Big stones
Naomi Mitchison
Barbara Hepworth: A Memoir Margaret Gardiner (Salamander Press £6, £3.95) This small book throws a brilliant spot- light not only on Barbara Hepworth and her friends in their prime as artists and as human beings, but also on what people like her, Ben Nicholson and Naum Gabo, whose delicate constructions so charm us today, were up to. It wasn't their job to ex- plain in words. That is the job of art critics, often so lost in the webs they weave for themselves that the rest of us can't unders- tand them. This wasn't so for Adrian Stokes, always deeply concerned with stone, as his 1933 review in the Spectator shows. But most of the professionals missed the point. Best to leave it to friends like Margaret Gardiner who happen both to be sensitive and dealers in words.
The main body of the book is in letters from Barbara during the Thirties, with the background sketched in: little money and enormous material problems, including unexpected triplets — no cash to pay, in pre-NHS days, for the X-ray which would at least have given her warning. Yet always it is overlaid by the need to work, to get at the stones in the small studio: 'I've got into such a good rhythm of work, I feel I would rather die than be stopped.' And again how, when she was in a state of anger and despair, she could 'work off steam roughing out'. For indeed sculpture is a tough job.
These snippets show Barbara and Margaret talking to one another in letters. Today it would have been telephone calls, lost for ever. We may never any more get the kind of spontaneous writing that comes into the letters of those highly literate men and women of the between-war years.
They wrote about all kinds of things, in- cluding clothes and how women's clothes express social happenings, rare birds and how to get crumbs past the starlings, or hatred of evil and what science has done to make war worse. Politics naturally come in. We were all deeply engaged in the Spanish Civil War and the hideous spread of Fascism. This was the time when many of those who cared most joined the Communist Party, including, for instance, Henry Moore, but most came out rather quickly, or at least were unaffected in their real work. Barbara wrote later: 'Re Picasso ... I haven't any definite information but knowing him and the work I should say he'll paint just what he feels and do as he likes.' True! She herself stayed undecided, even after long discussions with that man of enormous charm and intelligence, Des Bernal, who could always reconcile exact physics with Marxism.
The real Barbara comes out when she writes: 'Yesterday we moved two big stones close up together, very very slowly. It thrill- ed me absolutely because as they came together I saw all the shapes take on significance and what had been, up till now, a mental image took on reality.' These aesthetic and professional insights show where her heart lay.
Previous page
