There is a sculpture at the Courtauld this summer that stopped me. Not one of the large, famous forms, not the monumental bronzes or the public commissions you half-recognise from Oxford Street or the UN plaza. This one is small, wooden, strung with fine threads, and painted inside its hollow with a pale, particular blue, the kind you have to lean towards.
Barbara Hepworth used colour for thirty years and almost nobody knew. The blues and ochres and deep reds she mixed into the interior cavities of her sculptures were shown rarely, explained rarely, never positioned as a new direction. They existed alongside the work the world was receiving, the pure forms, the pierced voids, quietly, in parallel. A private practice running beneath the public one.
The blues came from Cornwall, from the particular quality of light over St Ives. She wrote once that colour in the concavities plunged her into the sensation of water, of caves, of depths the carving itself couldn’t reach. Colour did something form alone couldn’t, it went further in.
I find myself thinking about why she kept it so close. Colour is harder to defend than form. Form has a logic you can trace, a geometry, a conversation with space, a relationship to the body, but colour is felt, and instinctive. To foreground it would have been to invite a different kind of scrutiny. Easier to let it remain what it was: something between herself and the material.
The things we make for an audience and the things we make for ourselves are rarely identical, and the distance between them is often where the most alive work lives. Hepworth’s colour feels that way. Present, but unlabelled.
The exhibition is at the Courtauld until 6th September. Twenty sculptures, thirty drawings, and that particular hue you have to lean towards to find.
AE X
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