HEPWORTH, DAME (JOCELYN) BARBARA

born Jan. 10, 1903, Wakefield, Yorkshire, Eng. died May 20, 1975, St. Ives, Cornwall sculptor whose works were among the earliest abstract sculptures produced in England. Her lyrical forms and feeling for material made her one of the most influential sculptors of the mid-20th century. Fascinated from early childhood with natural forms and textures, Hepworth decided at the age of 15 to become a sculptor. She enrolled in the Leeds School of Art, where she befriended Henry Moore, then also a student. Their lifelong friendship and reciprocal influence was an important factor in the parallel development of their careers. Her earliest works were naturalistic. Gradually, however, purely formal elements gained greater importance until, by the early 1930s, her sculpture was entirely abstract. Such abstractions as "Reclining Figure" (1932) are derived from rounded biomorphic forms and natural stones and seem to be the fruit of long weathering instead of hard work with a chisel. In 1933 she married (as her second husband; the first had been the sculptor John Skeaping) the English abstract painter Ben Nicholson, under whose influence she began also to make severe, geometrical pieces with straight edges and immaculate surfaces. As Hepworth's sculpture matured during the late 1930s and '40s, she began to concentrate on the problem of the counterplay between mass and space in sculpture. Such pieces as "Wave" (1943-44; Mr. and Mrs. Ashley Havinden Collection, England) became increasingly open, hollowed out, and variously perforated, so that the interior space became as important as the mass surrounding it. The practice, increasingly frequent in her mature pieces, of painting the works' concave interiors further heightened this effect, while the sculptural voids were accented and defined by strings stretched taut across their openings. During the 1950s, Hepworth produced a notable experimental series called "Groups," clusters of small anthropomorphic forms in marble so thin that their translucence creates a magical sense of inner life. In the next decade she was commissioned to do a number of sculptures approximately 20 feet (6 m) high. Among the more successful of her works in this gigantic format is the geometrical "Four-Square (Walk Through)" (1966). Hepworth was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1965. She died in a fire in her home at St. Ives, Cornwall, which is now a museum housing many of her works.