A fundraising drive with a target of almost £3m is under way to prevent aBarbara Hepworthmasterpiece from being sold to a private buyer and taken out of the UK.
Art Fund, the charity that secures art for public collections while providing financial support for museums and the Hepworth Wakefield, is trying to secure the funds in order to keepSculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red)in the UK.
The piece, which Hepworth created in the midst of the second world war while living in Cornwall, was sold at auction byChristie’s last March for £3.8m.
But the UK government placed an export bar on the sculpture, which gives the institutions until August to match the money the private buyer – who plans to take the piece abroad – was willing to pay.ArtFund has provided £750,000 but another £2.9m needs to be found before the deadline of 27 August.
Eleanor Clayton, senior curator at the Hepworth Wakefield and a Barbara Hepworth specialist, said the sculpture by the Wakefield-born artist must be kept in the UK so future generations could see it on display.
She said: “Hepworth is obviously one of the most important British sculptors and really set the standard for what we think of as modern sculpture today. The piece is one of the earliest and best examples of the wooden, string-carved sculptures that she became really well known for.”
Clayton added: “It’s an incredible opportunity. If we’re successful, it would be pretty much on permanent display to the public, either in Wakefield or we would lend it to important exhibitions around the country.”
Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red)was made in 1943 after Hepworth had moved her family to St Ives in Cornwall with her then husband, Ben Nicholson, to escape the blitz during the second world war.
Hepworth had to obtain a special permit to use wood for her sculptures and the piece was crafted using string, one of the first times she had worked in such a way.
“They required a government permanent permit to carve into wood,” said Clayton. “She wrote a lot about the difficulties of actually obtaining seasoned wood that wouldn’t split immediately when she started carving. There’s only a handful of these that are still in existence.”
Hepworth once said the strings represented the tension she felt between “myself and the sea, the wind or the hills” inCornwall. She worked in St Ives up to her death in a fire in 1975.
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Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red) was initially bought by the “patron, socialite and connoisseur” Helen Sutherland and has always remained in private ownership. The work was cherished by Hepworth and the plaster prototype of the sculpture was the only piece she brought with her to Cornwall.
Clayton said that the making of the piece was remarkable, not just because of the difficulties related to the war but also the time constraints Hepworth faced due to her domestic workload.
“She was juggling childcare and domestic chores,” Clayton said. “She wrote in a letter to a friend and critic how she had to work for 30 minutes, and then she had to cook for the children, and then she’d go back to the studio and carve for another 20 minutes. Then she’d have to go and do some washing. It’s sort of astonishing that it was made within these circumstances and with the threat of war in the background.”
The piece was last shown in the UK as part of the Hepworthretrospective at Tate Britain in 2015– one of the rare times it’s been seen in public.
That exhibition was the first big UK staging of her work since the late 1960s. For much of her lifetime Hepworth lived in the shadow of Henry Moore – the other great British 20th-century sculptor.
Clayton said Hepworth had expressly wanted her work to be seen in the flesh. “She said you have to see the sculpture in three dimensions – you have to walk around it. You can’t get the sense of it from a picture, you have to see them in person.”