Hepworth at the Tate ARTS

BRYAN ROBERTSON

The Hepworth show at the Tate is one of the grand occasions in the art life of this country: awe-inspiring as a retrospective survey of a lifetinie's achievement in sculpture. Though a few omissions caused by difficulties in remov- ing works from particular sites may be regret- ted, my only serious cavil concerns the space provided by the Tate: just for once, that hard- pressed institution might have gone off the rails provided by the Tate: just for once, that hard- pressed institution might have gone off the rails and doubled the meagre exhibition acreage.

The acts of faith made by one or two artists in each epoch, against all the odds, have such a gallantry about them, in addition to their beauty, that when official recognition is at Jast bestowed it need not be meted out. For Hep- worth, in her sixties, whose latest inventions

have been recently completed in spite of chronic illness and a severe physical handicap,

the return salute should have been extravagant.

But as it is, the display makes it abundantly plain again (for this is the third and largest retrospective in London, following those of

1954 and 1962) that Hepworth has made a totally integrated and convincing world to ex-

plore, disarmingly easy on the eye and discon- certingly warm to the senses. Its logic is clearly mapped by A. M. Hammacher in his new book

(Barbara Hepworth, Thames and Hudson 35s)

which, though a trifle plodding, traces her de- velopment with affectionate thoroughness and

an enjoyable body of illustrations which mainly set the sculptures in their best context, out of doors.

If this world is unfailingly calm and poised, its deep undercurrent of serenity has the latent, contained energy of a crack athlete in repose.

Useless to refer to gender except to acknowledge the supple strength of feminine sensibility when

its motivating vision is urgent and clearly con- ceived, as it is here. We are a long way from the delicate inflexions of femininity in its habitu- ally restricted sense. What Hepworth does with wood, stone and metal is technically dazzling but, above all, powerful and generous. The work is free from meanness: what may look like a residual area of caution should more pro- perly be comprehended as integrity—a stead- fast refusal to compromise an idealistic concept of three dimensional form and truth to the materials which disclose it. To younger sculp- tors (who have their own militantly upheld orthodoxies) carving itself often seems to belong to another and more leisurely age; but it is as

well to remember that the returns hoped for by the sculptors of that age were far longer in term than those now demanded. And if respect for the natural properties of wood, stone or bronze seems a trifle folksy in some quarters, how about the tyrannies of fibreglass and painted steel, now so adamantly anonymous in surface, and in sheer, non-referential colour?

This attitude—rejection of one generation by another—if it exists at all, is in any case absurd. Hepworth may well give an impression of rigid adherence to the nature of her materials, but this impression is disrupted by her ability, unique in my experience, to confound utterly the implications of weight in her sculptures. She instils into their volume an undeniable illu- sion of lightness, so positive in its élan, so wholly opposed to the dull restrictions of heavi- ness, that each work soars with only the most glancing contact with gravity. I don't believe any other sculptor since Brancusi has used the physical reality of light itself with such

transformative authority and ease: light as not constituent element in the sculpture and not simply a hazard of exterior illumination. Hepworth has also used colour in sculpture:

beginning thirty years ago in the most radical and abstract manner, so that the solidity of stone or wood appears to be pierced—most enthrall- ingly with `Eos,' an upended ovoid or egg shape which has three complementary, shallow, oval concavities on its surface, each painted a differ- ent blue from palest azure through mid-cobalt down to deep sea blue. As you move round the sculpture its spatial perspectives revealed by the densities of colour change drastically. In stretch- ing the imagination, the sculpture is also a tonic to the eye. Colour is made to do other things even more abstractly in other works, and blue is not always used as a token of space. But it is hard to single out Hepworth's ways of deploy- ing imposed colour (not decorative like Calder, less arbitrary than Arp, not descriptive as in Archipenko).because the natural colour of the materials themselves, so lovingly brought out, suffuses everything she has made.

Light and colour are central attributes of Hepworth's work used to implement its essen- tial meaning. If any clues to this are still needed, think of Greece, the mediterranean world, the ancient menhirs and monoliths of Europe, con- sider the spiralling action of the sea on stones, caves, the womb and the phallus, the actual structure of a wave's 4rtnvement in rearing up and plunging over, cathedral interiors or the un- dulations, curves and hollows of a landscape by the sea, the sequences of open and enclosed spaces which we move through every hour of our lives. If the idea of a talisman compounded of these inner rhythms and tensions seems pre- ferable to a more literally expressive memento, start considering the sculptures from different heights and angles. Their apparent simplicity is deceptive. And, if strings bother you, imagine a commentary on space in terms of linear movement at high speed which counterpoints the volume, or converges dramatically on a cen- tral point of maximum recession, or animates a void. And look at what happens in 'Delphi,' a superb wood carving with the muscular energy of a clenched fist beneath its smoothly polished surface. Its deep interior valley has the scaled texture of the underbelly of a fish, thinly and softly white over the warm red wood, and har-

bours the strings like a mythical musical in- strument.

Hepworth has had to endure many years of misconception from the public in this country, largely because the clarity of her work was mis- taken for coldness. Her perseverance has been confused with the obstinacy of a missionary worker, ruthlessly out to do good but remote from the realities of life. More than anything, the work's immaculate surfaces were misread as lack of that feeling which, many believed, could be fittingly expressed only by an agitated texture and actual as opposed to implicit move- ment. The same public tends now to equate tonality in painting or sculpture with moral probity: large expanses of pure colour are taken as a sign of irresponsibility and shallow- ness. Still, we do at last accept that all sculpture need not look like General Smuts.

• The time has come now to see Hepworth's work more clearly; though she, has been absurdly under-employed, it must be remem- bered that there has been no tradition for sculp- ture here—a country where one sees tonally, rather than solidly or in relief—since the medieval period. We could still put the thirteen- foot-high 'Four Square (Walk through)' in Hyde Park, as a return for forty-odd years of arduous creative activity, and the constant gamble of ordering tons of expensive materials in the face of overdrafts and lack of patronage in earlier days. It is we who have been remote from life in our failure to keep up with the twentieth century, not Barbara Hepworth. All she has done is give it shape.