Sold for: $43,250

PROVENANCE
G. Blair Laing Limited, Toronto, 1964
Private Collection, Toronto

LITERATURE
New Sculpture and Drawings by Barbara Hepworth, The Lefevre Gallery, 1952, listed, unpaginated

EXHIBITED
The Lefevre Gallery, London, New Sculpture and Drawings by Barbara Hepworth, October 1952, catalogue #30

Following the Second World War, finding marble in short supply, Barbara Hepworth made a notable turn towards figuration and drawing. After her daughter was hospitalized in 1944, Hepworth became fascinated with surgical procedures and the technical, manual skill of the surgeons who performed them. She brought her sketch pad into the operating theatre at Princess Elizabeth Orthopaedic Centre in Exeter, taking the opportunity to observe the precise, skilled movements of individuals at work; between 1947 and 1949, she produced nearly 80 works in ink and chalk known as the Hospital Drawings.

Contemporaneous with these drawings was a group of nude figurative works done between 1947 and 1951, including Young Girl (Brown on Brown), an indication of her interest in introducing a more grounded, human element—a tempering of her modernism that coincided with a more organic turn in her sculpture at this time. Hepworth would employ dancers as her models, preferring to observe their bodies in motion or relaxed in moments of natural pause, rather than in fixed, artificial poses. She became thoroughly familiar with their movements, capturing their poise and energy through graceful, minimalist pencil drawings. A group of the resulting figurative works (as well as some purely abstract pieces) was shown in 1950 in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, alongside works by the earlier British artists John Constable and Matthew Smith—suggesting, perhaps, that Hepworth’s modernism could be seen as a continuation of a more painterly inheritance.

Young Girl undeniably occupies the space between painting and drawing. The board was prepared with gesso and oil washes, which were then scraped back. Over this surface Hepworth has laid graphite pencil, capturing the model with delicate precision. The standing figure initially appears static, effaced of all identifying features, but quickly becomes animated by Hepworth’s rhythmic line work. The curve of the spine, the rapidly worked and reworked legs, and the brief suggestion of hair express, with minimal rendering, the restrained movement and strength of the dancer at rest. Despite this austerity, we still get a sense of her presence in how she sinks her weight on her leg or in the carved hollow of her back. The body of the figure is further worked through dimensional techniques of relief shading—the contours and muscles suggested through burnishing and scratching into the underlying medium—which allows the exposure of the brown ground to suggest the colour of skin. In this sense, the flat surface takes on subtle depths and dimensionality, molded by the use of sculptural manipulations.

The title’s singular Girl assures us that this is not a pair of figures but a single subject, multiplied or reflected. The dancer is placed in a dialogue with her own body, existing in two contiguous moments or simultaneously seen from two points of view. To this end Hepworth is employing an almost Cubist construction to explore the relationship of multiple figures (indeed, the 1950 Venice Biennale also included prominent works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque). Hepworth explored this technique further in her sculpture, which at this time was beginning to take on a more organic, figurative quality. Young Girl shows that the two media were influencing one another: the skilful handiwork of the artist elevates sketching into sculpture, and the figure drawing becomes monumental. This work ably demonstrates that Hepworth’s drawings are not ancillary to her sculpture, but are highly effective demonstrations of the artist’s marriage of form and line.

We thank Sophie Bowness, PhD, for providing information in preparing this catalogue entry. Bowness is preparing the revised catalogue raisonné of Hepworth's paintings and drawings, in which this work is included as #BH D 286.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars