Impulses Towards Life

"Art is beyond sex," says Barbara Hepworth, and she would deplore being called Britain's top woman sculptor. Yet she is, and more: after her old friend Henry Moore, she is possibly Britain's best sculptor of either gender. Last week a ten-year retrospective show of her work was on view in London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, and a new7 book about her --Barbara Hepworth, by J. P. Hodin (Mc Kay; $17.50) -- is out in the U.S. Though her work is now totally accepted, both the book and the show prove what a vital thing it has always been. Barbara Hepworth is as responsible as anyone for re juvenating British sculpture and for prod ding the nation out of the artistic torpor that had stifled it ever since the death of Turner. Not until she and her contempo raries began their bold experimenting did English art outgrow the Royal Academy.

Her first contribution was to import: her early figurative work borrowed imaginatively from African and archaic sculpture and from the elemental forms of Brancusi. But in 1931, she produced a small carving pierced with a hole to give a sense of flow to the figure and to lead the viewer's eye around it. Just as no one can say for sure whether Braque or Picasso did the first cubist painting, so no one can be sure whether Moore or Hepworth first did this kind of open sculp ture. In any case, the innovation destroyed the prison of the outer shell to reveal the hidden forces at work inside.

Sculpture could be truly organic, for Barbara Hepworth's penetrations never violated the integrity of nature. No mat ter what shape the sculpture took, it was intuitively faithful to natural or human form, and no matter how abstract it be came, it was never removed from life.

Nature and abstraction were one; sculpture became a statement of unity.

The hole gave new strength to the play of light and shadow, and sometimes Barbara Hepworth paints the hollow to give it added mystery. Sometimes, too, she binds the sides of the hollow with a cat's-cradle of string in order to ensnare the eye and lead it deeper into the interior. Whether carving directly on wood or stone or working in plaster to serve as a cast for bronze, she bounces back and forth between representation and abstraction, just as nature goes back and forth from the specific to the ideal. But even at her most abstract. Sculptress Hepworth is concerned with living relationships--the lone figure in a landscape, "the tender relationship of one living thing beside another, the feeling of the embrace of living things, either in nature or the human spirit." Twice divorced--her second husband was Painter Ben Nicholson--Sculptress Hepworth lives and works alone in her studio-home in Cornwall. Her work can take the form of smooth organic shapes or of ribbons of bronze leaping with life.

The one will seem to throb as if it had a pulse; the other will be all rhythm. The only sculpture that matters, says Barbara Hepworth. springs from "innate impulses towards life, towards growth--impulses whose rhythms and structures have to do with the power and insistence of life.

That is how I feel about it: life will always insist on begetting life."

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