Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) was a leading figure in the international art scene throughout a career spanning five decades. She was born in Wakefield, West Riding of Yorkshire. She trained in sculpture at Leeds School of Art alongside fellow Yorkshire-born artist Henry Moore, and later she studied at the Royal College of Art having been awarded a county scholarship.
Hepworth travelled extensively through Italy – and she married John Skeaping in Florence in 1925; and they moved to Rome that same year. It was here that she began carving stone. Hepworth became acquainted with the sculptor Richard Bedford, a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum) at the British School in Rome.
Upon returning to London; Hepworth, along with Bedford and Moore, became the leading figures in the ‘new movement’. They had a couple of successful joint exhibitions consisting of figure and animal sculptures in wood and stone.
After her marriage to John Skeaping broke down in 1933, and she went on to marry the painter Ben Nicholson. The two artists moved towards abstraction; and this became a permanent direction of her work, where she experimented with collage and prints. Together they travelled throughout Europe where she met Georges Braque and visited the studio of Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi and Jean Arp.
Nicholson and Hepworth moved evacuated to St Ives, Cornwall when the war broke out; where they remained for the rest of her life. The wild beauty of her new surroundings inspired her paintings and sculpture; in a wider context, Hepworth also represented a link with pre-war ideals in a climate of social and physical reconstruction. She was also a major international figure, showing her work in exhibitions around the globe. As a woman in a largely male-dominated art-world, Hepworth took an active role in the way her work was presented.
