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"(RADIO CRACKLES)"
"..English Channel, from Hampshire to Cornwall."
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increasing later in the day and becoming fresh or strong."
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10 minutes to 12." (PHONE RINGS)
"Perhaps what one wants to say is formed in childhood,
and the rest of one's life is spent trying to say it."
"I know that all I felt during the early years of my life in Yorkshire
is dynamic and constant in my life today."
Hepworth famously said,
"What one wants to say is formed in childhood
and one spends all of one's life trying to say it,"
and her childhood was spent in Yorkshire.
I mean, what we know about Hepworth's childhood
and how she came to be a sculptor really comes from her
when she was writing in the 1950s.
She tells the story of, she came from quite a well-to-do background,
her father was the local alderman and so on, erm,
but she talks about driving through the landscape with him
and the experience of the Yorkshire landscape.
"All my early memories
are of forms and shapes and textures."
"Moving through and over the West Riding landscape
with my father, in his car,
the hills were sculptures, the roads defined the forms."
"This sensation has never left me."
"I, the sculptor, am the landscape."
"I am the form and I am the hollow,
the thrust and the contour."
I felt a real connection.
Our family moved
just outside Leeds for a while
and, erm, we used to ramble over the Moors
and follow streams up to their sources
and climb on those rocks and feel them.
And when you're happy as a small child,
these things go quite deep and they stay with you.
(ELEANOR CLAYTON)The family spent their summers in Robin Hood's Bay,
so she had the sort of mixture of the sort of industrial landscape,
but also the coastal landscape
was always something that was there from her early days.
And so all of these things kind of built into her theory
or sort of philosophy of the figure in the landscape,
you know, the human relationship to our surroundings
in all these different ways.
And I think that's something that, erm,
stayed with her throughout her career.
She also remembered the experience of being introduced to sculpture,
I think through a slideshow when she was at school
and seeing, you know, Ancient Egyptian sculptures.
She specifically mentions sort of having that inspiration.
I mean, I think it's worth thinking about
how unusual it would be
for a young, middle-class girl in Wakefield
to have an ambition to be a sculptor.
For a young girl to have an ambition to be a sculptor
in the early 20th century is pretty extraordinary.
There aren't many early works that exist,
but the early works that do exist are mostly drawings,
and I think that's also indicative of her pathway into arts education
because, erm, it was the drawing scholarship
that got her into Leeds School of Art,
and when she was at Leeds School of Art,
your kind of artistic prowess was largely based on your craftsmanship,
so the drawing master there, someone called WB Pearson,
knew what his students had to do
in order to get the scholarships down to the Royal College of Art
and he drilled them meticulously.
I think it was really when she moved to the Royal College
that she began making sculpture in earnest
and she said that she came down there on a drawing scholarship
and said, when she started, that she wanted to do sculpture
and so they asked her to model a bust, which she did,
and then they said, "OK, you can go on the course."
One of the key things to remember
is that the teaching of sculpture was still very traditional.
Modern sculpture, as we understand it, as she would develop it,
was happening, it wasn't in the art schools.
You know, someone like her would be learning how to, you know,
build up a plaster image around an armature,
to be cast in bronze by someone else,
but the forms are very traditional.
There is no sense that modernism
and modern style of sculpture was being taught,
so traditional skills,
particularly around modelling plaster and clay,
were not at all about carving.
Direct carving was already something
that was happening in Avant-garde circles,
but it wasn't really something that was being taught in art schools,
even somewhere like the Royal College.
So Hepworth did remember that, actually,
she was taught more at the Royal College by the common room
than the studio.
"The real value of an art school
lies in the opportunity it gives to the student
to work with his contemporaries."
"Tuition should be offered rather than administered
so that every student can exercise
and strengthen his sense of discovery."
She also remembered her and her fellow students
who'd come down from Leeds, so at Leeds School she met Henry Moore,
but also Raymond Coxon and Edna Ginesi,
and the three of them came down to London together.
They were known as 'the Leeds table'.
And they would go over to Paris together, as well.
One of them said at some point that it was cheaper, or easier,
to get a ticket to go to Paris than it was to go back home to Yorkshire,
which I'm sure was a great line to say to your parents,
but they did do these trips over to Paris
and they get more of a sense
of what contemporary artists were doing.
So when she was a student,
she went to stay with her cousins in Saffron Walden,
and her uncle, Arthur, was a GP,
and she made this relief of Jill and Peggy, her cousins,
which she carved into plaster,
that we think was probably plaster used from her uncle's GP surgery
that he would've used to cast up his broken bones of his patients.
Hepworth graduated from the Royal College
and immediately started working towards the Prix de Rome,
which was a prize that would give the winner
lodgings in Rome and a stipend
to basically study there and make work.
She didn't win the Prix de Rome, she was the runner-up,
but she did get a travel grant from West Riding,
the county that she grew up in,
so she was able to go and travel.
And then she met John Skeaping, who had won the Prix de Rome,
that she had come so close to winning and was based now in Rome,
and they travelled across sort of Tuscany together
and fell in love
and, er, eventually married in 1925.
It was a great stroke of luck, in a way, that she manages to go to Italy
and it's there that she starts developing a new form of sculpture
and I think she and Skeaping both learned to carve
with a local Italian technician.
Of course, there's a certain kind of kudos about that,
that, you know, Italy is one of the sort of crucibles
of the great sort of sculptural traditions.
One thing she talks about learning in Italy from Giovanni Ardini
is this sense of the difference and the qualities of the materials.
From an early age, she's fascinated by different materials
and how they behave differently, different forms of stone, marbles
and different woods, soft and hard, dark and light, and so on.
And I think she tells how he had said, you know,
marble changes colour in the hands of different people.
In Italy she would've learned how marble is different from, you know,
different parts of the same quarry even.
"At this time, all the carvings were an effort to find a personal accord
with the stones or wood which I was carving."
"I was fascinated by the new problem which arose out of each sculpture,
and by the kind of form that grew out of achieving
a personal harmony with the material."
I think the contrast between where she grew up in Wakefield,
you know, a small town,
you know, and like all small towns
it would've been laden with coal smoke in the early 20th century,
and in Yorkshire
where often the sky feels like it's right down on your head,
to then being in the Mediterranean and feeling that light, it's the...
Though, actually, she doesn't travel that extensively through her life,
the Mediterranean is a point she comes back to again and again.
I mean, even later in life, she talks about her work -
her garden even looks sort of Mediterranean -
it's definitely something she comes back to.
And there's a lovely quote, I think,
from David Lewis, who was her secretary in the early '50s,
and he says, "Effectively, she's sculpting light."
So Hepworth and Skeaping came back in 1926,
erm, because Skeaping wasn't very well,
so they came back to London and they set up a flat in St John's Wood,
where they had a big studio that stretched out into the garden,
it had a big skylight for natural light
and they built an aviary all down one side, so kept an array of birds.
They were both still practising direct carving
and their subjects were largely drawn from the natural world,
so quite figurative but using this kind of
Avant-garde technique of direct carving.
There's an intimacy in some of her smaller works
that I really relate to particularly.
There's something about the scale of that,
something to do with the scale
and quiet involvement with your material,
something that's your own,
that you're involved with a dialogue with yourself
and your, erm, unconscious, on some levels, perhaps.
Initially, they struggled to make ends meet.
Skeaping recalls in his biography
that he would go and busk with a friend of his
outside theatres in London to make money.
What they ended up doing was putting on an exhibition in their flat
and Hepworth said she remembered that it was almost a disaster.
For 14 days, or something like that, no-one came at all.
this big collector who, between them,
purchased several drawings and sculptures
and it just completely saved them.
Hepworth became pregnant
and she gave birth to her son, Paul,
in 1929.
And she made an incredible sculpture of Paul, called Infant,
which is one of maybe the first examples of seeing Hepworth's life
feeding so directly into her work
and how she's taking all of the experiences she has
and sort of channelling it into the way that she's making her work.
When Hepworth was first living in London, she lived in Chelsea,
which was a traditional artists' quarter,
but she and Skeaping moved to the Mall Studios in Belsize Park,
and there's a gradual movement, I think,
of many artists to the Hampstead area,
where the air was much cleaner.
In the Mall Studios, they're in this row of purpose-built artist studios,
so they're in a community of artists,
Henry Moore's just round the corner.
And then during the 1930s, the whole area becomes
sort of the centre, in a way,
for a kind of international modern arts scene,
as artists move from Europe with the rise of fascism.
In April 1931,
Winifred and Ben Nicholson were exhibiting
as part of the Seven and Five,
and the Seven and Five was a progressive exhibiting society
that had been going on since the early '20s,
and in 1931, Skeaping exhibited with the Seven and Five as a guest.
Having met Ben and Winifred earlier in the year,
when Hepworth and Skeaping were going on holiday to Norfolk
with various other artists, including Moore and Ivon Hitchens,
Hepworth invited them to come along with her.
Ben comes along, Winifred stays at home,
and over the course of the holiday
Ben and Barbara develop more of a romantic relationship.
I mean, Hepworth coming together with Ben Nicholson
is clearly a crucial step in both their lives and in their art.
I think she has as much impact on him as he does on her,
if not more.
But I think there's a coming together of like minds,
to a great extent.
They're both kind of modern thinkers in the broadest sense.
Ben is a follower of Christian science,
like his first wife Winifred,
so it's a very kind of modern take on Christianity, very unorthodox.
He's also vegetarian, you know, these things which,
at that time in the early '30s, are very kind of out there.
And then you see there's a point
when they're living together in the Mall Studios,
when they're clearly making work in dialogue with each other.
For a year or two, it's like a common endeavour.
So in 1934,
Hepworth's work had already become to be more abstract,
or sort of getting more abstract,
particularly, though, in these biomorphic forms
that you could see in things like Seated Figure
and Mother and Child, which was made in 1934.
At this time, she made several of these mother and child,
or like, erm, large and small forms, sort of all in the same theme,
and perhaps this was because she was pregnant.
Over that year, she made several of these works
and then she gave birth in October to triplets.
At this time, there wasn't really a way of telling
that it was going to be triplets,
so they only discovered when they arrived.
"It was a tremendously exciting event."
"We were only prepared for one child,
and the arrival of three babies by six o'clock in the morning
meant considerable improvisation for the first few days."
"I decided I must do some work each day."
"It went on in my head, even when I was doing the chores."
"The result were fewer sculptures
but, I believe, more triumphs."
What's interesting is, when she comes back from having the triplets,
is her art changes completely.
Afterwards, the new style is the very sort of austere,
very pure, formal groupings.
Though in those, she's still developing that theme
of what she calls interrelated masses.
It's a sculpture that's about
the way two or three things relate to each other -
the spaces between the forms is as important as the forms.
And I think that's very much a kind of metaphor for human relationships.
In the mid-20th century,
I mean, there were well-known and established women artists,
but particularly in Britain in the world of sculpture,
she would've had to be pretty tough and strong, I imagine,
to survive that and keep her belief in herself and what she did.
And she did continue to make work,
even when she had four children, young children at one time,
so to be able to then continue to make work as she did
and to carve a life out that was... where she able to do that.
I mean, the end of the 1930s for Hepworth,
like all liberal people, was a traumatic experience.
They were a generation who, if they hadn't been in the First World War,
had witnessed it
and, you know, had thought that was the war to end all wars.
So the sort of descent into another war in 1939
was really, you know, traumatic psychologically for everyone.
And for Hepworth and her circle,
they had spent the 1930s making art that was, you know,
consciously in defiance of fascism
and all the values, the material values of fascism and Nazism,
so, in a way, all the things they tried to do,
the kind of Utopian values,
the internationalist values that those sculptures stood for,
had been kind of, erm, decimated.
And at the same time, they're living with the threat
of the bombing of London.
There was a widespread expectation
on the first day of the war that London would be bombed.
Her friend Adrian Stokes believed the city would be destroyed,
so he settled in his house in Cornwall
and invited them down as friends
and as, you know, the most important modern artists in Britain.
(INTERMITTENT RADIO BROADCAST)
So in 1939, she'd established a practice
that was very much based on direct carving.
It had become progressively more abstract,
you know, from the mid-1930s.
When she moved to Cornwall,
this very sort of ardently abstract work
then becomes kind of influenced by her surroundings.
"From late 1938, until war was declared,
it became increasingly difficult to sell a painting or a sculpture
and make a bare living."
"At the most difficult moment of this period,
I did a maquette for the first sculpture with colour,
and when I took the children to Cornwall
five days before war was declared,
I took the maquette with me,
also my hammer and a minimum of stone-carving tools."
So obviously Hepworth made her name initially with direct carving,
carving really, erm, amazing materials,
hard woods often,
and very particular stones,
and these things were just not easy to come by as soon as war hit,
and so what she started to do was turn to drawing as an outlet.
The first pictures that Hepworth makes in Cornwall
are really kind of her imagining sculptures in two dimensions,
so the forms you see her drawing, these sort of curving forms
and then a whole series of lines
that relate to the strings and sculpture,
and then there's normally a little area of colour,
as if it's in the core of the form that encloses it.
She has a major breakthrough in 1943 when she comes back to carving
and she produces this series of small wooden sculptures,
which really establish, I think, her most distinctive vocabulary
when she takes what's basically just a log of wood
and hollows it out, pierces it from several sides
to create an inner space
and then paints that inner space,
while leaving the outer surface raw.
That contrast really makes you feel that you're looking at a sculpture
where the internal space, the caverns within the wood,
are the thing, rather than the wood itself.
And she talks about those sculptures in terms of her,
how she feels in the landscape, sort of embraced and protected,
which I think, you know, in the middle of war
is a very significant thing.
"I used colour and strings
in many of the carvings of this time."
"The colour in the concavities plunged me into the depth of water,
caves,
or shadows deeper than the carved concavities themselves."
"The strings were the tension I felt between myself and the sea,
the wind or the hills."
Not a day goes by where I can't go out for a walk.
I like the forces of nature.
I can enjoy it, you know, if you're dressed properly and so on.
And, you know, that...
..the sort of greatest connection I've got with Barbara Hepworth
is this passion and love of the landscape.
By the late 1940s,
she had been exhibiting sort of through the war
and establishing herself as a kind of leading modern British artist.
It was decided that she should really get a suitable studio
for her developing career.
In the Palais de Danse opposite Trewyn, erm,
was a big auction in 1949
to sell off the outbuildings of the Trewyn estate -
she was still living in Carbis Bay with Nicholson at that time -
but by the end of 1950 it had become her home.
"There's nothing more inspiring to me than the act of creation."
"There must be magic in this country round here -
every smallest sound, the fragrant smells of the wind,
the soil and this lovely sunlight,
the rain, the night, the dawn,
the day of work, and sleep."
In terms of public sculpture,
Hepworth's stuff was in the post-war years,
because there has been a move
towards something more traditional, more figurative.
So when she enters the competition
to make four sculptures for the corners of Waterloo Bridge,
which had been built just before the war,
the forms she produces are sort of kind of abstracted reclining figures
because of the shape of the plinths,
and it's sort of very telling, I think,
that though there are a number of entrants to the competition,
the judges decide that since Jacob Epstein and Moore didn't enter
they'll just forget it,
and there have been empty plinths on the bridge ever since.
I mean, even though one gets the sense of her
being a very strong, tough woman,
to be single-mindedly able to continue working,
I could only imagine how hard it must've been.
She started applying for commissions, er,
to be in the public realm,
and then in 1950
she was invited to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale,
which was obviously a huge moment for her.
These big successes in the early '50s
started also a period of really great collaborations.
She designed the set and costumes
for a theatre production at the Old Vic of Electra in 1951.
She was also, at this time, part of a collaboration
that brought together an experimental filmmaker,
that was funded by the BFI, with the poet Jacquetta Hawkes
and Priaulx Rainier did the composition.
'Barbara Hepworth came from the cool, grey north,
seeking to find herself in Cornwall, and Cornwall in herself -
a figure in the landscape.'
'She came to St Ives and set up wood and stone
in a warm, coloured garden high above the town,
with sunlight and leaves, flowers and sliding shadows.'
'She has walls about her and the sea beyond them.'
'Eye and imagination, hand and tool
shapes the stone,
cutting more deeply than sea and wind.'
'(PLAYFUL MUSIC)'
In 1953, Hepworth discovers that her son, her first son, Paul,
has died in an air crash -
he was in the RAF -
and, of course, it's absolutely devastating news.
It's at a time when actually, professionally,
she was doing incredibly well
and she has all these different projects on the go,
but it completely floors her.
One of the ways she gets through it is making a memorial to Paul.
Unlike many Hepworths at the time,
it's a sort of figurative Madonna and Child
that sits in the church at St Ives.
Her friend and long-term supporter Margaret Gardiner
decides that what she needs is a holiday,
so she takes her to Greece.
It was a trip of a lifetime for Hepworth,
visiting some of the ancient sights and really exploring the landscape.
It inspired her immensely.
And she comes back and makes this amazing sort of group of sculptures
in this African hardwood, guarea, which has been sent to her,
and I think she then finds herself again,
because she's gone back, basically,
to the idea that she developed in 1943
of a sculpture in which the hollowed-out inner spaces
create a sense of wellbeing and protection in an idea of landscape.
"I didn't really begin using bronze until '55
because I could not find a way that pleased me,
and then I began to think in terms of molten metal."
"I'm always delighted to hear that one is safely cast
and I can go check out everything."
The move into bronze
allows Hepworth not only to make more fluid forms and lighter forms -
that relate sometimes
to a kind of new spirituality that follows the death of Paul -
but also bigger sculptures.
She's not limited by the size of the tree or the piece of marble.
In the '60s, Hepworth becomes extremely prolific
and she makes almost as many works in the decade of the '60s
as she did in her entire career before that point.
And something that she talks about is, er, how she finds herself
returning to the visual language that she developed in the '30s,
so her work becomes more geometric.
What's interesting about how she then sort of
uses this geometric language in new ways
is thinking about the encounter of the viewer with the sculpture.
You're encouraged to move around it, to sort of see through it.
In the '60s, it's an era of increased participation in the arts,
not just in terms of, you know, the number of visitors going to museums,
but also actually participatory practices,
you know, installation art
and an increase in sort of architectural monumental works,
and Hepworth becomes part of this, as well.
The simple form, I really connected with,
these forms that you could look through, often placed in landscape,
so you looked through
and it gave you a particular perspective or view on a landscape,
depending on where you stood.
Also, I think the scale I really related to,
the scale in relation to me,
to a body, to a person,
so they were big and monumental and you had to look up to them
and then they guided you through to look at these views,
and I really related to that,
the physicality, the materiality, the scale.
"At last, I think people have realised
that one hasn't devoted a lifetime without being sincere."
"And people now are so much warmer, I notice, in the big shows in London,
the tremendous interest and the way they move round things,
because we're meant either to caress them or touch them
or hold them or walk round them
or allow our bodies to be incorporated in the experience,
and that is what it's all about and this is improving."
"But the average person in this country is terrified
of thinking that he is going to be laughed at."
And there's one piece called Single Form
that there's a version of that's in Battersea Park,
I lived in Battersea for a long time when I first came to London,
and it's always been a point of visiting, for me, an old friend.
So I'll go and see that piece and it'll remind me of past times
and I might have a conversation with it.
And it always looks different
and the view through the hole always looks different
and the colour of the bronze changes
depending on the light that's falling on it.
So it's a kind of old friend that I visit sometimes, you know,
and might take people to see,
and have a long-term relationship with!
I first met Barbara in New York City
where she had a show.
As people thinned out towards the end, we talked a bit more
and she said, "If ever you want to come to England,
you can come and work with me to begin with,"
and so on, erm,
which I think about a year later I did do.
She had two very good workmen there.
I learnt a lot, but I remember the first morning,
and obviously I was somewhat dubious of how this was going to work out
because she was a considerably famous sculptor
and I was a 16-year-old nothing,
and she put me in front of a huge log
and left me.
I thought, "Well, I mean, what do I actually do?"
"I daren't start this thing because I've no idea what she wants."
And about half past 11, she came and chatted again
and left again... (LAUGHS)
..and I didn't touch the thing!
I didn't know where she wanted to start!
I'd no idea what shape she wanted.
Come late afternoon I thought, "I think she's wanting me to start."
So that's what I did that day,
and then, obviously, following it up the following morning and so on.
She gave it more precise directions, um, as it got more finished,
until at the end, we're talking about "a millimetre off here,"
very precise.
It really is a rhythm.
And she could tell,
or any of her senior assistants could tell a mile away
whether you were really, you know,
happily working away or whether it was, "Hm..."
It was almost like a dream sequence
trying to get my chisels copying what was in her head.
Quite a dance.
I mean, one of the remarkable things of Hepworth's last decade
is that she's so prolific
and so willing to explore new ideas and new materials
and to kind of revisit former ideas.
Part of her ambition is also working on this larger scale.
She was invited by John Lewis to submit a proposal for a sculpture
for their flagship shop in Oxford Street
and she submitted a proposal which was called Forms in Echelon.
But they did not think that
it was representational enough of a Hepworth,
so she was asked to submit something else
and she submitted the design for Winged Figure.
During the '60s, as well,
she continues to make these architectural commissions,
so starting with Winged Figure,
then you have Single Form outside the UN, of course,
and then Theme and Variations for Cheltenham and Gloucester,
you know, and that's quite a different sculpture for Hepworth
because it's a relief,
but you can see that
she's interested in lots of the same things,
you know, this idea of movement
that has actually been present in all of her work
can be seen in that.
So she started to make these multi-part bronzes.
Along with Conversation with Magic Stone,
the Family of Man really sort of encapsulates
the number of themes that developed through Hepworth's work,
things like the relationship to the pagan landscape and standing stones
that have very much been drawn out in her work,
you know, even from as early the '30s.
I think what you see in a sculpture like Family of Man
is, you know, the title tells you what it's about
and that is very much Hepworth's ideology,
you know, that all human life
should be, ideally, one harmonious cooperative whole, like a family.
And so she's produced this, erm,
group of figures who all inter-relate in the familial sense,
and, you know, naturally, once you put them in an open space,
remind you of the stones of Avebury or Stonehenge
or those ancient sculptural monuments that she has in her mind
and she sees herself in the tradition of.
It's not just ambitious in terms of its scale
and the space that it takes up
and how you interact with it as a visitor,
but also in the things it encompasses.
It's really taking you through from all experiences of life...
..until you reach the Ultimate Form,
which is the final sculpture at the end.
"We all have an aspiration which we share."
"They may be different aspirations,
but they're still hopes for the future,
belief in the future,
belief in the children that are yet to be born,
and the Ultimate Form has the kind of serenity that says,
'Go on working — here I am.'"
Even when she's really suffering, you know, from 1965 onwards
she was in a lot of pain,
both physically and I think sort of emotionally,
there's a very touching account by AM Hammacher
going to see her late in life, towards the end of her life,
and he's shocked to find someone who's always been so positive,
erm, and so forward-looking,
now being, you know, full of regret
and looking melancholically back at her earlier life
and, you know, absences, I guess,
so what you see in her work in the late 1960s and early '70s is,
you know, she's working in bronze but also comes back to marble
and then starts exploring new stones and new finishes.
Early on her career, she trained with a marmista
when she was in Italy
with her first husband, John Skeaping,
and, you know, these late carvings were also so important to her
and she was exploring all sorts of different colours
and different types of marble and stone.
I mean, you can see in her yard, for example,
there is still a massive order of white marble waiting to be carved,
you know, "Patiently, waiting like sheep,"
I think she described it as.
Here in this tiny area of Cornwall,
there have been more artists come to live and work throughout the years.
Barbara Hepworth is undoubtedly
the greatest carver working in the world today.
Hepworth had a massive sense of community.
She really supported artists when she first moved to Trewyn
and she also gave work, you know, to the local community.
It says something about her scale of ambition
and, you know, at what point she was in her career,
she's operating at an international level
from the far west of, you know, southwest of the country.
You know, that's an extraordinary thing!
As you know, I love St Ives so deeply
and I've met with every kindness and warmth
the many years I've lived here.
And it's not only been my physical home
but it's also been my spiritual home.
And this means a tremendous amount
because you've made me, I've always been part of it
but now you've made me part of it
and it will be an inspiration every day I wake up
and go to work in the future.
(APPLAUSE) Thank you.
"..showers will spread in later tomorrow,
but visibility will remain mainly good."
"In western areas, from Cornwall to Cumberland,
winds will be southwest to west, fresh or strong,
with occasional showers and mostly good visibility."
"Now weather reports from coastal stations for 22:00 hours."
"Accrington, south-southeast..."
(PHONE RINGS)
(RINGING CEASES)
Even in her time, you know, she was never someone who became irrelevant.
She was always relevant.
But, also, her work always aimed to bring...
..something about the present
with something that's universal and eternal,
and I think that that's really why, even today, you know,
it speaks to people very directly,
you know, this idea of interaction with our physical surroundings.
The Figures in the Landscape is as important to us now
and as integral to our experience of the world
as it was in Hepworth's time.
When you look at Hepworth's public standing, her reputation,
she was very successful in her lifetime
but not as successful as many artists of her stature.
I think, certainly, she suffered from being shy,
being a woman, being insecure.
Certainly, when she represented Britain
in the Venice Biennale in 1950,
there's correspondents in the British Council saying,
"It was really awkward."
"She didn't really want to participate in the social side,"
whereas Henry Moore two years earlier had been the life and soul.
You know, and a lot of artistic success
is actually about what you're like in public.
From the 19, the late '80s onwards, I guess,
there's been a growing interest in her art
because the art can speak for itself.
I think there's a sensitivity in Barbara Hepworth's work
that was the same, erm,
part of her work that maybe was discarded formerly.
It's that same sensitivity that there's a response to now.
I think we were still perhaps in the period
where women weren't given the real seriousness
that was instantly given to Henry Moore, who was more of a showman -
he loved having loads of people in his studio -
whereas Barbara, absolutely instinctively,
was a very private person,
that, plus being female and plus still that period
when it wasn't natural to think that a woman could carry...
..up to the top of the pit
of the phases of work involved with being a sculptor,
erm, it was strange.
It was still quite a heave-ho to get there.
I think Hepworth's work, you know, has an enduring quality.
I have seen her work in exhibitions
that explore the prehistories of modernism
and all of the kind of historic ancient works,
I've seen her work shown in cutting-edge contemporary shows,
and in every case she holds up.
There are many compromises one often has to make.
Artists don't compromise.
It's... Their work is an extremely personal statement
and you cannot compromise that.
I think that's the difference between design and art.
I think that her influence as an artist -
on artists since and even now -
I see students that still look at her work
and are very influenced by her.
I wouldn't be where I am now if it wasn't for Barbara Hepworth.
"I have enjoyed every morning
that I've wakened up...
..and been grateful for the next dawn, the next spring."
"I think it's been the most wonderful life."
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