The U.K. Rallied to Save a Barbara Hepworth Sculpture. Now It Anchors a Landmark Show

Last summer, nearly 3,000 British art lovers along with U.K. cultural funds raised £3.8 million ($5.1 million) to acquire a pivotal Barbara Hepworth sculpture for the nation. (1943) had been in private hands since its creation, but was sold at Christie’s London in March 2024, and was set to be exported. Then, the Hepworth Wakefield museum stepped in, garnering support from the likes of Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, to keep the work of “outstanding significance” in the country.

Now, the wood and string work, an early example of a sculptural form for which Hepworth became well-known, is the centerpiece of an exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery, in the first exhibition devoted to the artist’s relationship with color.

The oversight is not without a certain logic: whether wrought in stone, wood, or bronze, Hepworth’s sculptures seem more concerned with form, tension, space, and politics than color. All the same, as the 20 sculptures and 30 drawings assembled from around the U.K. and beyond demonstrate, the artist’s investigations of color is right there before our eyes. Indeed, Hepworth once told her son-in-law, the art historian Alan Bowness that her use of color “has been accepted but never understood.” Now, “Hepworth in Colour” aims to change this.

Hepworth’s experiments with color began as Britain was falling under the shadow of the Second World War. In 1939, she left London for St. Ives, Cornwall, with her three young children in tow. Among her belongings was a single sculpture, her first study in color, and over the coming decade she would draw inspiration from the rugged coastal landscape around her. The shapes of Cornwall’s rocks and cliffs are visible in the works, but so too are the color of its skies and sands. (1947) paints a tawny eye of sun in an ovoid of limestone and  (1946) offers a well of alluring blue in Hopton Wood stone.

Nearby is a group of painted stringed sculptures, including (1943-44) and (1946), a beguiling work of curved elm that Hepworth said was inspired by looking out from her studio towards the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean. Alongside the recently rescued Hepworth, are six progressively larger versions of the work, which are united for the first time at the Courtauld.

These sculptural works belie the material and time constraints that Hepworth faced in Cornwall during the first years of the war—a period when she was juggling childcare, chores, and trying to maintain an art practice amid rationing. As “Hepworth in Color” makes clear, much of her thinking happened first on paper, with the exhibition presenting a wealth of her drawings for sculpture colored with blue, green, red, and yellow. Some would emerge in her expressive paintings of the 1950s, others in later bronze and marble works.

“I did innumerable drawings,” Hepworth said. “Exploring the particular tensions and relationships of form and color which were to occupy me in sculpture during the later years of the war.”