Last year the Hepworth Wakefield raised £3.8m to acquire Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form), Pale Blue and Red, a sculpture that had been in private hands since the artist made it in 1943. The first work in which she combined strings with wood painted sky-blue, it evoked the landscapes of her adopted home of Cornwall and, in her words, represented ‘the tension I felt between myself and the sea, the wind or the hill’. Now it travels to London to be the centrepiece of an exhibition that explores Hepworth’s relationship with colour – a relationship that art historians, in her opinion, ‘accepted but never understood’ (12 June–6 September). Some 20 sculptures, including loans from museums and private collections around the world, are joined by drawings and paintings that reveal how carefully the sculptor thought about form, colour and space.
Find out more from the Courtauld’s website.
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