ART
Barbara Hepworth. (Whitechapel Gallery.)
BRITAIN Leads the World in Sculpture: an absurd and disgusting thing. to say. But nowadays, when all the arts are expected to Boost for Britain, it is the sort of thing that gets said, and acted on. Perhaps it should not be surprising, since Culture is an export of national importance, that at home we should have to wait until now, and for the enterprise of an independent institution, for a proper view of the artist who, next to Henry Moore, has done most to keep Britain's end up abroad.
The retrospective exhibition given to Barbara Hepworth at the Whitechapel Gallery is the most complete to have been arranged anywhere so far, much the most comprehensive to have been collected in Britain, the only one of its kind, large or small, to be brought to London: it is pos- sible for the first time to see the whole range of her work, decently set out, with enough space for circumambulation, and in natural light. The undertaking does the gallery and its director, Mr. Bryan Robert- son, much credit. There is an elaborate catalogue, to which the Director of the National Gallery of Scotland contributes.an enthusiastic introduction and Miss Hep- worth herself—confessing the difficulty of putting words to "the meaning of forms," but launching bravely into commentary on her own art—fragments of self-revelation.
What Miss Hepworth has done in the past twenty-live years is tidily categorised, the vagaries of development confined within convenient dates, each section with its gloss. The acquisition and absorption of different manners may be remarked and put in its pigeon-hole: the Mauresque dodge, incorporated in the early and accomplished figure-carvings, of using high-relief effects in sculpture of the round; the pursuit of abstraction and geometry, producing objects which, being unlike anything in particular, are inevitably likened to something in- appropriate, a baseball bat, an Easter egg, an arrangement of sugared almonds; the preoccupation with what has rudely been called gruyere-sculpture; the refinement of what Miss Hepworth with her interest in surgery, might consider lithotomy, per- formed by a veritable voluptuary of incision; the return, though by the most remote parabola, to the human figure.
But continuity is more powerfully demon- strated than are the quirks in personal ex- pression; the more the accidents of manner- ism vary the more unmistakably appears the substance of a singular and constant style. It may be illustrated by odd tricks of chronology—there is, for instance, a draw- ing of a Madonna and Child dated 1953, which might be the study for a carving executed in 1932—and it shows most forcibly in Miss Hepworth's extraordinary and undeviating sensibility to the qualities of her materials. She is famous for this, of cohrse; her feeling not only for the texture but for the spirit which, as much for her as for the Australian aboriginal, inhabits wood or stone, is without parallel. in no other modern sculpture does it appear so literally true that the desired form is discovered within the untiewn block; Miss Hepworth's conjuring-trick is, moreover, done not by violence but, as she remarks, "almost by persuasion." There are some sculptors, and great ones, whose work looks like the pro- duct of a ferocious battle; Miss Hepworth works on stone as the sea does, with as much patience as force.
There is, obviously, a lot of the sea in Miss Hepworth's blood. Marble and lithe- stone under her hands assume the curves and concavities of Cornish slate in a sea- cave; even in her devices of hollowed wood —solid models of abstract ideas—it may not be altogether fanciful to see some resem- blance to those fragments of worn and bleached timber which lodge in rocks at the edge of the tide. To describe such a carving as the recent Pastorale, or the Biolith which, unfortunately, could not be included in the present exhibition, subaqueous adjectives present themselves, cool, clear, reserved, undulant. Occasionally it is impossible not to add, shallow: in many of the drawings, particularly the modish studies of surgical operations, there is something flat, flaccid, sentimental. But a lapse possible for the artist on paper is out of the question when she turns to her proper business.
CHRISTOPHER SMALL
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