hepworth had a large feeling for the most intimate interior space, like “a nut in its shell or a child in the womb,” and also the exterior vastness of landscape. It has affected me very much to see how much she wanted to feel that her interior self was part of all reality. We can see this in this work titled Figure in Landscape, as the interior of this upright personage in bronze is external space. “The artist,” said Mr. Siegel “while he shows what is within…as outward, sees himself as within and without.”
The Beautiful Resolution of Hardness and Softness, Inside and Out
Sincerity, writes Ellen Reiss in The Right Of, “begins with the feeling—beautifully proud and humble at once— “What I am, feel, and think is certainly me, but it is also part of the world.” I believe that a deep desire to be sincere, to put together as artist what was inside and outside, the depths and the surfaces of things impelled Barbara Hepworth in this work titled Pelagos.
Pelagos, is Greek for sea, and from her studio window in Cornwall, looking out at the Bay of St. Ives, she saw the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean and how the curving arms of coastline enfolded inward upon the sea. I think she was swept by earth itself and felt it had something to do with her. She said “I, the sculptor, am the landscape, I am the form… the hollow, the thrust…the contour.” The hollow, thrust and contour are what she gave form to in this gracefully curving spiral carved from elm wood. Gentleness and force, within and without are one in her very technique of carving. She wrote:
“The interior gouging is all done by hand, and no mallet…– one's whole mind and body must be focused on it… The thing is to get the flow of the lines all in one mood, then you can come out through the hole and join up where you want to.”
In Pelagos there is a beautiful oneness of soft curve and hard edge, sweeping suggestion and definition, interior space and exterior form. Does this stand for a desire to be swept by reality and still feel intact, not in pieces? I think it does! The interior is painted a contrasting white, asserting its difference from the warm exterior of wood. But look at how the surfaces, one within and one without, move together in the same motion. Is the motion of this, enclosing inward or opening outward? It is both!
Inside, the artist has placed a series of taut strings. The tension of these strings pull inward and push outward, seeming to hold the form open, welcoming all surrounding space. Hepworth said these strings represented her feeling about, and the tension between herself and “the sea, the wind, and hills.
Hepworth, Barbara, Pelagos, 1946, painted elm and strings, 14 1/2 x 15 1/4 x 13 inches on an oak base, Tate Gallery, UK.
I believe that Pelagos deeply comments on these questions my consultants asked me, “Do you think the inside and the outside can really go together? “Can hardness and softness work for one purpose.” This work is an affirmation that they can.
In Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites?, Eli Siegel asks:
“Does every successful example of visual art have a oneness of outward line and interior mass and color?—does the harmony of line and color… how a oneness of arrest and overflow, containing and contained, without and within?”
In Pelagos, hard edge is at one with graceful curve; tension is together with ease of movement, and interior and exterior are the very same thing. Pelagos contains all that is outside and is contained by it. What is most deeply within is the most external thing—the outside world. That is what I wanted to feel—a large and beautiful coherence between myself and the reality outside of me.
“The depths,” explained Mr. Siegel, “the real depths, of self, are the world.” This is the sincerity that I have learned all true art comes from and through art we can proudly learn how to have it more and more in the daily moments of our lives.
—For Further Reading—
More about Barbara Hepworth Barbara Hepworth.org.uk
Works by Eli Siegel available at the Aesthetic Realism Online Library
“The Drama of Hardness and Softness in Painting”