#Hepworth Gallery

[revault]

The Hepworth

[selfindulgenttwaddle]

Wife imitates art

S.I. Twaddle, 2023

[mirellabruno]

Eileen Agar, Adam’s Apple, 1949, watercolor on paper The Hepworth Wakefield

[vinvmsabbathi]

one thing about me is i will stand for hours in an art gallery and draw a sculpture from 6 different angles and annoy all the elderly couples

[bluecote]

Barbara Hepworth,

Penwith Gallery /June 23

[earhartsease]

this is one of Barbara Hepworth's sculptures called Orpheus - by which we mean she made more than one of them

we deeply love this, and we saw it at her house in St Ives, Cornwall - so imagine our amazed delight the first time we visited Australia and saw its sibling in an art gallery in Sydney

the more delight because we were in the process of trying to write a novel that featured the lyre of Orpheus, and also the necessity of keeping certain of his body parts at opposite sides of the planet

and no, we haven't finished the bloody thing yet - it's been 24 years so far and executive dysfunction/performance anxiety is a bugger

[no-tengo-ojos]

The Barbara Hepworth Museum and Art Gallery in St Ives, Cornwall

2/7/2024

[optikes]

1 Cyril Power (1872-1951) UK The Eight  reduction lino cut print (1930) 32.3×23.4cm

2 photographer unknown

economist.com  

IT HAS become the custom nowadays,” wrote Claude Flight, a British artist, in 1926, “to go to a shop for the tools of one's trade.” Flight was scornful of shoppers and liked to make things for himself. He kept his own bees and championed the art of the linocut, believing that the use of cheap materials would help democratise art and bring it to the attention of the masses. For his own linocuts he insisted on “a sharp penknife—such a very rare thing among art students” and a gouge he fashioned by fitting a small wooden handle onto a rib he cut from an umbrella.

Hard to imagine health and safety regulations allowing children today to have such fun. But Flight, who was a friend to Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, inspired many pupils at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art, where he taught, wrote and organised exhibitions on linocuts.

Among the most famous was Cyril Power, an extraordinarily creative printmaker, born in 1872, who soaked up Flight's enthusiasms and gave them new force. Power drew on many influences—of the German Expressionists (who invented linocutting before the first world war), the Italian Futurists, the Vorticist prints and paintings of Wyndham Lewis—and the enthusiasm for speed and movement that marked the work of so many artists of the period, from Natalya Goncharova to Marcel Duchamp.

While the work of the Germans, Italians, French and Russians has become very well known, the prints and linocuts made by Power and his fellow British artists have lingered in the shadows. An inspired little exhibition—the first major show of Modernist British prints in America, which began earlier this year at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and is now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York—will help change that. So too will a newly opened show at a private gallery in London that gathers together for the first time prints of all 46 of Power's linocuts. Some are for sale; others have been lent by museums and private collectors, of which the most important are two New Yorkers, Leslie and Johanna Garfield.

The first impression of the Power show is that he lived his life in reverse. Until he was almost 50 he followed in the professional footsteps of both his father and his grandfather and practised as an architect, making a name for himself also as the author of an erudite study entitled “English Medieval Architecture”. Then, as Philip Vann explains in an elegant essay that accompanies the show, he “embarked on a kind of Gauguin-esque adventure”, leaving his wife and four children to enrol in art school in the company of a 24-year-old artist, Sybil Andrews.

The early prints in the show were made by a middle-aged man and it shows. In black-and-white there is a bridge at Rickmansworth, a street corner in the sleepy Suffolk town of Lavenham. Then suddenly the movement of the windmill in “Elmers Mill, Woolpit” gives an indication of what is to come. Starting in 1930, when he was already 58, Power takes to speed as if he had taken personal charge of the Futurist manifesto, which C.R.W. Nevinson co-signed with an incendiary Italian, Filippo Marinetti, in 1914, with the words “Forward! HURRAH for motors! HURRAH for speed!…HURRAH for lightning!”

Power allows light, noise and speed into everything he sees. Using a series of easily recognised colours, particularly “Chinese orange”, “chrome orange”, “viridian” and “Chinese blue”, he created images of merry-go-rounds, rowers, acrobats, dancers, runners, hockey players and, of course—given that some of his influences were Italian—beautiful cars.

The most successful are those, like “The Eight”, in which the element of formal design is most visible. But Power's vision as an artist really comes to the fore in works containing a hint of menace. The bourgeois-assaulting spirit of Italian Futurism, Mr Vann explains, had fallen into the malign hands of Mussolini and was about to give way to Fascism, while Freud's and Jung's obsessions with the unconscious were increasingly helping to throw up visions of fears, hopes and dreams.

“Monsignor St Thomas” (1931, pictured at left) is a brilliant working of the murder in the cathedral of Thomas à Beckett, but it is technically skilful rather than edgy. The really potent, and most modern-looking, of Power's linocuts are those that lead the viewer right to the edge. These start with “Tennis” (1933, below), a magnificent rendering not just of the energy of the centre court, but of the physical and psychological effects of slicing and spinning—sport at its most gladiatorial.

As the 1930s move towards totalitarianism and then war, Power's work takes on a darker hue. The tube trains and the escalators of the London subway system provide ample opportunity for exploring man's addiction to the rat race. Two further works seem remarkably prescient. In 1934 Power made a linocut which he called “Exam Room”, full of hunched-up concentration and a complex set of figures that show, in turn, fear, nerves, gloating, dreaming—and one who is slyly distracting a neighbour. Watching over them is the overbearing timekeeper and the all-seeing eyes in the ceiling.

Similarly, “Air Raid”, which Power made in 1935 and which has been lent to this show by the RAF Museum in Hendon, is an extraordinarily filmic response to a period of history the artist had not yet even seen. It would be another five years before the start of the Battle of Britain would make such imagery routine. Cyril Power was not just an artist, he was a visionary

[15beads]

Barbara Hepworth (1903 -1975)

Barbara Hepworth, Head (Mykonos), 1959-60 | Offer Waterman

Barbara Hepworth, Zennor, 1966 | RWA Bristol

Educator Resource Packet: Two Figures (Menhirs) by Barbara Hepworth | The Art Institute of Chicago

BARBARA HEPWORTH, Elegy III, 1966-67 | Mira Godard

Barbara Hepworth | Pace Gallery

[johnlinneyphotography]

Approaching. On the footbridge over the River Calder to the Hepworth in Wakefield. Always a pleasure visiting this gallery. #fujixt4 #fujifilmxt4 #fujifilmxf16mmf28 #hepworthwakefield #architecture #artgallery #yorkshire #yorkshirephotographer https://www.instagram.com/p/Cott8iFIj7G/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[colgreen31]

[stellabarak]

Performance with clay

I have been thinking about the relationships between ceramics and performance. The very nature of clay, its long trajectory and history, but especially the way ceramics are produced, makes it a material amenable to performance.

It isn't a coincidence, then, I think that there is a significant link between pottery, ceramics and performance.

If we look back at the recent history of modern and contemporary artists, we find a significant list of those that have employed ceramics and expanded its qualities on a performative level.

First, the one name that undeniably springs to mind is the American Lynda Benglis. Although not necessarily associated directly with ceramics, at first glance, Lynda's work comprises links between feminist art and performance, foremost. Her large oeuvre encompasses wax and latex casts, metal and of course, ceramics. The imaginative and tactile forms of Benglis's creations are at the core of her investigation and experimentation. Clay, also allowing her to bend and manipulate it in a free-form expression, also gave her the opportunity to explore it in what I see as a performative way.

The abundance of her works, the sheer sensual and gravity defying nature of the knotted works and draped fabrics, as well as her sparkles are at the centre of her idea of sculpture as "frozen moments" or frozen gestures.

The MoMA in New York has an exceptional piece of Benglis of 1998, GhostDance/PedMarks, that for me encapsulates the ongoing fascination with gestures and mark making.

In her ceramics, specifically, Benglis continued on one of her favourite motifs, the knotted bow. In a poignant retrospective of her work at the Hepworth Wakefield museum in 2015, I had the chance to experience these in person. Below you can see images of the ceramic works, which attest to the ever-shifting nature of the knots.

Second, of course American but of Greek heritage, Peter Voulkos.

I have always enjoyed watching the videos of him throwing on the wheel but even more, the ones where he is creating large sculptures out of clay, that are intentionally badly handled.

I was ecstatic when I visited one of these large sculptures and got the chance to see it in person, as part of the Victoria and Albert museum's extensive ceramics collection.

"Pinatubo" (1994) is a wood fired, stoneware sculpture, and it is currently on display in Room 142 of the Lydia and Manfred Gorey gallery at the V&A.

[irishgop]

Portrait of Frances Hodgkins, Cedric Morris, Oil on Canvas, 1928 (Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki)

She arrived in London in the spring of 1901 at the age of 32. By June she was sketching in Normandy before decamping to Paris and Italy. Hodgkins became an incessant traveler including within England and the British Empire, among the Low Countries, around the Mediterranean as well France on the Continent, and eventually The United Stares; who embraced “en plein air” sketching and painting.

As World WR I consumed continental Europe, Hodgkins settled in the village of St.Ives, Cornwall, having given up on a studio in Kensington which she had leased but found cold and cramped. She leased it to Cedric Morris and his friend Lett-Haines. They were the first of numerous English artists drawn into her circle. Ten years later Morris would paint the portrait of Hodgkins posted here. A year earlier Morris had introduced Hodgkins to Ben Nicholson, an abstract artist who had assumed the leadership of the Seven & Five Society of avant-garde artists in 1926, and began frequenting St.Ives in Cornwall in 1928.

Hodgkins would join other preeminent artists like Winifred Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore in the Seven & Five Society. She exhibited her work in the Society’s 10th and 11th exhibitions and with the Society in their 1932 showing at the Leicester Gallery in London.

In 1938 her only lithograph, “An Arrangement of Jugs,” was produced and published by the Curwen Press of Plainfield, East London along with images done by Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell, and John Piper. Kenneth Clarke, Director of the National Gallery in London had her exhibit at the British Pavilion of the 1939 NEw York World’s Fair, and subsequently she was invited to show at the 22nd Venice Biennale alongside Duncan Grant, Edward Wadsworth, Frank Dobson, Glyn Philpot, and Alfred Munnings.

In November of 1946, six months before her death, 64 of Hodgkins’ paintings and 17 drawings were shown in a critically acclaimed retrospective at the Lefevre Gallery. Francis Hodgkins passed away in May of 1947.

[Abstracted from writing by Jonathan Gooderham & Richard Wolfe, and edited by Grace Alty.]