From out of the shadows

Barbara Hepworth fought hard for recognition in her lifetime, and privacy after her death. Now, with an exhibition celebrating the 10th anniversary of the museum in her name, it’s time to reassess her life and work

- Ruth Guilding

BARBARA HEPWORTH was born into a sepia world before feminism was invented. As a would-be artist, she faced far greater hurdles than her male coevals and especially the sculptor Henry Moore, with whom she was compared throughout her life. However, she held on to her ambition, explaining herself in essays, manifestos and a propagandising A Pictorial Autobiography, which laid down boundaries for what future audiences could know or write about her. In middle age, she emerged into the limelight as an awkward pioneer in the history of modern art, whose signature pierced forms and expressive, dynamic public sculptures had found a new, global audience.

All this was achieved at some personal cost and by ferocious determination and control, both in her lifetime and posthumously. The measures that Hepworth took ensured that her concrete achievements remained to the fore; the familial and emotional were embargoed, together with her personal papers. She knew that to be judged as a woman on the counterweight of her private life would have provoked harsh criticism then.

After her death in 1975, control ceded to her family, particularly her late son-in-law, the curator and art historian Sir Alan Bowness, who has gradually drawn her from under Moore’s long shadow. Deftly machinating for the founding of Tate St Ives and entrusting Tate with Hepworth’s house-museum there, Bowness confirmed Hepworth’s icon status in the 1990s by endowing the HepworthWakefield in her home town with her prototypes for sculpture in plasters that still bear the textured marks of her hand tools.