Hepworth in Colour, Courtauld Gallery

Posted by Barbara on July 21, 2026 in Art, Dame, Exhibition, Leisure activities, women artists | 4 comments

Dame Barbara Hepworth was one of the leading female sculptors of the 20^th century; her understanding of form and materials was extraordinary, and despite her reluctance to promote herself, she achieved huge recognition during her lifetime.  She was as confident in her personal life as she was with the materials she used for her sculptures, divorcing her first husband for artist Ben Nicholson and having triplets with him several years before they could marry.

Her works can be found across the UK and abroad, but the Courtauld Gallery in London has come up with a real gem: Hepworth in Colour is the first exhibition to consider colour in Hepworth’s sculptures and drawings.  Her early modernist sculptures of the 1930s were admired for their use of natural materials, the purity of their forms and their refined surfaces.  Yet Hepworth was also exploring the potential of colour to create new spatial and optical effects in sculpture.

In 1939, five days before the outbreak of WW2, she left London for Cornwall with her family, taking a single sculpture with her.  This became her first study for a sculpture with colour.  The exhibition brings together a wonderful collection of 13 coloured sculptures produced during the war years in plaster, wood and stone, alongside coloured drawings, which Hepworth referred to as sculptures ‘in disguise’, working on them in the evening and at night when her children were asleep.

The sculptures draw you in and around the forms; some of them have fine strings of a different colour to the materials, focusing your attention to shapes and surfaces you might have overlooked.  The colours used reflect the Cornish landscape; soft on the eye, sometimes bolder yet all with a dreamlike quality. The use of colour on natural materials was a pioneering move; the shapes reflect nature and the cosmos, taking you beyond the earth into the galaxy. 

The drawings in the exhibition explore complex crystal shapes in layers of pencil and paint with brightly coloured planes, suggesting light travelling through a prism, They were not preparatory drawings for the sculptures, yet the forms and colours resonate with the painted carvings Hepworth was creating.  She used compasses, rulers and templates for lines that could not be drawn freehand.

The sea was another source of inspiration; she observed that ‘the incoming and receding tides made strange calligraphy on the pale and granite sand’. Ovals were a favourite shape; as you walk round the sculptures at the exhibition, each side and profile affords a different experience of colour and form.  Hepworth said she used colour to evoke the sensation of light along on a specific surface at certain times of day.

The exhibition is on until 6 September; when you leave you feel strangely calm and linked to the natural forms and colours that inspired these marvellous sculptures. Catch it if you can.