How St Ives became Barbara Hepworth’s spiritual home

‘To see a world in a grain of sand’, to attain the mystical perception that Blake advocated, requires a concentrated, fertile imagination. Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), one of the leading and most popular British sculptors of the 20th century, fervently imagined that her works expressed cosmic grandeur and her own spiritual aspirations. In the foreword to this thoughtful and enjoyable biography, Ali Smith testifies that Hepworth was ‘fiercely intelligent’, while its author, Eleanor Clayton, candidly declares: ‘I write as a curator who loves the artist she presents, a fan writing of her hero.’ Her research shows how frequently the sculptures convey ‘concepts [Hepworth] considered universal and eternal’.

Clayton, eminently qualified as an expert on all aspects of Hepworth’s long and prolific career, is curator at the Hepworth Wakefield gallery, which will present a major retrospective from 21 May until 27 February. Wakefield, in Yorkshire’s West Riding, is where Hepworth was born, and Clayton has organised other exhibitions such as Hepworth in Yorkshire and A Greater Freedom: Hepworth 1965–75, co-founded the Hepworth Research Network with the universities of York and Huddersfield, and published widely on British modern art.

Hepworth had a comfortable, happy childhood and always cherished vivid memories of Yorkshire, explored with her father, a county surveyor and alderman, who encouraged her by enrolling her at Leeds school of art. She entered at 17, when Henry Moore, a Yorkshire coal miner’s son, had already been there a year. Having served in the army for the last two years of the first world war, he was 22 when they met. They had ‘a little affair’, Moore said, but he later more tactfully described their relationship as that of a brother and younger sister.

It seems probable, though uncertain, that Moore aesthetically dominated their early conversations.