Ali smith: barbara hepworth changed the way we see the world

Ali Smith 18 May 2021 12:00pm BST “Your work is very organic,” an interviewer said to Barbara Hepworth once. “It’s meant to be,” Hepworth replied. “I’m organic myself.” This off-the-cuff

reply isn’t just frank and funny. In it there is a vision that connects every individual to the ground we walk on, the world we inhabit and the planet’s place in something universal.

Hepworth saw our own organic relation as connected not just to the landscapes we inhabit or the elements of the physical world from which we are literally made, but to the world in outer

space, and more. There is a renewing, in encounters with her work, of what words like “space” and “world” mean, all the way from the planetary sphere right back to the miniature curvature of

the side of a pebble. Simultaneously ancient and contemporary, concrete and symbolic, earthy and spiritual, her art conjures from two pieces of shaped stone everything from the intimate

pull of love between two living beings to the massive power of Earth’s magnetism. She opened expectations of figuration to abstraction, and vice versa. She pierced holes in stone, wood and

metal, opened her materials to light and to air as if matter itself has eyes or is a window to itself and the rest of the world, waiting for us to understand it inside out, to open our own

eyes to what matter is. She made herself open to the life she perceived deep in stone, wood, metal; she sensed that a slab of marble, say, already held form inside it and that it was her

responsibility, in dialogue with her materials and with the working of her head and hands, to find that form. She strung strings across hollows to bring out the music, the underlying rhythm,

in the space that a curve can suggest or the depth that a surface will belie. She lived through two world wars; it’s no surprise that she became an early environmentalist, a socialist and

anti-nuclear campaigner, and this commitment and her art practice were indivisible from each other and as organic to her as breathing. Eleanor Clayton’s biography, published to coincide with

an exhibition in Wakefield, reads Hepworth’s life and art together as an organic symbiosis. Clayton traces a biographical timeline that dispenses with anything not integral to the

relationship between the artist and the work. With access to unpublished letters to friends and people closest to her, she aligns Hepworth’s “private thoughts” with her “public narrative”,

treating the life and the work as one and the same and revealing not just the impossibility but the daftness of ever splitting one from the other. The book deals with contemporary fractures

in history across her lifetime, shifts and fashions in art history, and the everyday “continued, insidious sexism” that Hepworth had to withstand from one half of the century to the other.

It contextualises all of this by placing Hepworth’s own wise voice centre-stage. What a voice. Hepworth was one of our most eloquent speakers on time, on life, on what we make of these, and

on the art process at the core of both. Fiercely intelligent, always striving against any falsity or pretension both in what she said and what she made, she defined art as the opposite of

elitism and was committed to the “universal language” she knew it to be. This voicing and Clayton’s book make for a new revelation of the underlying rhythm at the heart of the artist and the

art, a galvanising vision of both at work in the real world. “One could really do with 10 lifetimes,” the artist said towards the end of her life, “to express the variations and subtleties

which one lifetime can give.” I wish the book were ten times as long as it is, for the human being it conjures who saw earth, stone, stars and spirit come together as one organic vision, and

for the process, the person, the art and the spirit that came together to make Barbara Hepworth. BARBARA HEPWORTH: ART & LIFE IS AT THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD (HEPWORTHWAKEFIELD.ORG) FROM

MAY 21-FEB 27. BARBARA HEPWORTH: ART & LIFE BY ELEANOR CLAYTON (THAMES & HUDSON, £25) IS OUT ON THURSDAY