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Descrizione : 1903-1975 torso marble on a wood base height 29cm., 11Iin. (excluding base) The present work, carved in 1928, is dramatic evidence of the sea-change that occurred in about 1930 not only in Barbara Hepworth's work, but in British modernist sculpture. It is often forgotten, in the face of Hepworth's extraordinary body of mature work, that she was at the forefront of two modernist movements, and that the movement of the 1920s, whose heroes were Gaudier-Brzeska, Eric Gill and Frank Dobson, was dramatically different from that of the 1930s, headed by Moore and by Hepworth herself. On one hand, Torso encapsulates vividly the values of the sculptors of the earlier decade. Hepworth and her husband John Skeaping believed passionately in the importance of direct carving and of immediate contact and understanding of the material itself. As the present work shows, this led to a fascination with exotic and technically difficult materials, and much of the couple's work of this period is carried out in rare or even semi-precious stones. They saw the key to understanding in earlier and purer traditons of figurative carving, free of the decorative conceits of the nineteenth century - Epstein himself possessed a highly important collection of African tribal art. In the catalogue to the Tate Gallery, Liverpool's 1994 exhibition of Hepworth's work, Penelope Curtis neatly contrasts the two succeeding movements: 'As modern Carving was to be explained in the 1930s by analogy with biology and geology, so in the 1920s its apologists made comparisons with the archaic or non-classical traditions of the craftsman working direct with the chosen material' (op. cit., p.11). In the introduction to an exhibition of Henry Moore's work, Peter Fuller gave a brilliant and incisive analysis of the central concerns of the early carvers: 'The twentieth-century British sculptural 'pioneers' were, in aesthetic terms at least, reactionary, in that they took their standards from the past; their strengths were rooted in their unswerving desire to restore lost sculptural values, to re-affirm the vitality and spirituality of pre-Renaissance art. Indeed the best British sculpture in the early decades of this century was, in terms of its cultural stance, rather more like PreRaphaelitism, or at least the Gothic Revival, than it was like an avant-garde movement' (Henry Moore, Royal Academy, London, 1988, p.38). Torso can on one level be seen to belong to this earlier tendency: like all of Hepworth's work of the late 1920s, with titles like Frog, Goose, Dying Bird, Dog, it is a figurative piece. At the same time, however, it vividly foreshadows the way in which the figurative idea would be used in the following decade as a vehicle for essentially abstract formal experiment by Hepworth and particularly by Henry Moore. Although it employs classical references, the figure possesses a serene weight and organic awareness of form that reflects Penelope Curtis' references to biology and geology, more than any antique idea of proportion. The figure's lack of head and limbs, justified again by the classical references, enables Hepworth largely to eliminate its anecdotal identity and hence its figurative values. The eclipse of this earlier movement by its successor was very sudden: in 1931 the two sculptor-members of the Seven and Five Society were John Skeaping and Kanty Cooper, but by 1933 these two had been replaced by Moore and Hepworth. The present work can certainly be placed within the earlier bracket, among the works of Skeaping and Dobson: at the same time, though, it is among the earliest of Hepworth's carvings that can also be seen in the context of her later role as one of this country's key exponents of modernist carving. Exhibited: Liverpool, Tate Gallery, and Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Barbara Hepworth: A Retrospective, 1994-5, no. 4, illustrated in the catalogue. London, Royal College of Art, 20th Century British Art Fair: Loan Collection, 1995 Literature: J.-P. Hodin and Alan Bowness, Barbara Hepworth: complete catalogue of sculptures 1925-59, Lund Humphries, London, 1961, no.14c.
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