Review of Hepworth in Color – Cornish salt patterns compressed into fine sculptures | Barbara Hepworth

THey tell St Ives that if you listen to Barbara Hepworth sculpture, you can hear the waves breaking on Porthmeor beach. Well, maybe they say that and maybe they don’t. But the sea roars in the most fascinating sculptures at the center of this small study of just one aspect of his work: the use of color.

Hepworth’s favorite colors are – wait for it – blue and white, the colors of the sea: white bursts of foam and bubbling water that wash the Cornish fishing town where her house and studio are proudly kept.

And he also looks at Hepworth’s round, piercing sculptures, luscious and curvaceous. In the first and most beautiful room, a list of objects the size and shape of the geode is displayed on the metal. The round, white material is cut away to reveal a blue interior that seems unremarkable, even though Hepworth painted it. In the center of the bright blue, red-painted strings are fixed. Red ropes can mean seaweed if, like me, you can’t get nature out of your head and focus on abstract but attractive tasks.

Is it fair to see Hepworth as an artist on the oceans? Courtauld makes him look, very modern like a real designer. Around its beautiful sculptures, in which many wild walks on the beach seem to be squeezed, the walls of the building are hung with original designs. They have smooth and slanted, intersecting lines that capture an elegant aesthetic.

It’s fun to see these drawings, especially at first. But the responsibility of continuing to look from Hepworth’s seductive sculptures to her studies begins to feel like a chore. The argument for this exhibition is empty, anyway: the famous British artist used paint. Is it weird? It seems reductive that a few pieces – a curved, curved stone with a yellow tint and a long, transparent jade-like one – seem to be here just to show that Hepworth did not think in monochrome. He really deserves better than being taken as proof that he enjoys his colors.

But Hepworth is a great sculptor, perfect and perfect. His elmwood 1946 Pelagos curves like the most beautiful waves, the kind that surfers wait for in St Ives. Hepworth must have stared at the waves for hours, for years, so that he could visualize the beautiful, smooth mountain of the army, which he painted white beneath. The red strings, again, are suspended between two curves, creating an almost cinematic movement. He adds that Hepworth not only works with color but words, too.

The strings make his sculptures resemble the Aeolian harp, an instrument that can be played by the wind. Samuel Taylor Coleridge had one and wrote: “Thus the stormy wind caressed . . . long long notes / On sweet waves sink and rise.” In this windowless room in central London, Hepworth’s string sculptures don’t sing to the wind but resonate in your mind.

Hepworth’s love of colors created by wind and waves fills the exhibition with blues and greens. His oil and pencil painting Turning Form (Atlantic) is white smoke in a blue sea, while The Ocean (Porthmeor) shows the same wild water in a vast bronze-green horizon. The weirdest and slowest of all sculpture It’s Color (Eos). This upright oval was carved from Hopton Wood rock in 1946. Hepworth dug a hole and painted it blue. The circular breathing of the sea in the small monolith resembles a large looking eye: is it the eye of Eos, the Greek goddess of the dawn?

I never thought of Hepworth as a mysterious person. But the stillness and calm that his art creates feels spiritual. When you look at the top and bottom curves of his work Wave, time stands still, like a swimmer.

Hepworth’s paintings do not depict nature. On the contrary, it makes you feel alone, at peace with the longest, slowest moments of nature: the time it takes for the sea to create a cave in the abyss, or for the rain to carve a peninsula. People often think of a chisel as an incisive, aggressive tool that makes the stone horizontal and vertical. Hepworth releases concavities, releases holes. Perhaps the exhibitions of his art are often cautious and confusing, like this one, because he is a little intimidated by the power of the goddess of British art culture.