>> Hi, my name is Hemdat Kislev, I'm a PhD candidate in the School of Art History in the University of St Andrews and I study British Modernism.
>> Hi, I'm Eilidh Lawrence and I'm Head of Museum and Photographic Collections here at Libraries and Museums, University of St Andrews.
>> So we're talking today about a work by Barbara Hepworth, a lithograph called Pastoral, who was probably made in 1969 and I guess we can start with just describing what we see, which is usually what we do in art history, a visual analysis.
So we have, the composition is filled with two shapes that look kind of like rounded out triangles or maybe the cones, some sort of elongated shape with two circles in the centre, one of them is empty so we can see the colour of the surface of the paper and one of them is coloured in yellow.
>> I think what's obvious here, so Barbara Hepworth was a sculptor, mainly I would say, and this is like you say Hemdat, this is a lithograph and there are some common themes in Hepworth's work, so as you say you've got these circular forms in the middle here which really speak to her pierced forms, if that makes sense.
>> Yeah and we can see that she's also using colour here, which is again something quite unusual for sculptor, even though some of her works do have colours, but because this is a different medium, one that invites the use of colour, we can see that she is she used black and yellow and we can see some in some places we can see the brush strokes, some of the colour was splattered on like we can see here and maybe she even used her hand I think to smear colours here and here, so that's basically the work, it's a very I would say kind of a minimalistic abstract painting or that is in the medium of lithograph here.
>> So Hemdat maybe you could tell us a little bit about Hepworth herself and her work?
>> Yes of course, so as we said this is a work from '69 which is a very late work for Hepworth.
She started her career in the 1920s.
Hepworth was born in 1903 in Wakefield and she started studying art in 1920 in the Leeds School of Art where she also met Henry Moore for the first time.
Then both of them moved to study in London in the Royal College of Art between 1921 and 1924.
After that she spent some time in Rome with another sculptor who was her first husband called John Skipping and when they returned to London they started to exhibit together and by 1929 she moved to Hampstead which was a very artistic neighbourhood at the time so many of the famous modernists lived there like Moore, Hepworth, Nicholson, so the whole the whole gang of the 1930s basically.
While in the in the '20s her works were very focused on this idea of direct carving which she shared an interest in that with Moore.
In the 1930s she became more interested in abstraction and she started working in a more three-dimensional way and she developed this notion that her works should be guided by an idea so she started developing forms as sort of not exactly symbols but something that is informed by an idea that she conceived of before starting to work and what we can see is that the the forms that she developed in the 1930s and the abstract language that she developed stayed with her throughout her career so we can see as we said like the holes that are reminiscent of her pierced forms that's something that started in the 1930s and is often considered to be her first abstract gesture in 1931 she created an alabaster sculpture called abstraction or pierce form today.
It is lost, but it was the first time that she pierced a hole through a mass of stone and basically introduced the inside of the work to the outside to the viewer and kind of introduced the notion of an abstract space as well.
So yeah we can see that definitely here with with the circles that are referring to that.
Another form that was very common in the '30s, or not exactly a form but a sort of a composition strategy for Hepworth, was putting two forms in what she called in echelons so in a diagonal positioning and we can kind of see that here as well with they're not exactly in an echelon but they are overlapping and one is in front of the other so that is what we see in works like two forms in echelon from 1938 where we have two wooden slabs that kind of look like this form.
One of them does have a pierced hole in it and they are positioned diagonally to each other so we can see that she is really using the same forms from the 1930s again and again throughout her career.
>> Absolutely and the pierced forms it's an interesting thing isn't it when we think about the sort of canon of art history and how we view women's art throughout history and in museum collections and that sort of thing in that for a long time Moore had been credited with inventing the pierced form right but in fact absolutely it was it was Hepworth.
>> I think in 1931 and I think what was what is most important about these two and kind of the comparison that became so common to do between them is that they were actually very close and worked together so it's almost like today you know when you compare Picasso and Braque in their cubist phase they were working together so Moore and Hepworth were really close and they did work and share ideas I think throughout the 1930s when they were living next to each other and exhibiting together and participating in the same art groups.
>> Yeah and I think that there is there is something though about an assumption in the art historical canon that the the invention the the the sort of innovation must have come from the male partner in that partnership right and that's something I think that museums really do try and are trying now to redress that balance so thinking about how we interpret women's work where the canon tells a story that in reality you have to learn how to question you know who wrote that history and yeah what was their sort of bias?
>> Yes and I think with the story of Hepworth this bias is very apparent because after the war she was on the same standing as Moore but very quickly when government commissions began to be a common thing in the art world in Britain Moore became the favorite for the arts council and even though Hepworth was invited to participate in the festival of Britain and she exhibited in the Venice Biennale in 1950, Moore was considered like the the celebrated artist the arch modernist among them and Hepworth was not happy about that she felt she was it was an injustice and she had to start promoting herself and kind of come up with a plan for promoting herself and her position and her place in the history of modernism in Britain.
Which in real time was actually very important, she was not a marginalized figure, so she did start to search for public commissions and she did move from small scale sculptures to large scale sculptures that will fit a public setting and she I think to a degree succeeded in that even though she perhaps was not as celebrated as more she compared to other women artists she is still considered a very well-known and appreciated modernist and she did get like a very important big commission in 1964 when she did the UN sculpture that is called single form and it actually looks just like that with this like sort of slab with with a pierced form at the at the top of it.
>> Yeah so I think what we see though throughout history and the history of women's art is women who are basically rallying against the system you know it's the system that was not designed to accommodate women artists artists of color you know anybody who comes from a marginalized background right the the the system was set up in such a way to prioritize the work of of men and men in the artistic canon like it makes me think about movements like the guerrilla girls who literally had to take to the streets to say -
>> Like Peppers did she had to take her sculpture out to public so that it will be seen.
>> Yeah exactly because there's no sort of space carved out for you in the system right so you have to work against the system to show that your work deserves to be seen and deserves to be sort of given that public recognition.
>> Yeah and there is a quote from her where she is quite she is quite upset by the way that even Henry Moore who knows that she is his equal actually and he's not helping he doesn't mind that he's being exhibited next to other male sculptors who were actually not as perhaps related to his practice as she was and she kind of she talks about that in in some of her personal writings.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> And I think with Hepworth there was also the need to negotiate her relationship with Ben Nicholson that was also kind of overshadowing perhaps her own originality.
So Ben Nicholson was a painter who was married to Hepworth from the '30s until the mid-1950s and they they did develop their abstraction together they shared ideas and and worked together.
But Nicholson, of course, got this status of the the modernist painter of Britain and and and Hepworth had to kind of struggle more in relation to to Moore and Nicholson.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
So it really speaks to what museums and galleries and collections can do to kind of redress that balance right?
These are stories that have been deliberately hidden from view, right?
Voices that have been silenced.
So, I mean, in things like commissions so we talked a little bit about how Hepworth was commissioned and in many ways some of those were her sort of breakthrough moments right because it was the art world taking her seriously you know one of the things that we try to do in diversifying collections is use commissions you know taking a sort of sweep of your collection.
What's missing?
Whose voices are missing and whose stories are told in museum collections and how can we redress that balance through commissioning contemporary artists or acquisitions that you know basically expand our our holdings to to to show the work of artists who have been marginalised?
>> Yeah, I think it's important to highlight that she was not marginalised in the sense that we sometimes talk about women artists that were really marginalised maybe like Jessica Dismorr or Helen Saunders of the Vorticists or artists of colour that were marginalised.
But she definitely had to struggle and kind of secure her position in a way that her male counter-parts did not.
So can I ask, what do you think contriubtes to the collections here in the museum?
>> Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I think, we have a collection called The Boswell Collection which helps us to acquire more contemporary works.
Works by artists who maybe haven't been collected by the musuem up to this point.
So we're really trying to basically diversify our collections.
We have a collections development policy that essentially says that we are looking for gaps in our collections and want to fill those to represent the University community in it's diversity as it is today and no longer just have the sort of classic, big state portraits for example.
Our collections also are heavily used in research and teaching at the University, so the fact that we're talking about this Hepworth piece today is sort of evident that this is a great thing that we can do with these works is bring them to students and bring students to them and have these sorts of conversations.
>> Yeah. That's great.
And we can use these objects to kinda dig out stories, like the story of Barbara Hepworth.
>> Yes, absolutely, you sometimes have to look a little bit harder to find the stories but they are certainly there.
