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Course: Modernisms 1900-1980 > Unit 10
Lesson 4: Postwar art in Britain- Modernism and its legacy
- Barbara Hepworth: Pioneering modern sculpture
- Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos
- Room: Henry Moore
- Describing what you see: Sculpture (Henry Moore, Reclining Figure)
- Bacon, Triptych - August 1972
- Freud, Standing by the Rags
- Room: 1940s
- Room: 1950s
- Room: 1960s
- The Berlin Wall and industrial England: Don McCullin's conflict photography
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Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos
Dame Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos, 1946, elm and string on oak base, 43 x 46 x 38.5 cm (Tate Britain). Pelagos is the word for "sea" in Greek.
speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
Want to join the conversation?
- Could the strings point to a instrumental/musical reference of some kind? The piece is beautiful, almost transcendent.(4 votes)
Video transcript
(soft music) - [Steven] We've come to
the museum Tate Britain to see a sculpture by
Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos. This was made just after the
end of the Second World War. - [Beth] Pelagos means open sea in Greek and we know that Hepworth
moved to Cornwall just before the start of
World War Two in 1939. And Cornwall is a place that is known for the beauty of where
the land meets the sea. - [Steven] But this is not
a depiction of the sea. This is not a landscape in any sense. This is not taking a thing that she sees and trying to mimic it. Instead, it's a formal
experiment in the feeling that one might have in that place. - [Beth] It's about experience and in fact she says this in a famous
quote from this period. She said, "What a
different shape and being "one becomes lying on
the sand with the sea "almost above from when
standing against the wind "on a high sheer cliff
with seabirds circling "patterns below one. "And again, what a contrast from the form "one feels within oneself
sheltering near some "great rocks or reclining in the sun "on the grass-covered
rocky shapes which make "the double spiral of
Pendour or Zennor cove." So she's referring to
the bodily experience of being either enclosed
or lying on the sand or standing upright and facing the wind. How does one translate
that into sculpture? - [Steven] Sculpture had always
been about the human body. But she's after something
that seems almost impossible. How does one represent an internal feeling in the vocabulary of
form and mass and volume, texture and color? - [Beth] When we think about this through sculpture, we
think about sculptures that celebrate heroes or
battles or ancient Greek gods and goddesses, or
we think about sculptures of saints and other religious figures. - [Steven] So what has she done? Well, first of all she's carving in wood, which is a warm material,
one that feels good in our hands, one that
we can imagine holding that has texture and rich color. She's used round forms, which give a sense of sheltering, of protection. And the scale of the sculpture
is small, it's intimate. It's about the width of our shoulders and so it's something that
we can come to directly. It's not something
that's put on a pedestal. - [Beth] Even in this glass box I am drawn to caressing the smoothness of that wood or what I imagine to be
the even smoother interior. - [Steven] Which she painted a light blue so that it feels cool in
contrast to the warmth of the outside. It looks as if it might actually be stone even though it's just painted wood. - [Beth] And then you have the string, which is the very opposite
of these rounded forms of the wood. These are lines and
they're also more fragile. - [Steven] It's introducing a drawing, almost a two-dimensional
form, in the volumes of this sculpture. It seems to almost draw
the wood back on itself as if it were completely malleable. - [Beth] Well, we could think about a conch shell, a shell
that's created organically by the living form inside it. - [Steven] Or a wave, but
a wave that is crested and has been held in
stasis by those strings. At that perfect moment
when it's about to break it's held there permanently. This sculpture is so complicated. As you move around it,
you can't anticipate what you're going to see. - [Beth] The longer you
spend with it, the more you see how complex and sensitive the relationship of those curves are to one another and to the
depth of the sculpture itself. - [Steven] And I can't
help but think about how its ideal qualities
function as a refuge in the moment that it was made. This is 1946, the war had just ended, Britain was in ruins and
yet here she is creating this ideal representation. She lived at a moment that we often refer to as high modernism. If you look back to the art historians of her own era, they would rarely discuss the circumstances that might
have helped shaped this. For example, the end of the war. Instead, they would
focus on the traditions that she was breaking and one of those was the idea of sculpture as a mass. When she first pierced her sculpture it was doing something
fundamentally different from what sculpture had always been. One of the other issues
that's often brought out in talking about Barbara
Hepworth's sculpture and other sculptors of the same period in England, people like
Henry Moore, is the idea of truth to materials. That is rejecting the 19th century way of making sculpture,
building in wax or clay, casting in bronze or
having a marble sculpture carved by somebody else. Here instead the artist has taken a block of wood that they've chosen. - [Beth] And you get that
sensitivity to the wood when you walk around this sculpture and you see these lovely rounded
forms of the grain itself. - [Steven] But the
sculpture we're looking at is more than 70 years old,
and because it's an organic material and it's been handled,
it's no longer perfect. The strings sag ever so slightly. They're not as taut as I
imagine they once were. There's some slight cracking in the wood and you can see that the
paint has been redone. The outside is dark and
the inside is light, which itself is unexpected. And though she seems to have dismissed the importance of color in her sculpture in a later statement,
we can't help but think about the blue of the sea and the color of the earth that surrounds
the sea in the coves in the Cornwall that she was living in. (upbeat music)