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| Barbara Hepworth, Two Forms. 1933 in Marble (blue) |
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| Barbara Hepworth, Two Forms. 1934 in Alabaster |
'[J.D. Bernal] Writing in The Spectator in 1933 after her exhibition at Reid and Lefevre, he noted: 'These stones are inhabited with feelings, even if, in common with the majority of 'advanced' carvers, Miss Hepworth has felt not only the block, but also its potential fruit to be always feminine....'
This generative metaphor was deeply internalized by artists working under the influence of Surrealism. In a poem written in the early 1930s and dedicated to Max Ernst, the English poet David Gascoyne celebrated "the great bursting womb of desire." (...)
No artistic movement since the nineteenth century has celebrated the idea of woman and her creativity as passionately as did Surrealism during the 1920s and 1930s. None has had as many female practitioners and none has evolved a more complex role for the woman artist in a modern movement. (...)'
Chadwick, W. (2007) Women, Art and Society. fourth ed. Thames and Hudson. London p 309
As mentioned by Chadwick, Hepworth's sculpture and her approach to abstract form is reminiscent to the female attributes. In her work Two Forms (1933) we can see a relatively more suggestive depiction of the female body than in Two Forms (1934). The sculpture is suggesting a relationship between the two objects, where the large piece is portraying the lower, genital part of the female body, possibly the womb and where the smaller piece could be the fruit of reproduction. The same observation could be applied to the second figure Two Forms (1934), where Hepworth is again depicting the eternal-circular reproduction system together with what might be the 'penetrating' organ of the male body. The justification of the term 'penetrating' derives from the forms' narrow angles that give the shape corners in a way that it informs the objects' depiction as a 'tool'. It is very interesting to note that Barbara Hepworth and her 'abstract vocabulary' has been influenced by Jean Arp, when Hepworth visited his studio in Paris in 1931. What is most notable about this two works is the composition in which they are both arranged, that suggests the effectiveness of Hepworth's work in the portrayal of femininity.
Images sourced from OoCities
