Correspondence of Barbara Hepworth

The collection consists of personal and professional correspondence from and to Barbara Hepworth.

Barbara Hepworth was born in Wakefield, Yorkshire, on 10 January 1903. After attending Wakefield Girls' High School, she studied at Leeds School of Art (1920-21) and the Royal College of Art, London (1921-24). In 1924 she went to Florence on a West Riding Travel Scholarship, where she married John Skeaping in 1925. For a year they lived at the British School in Rome, where Skeaping was a Rome Scholar in Sculpture, before returning back to London. In 1927 the couple had their first studio exhibition at their flat in St Ann's Terrace, St John's Wood. Shortly after, they moved to 7 The Mall, Parkhill Road, Hampstead, where Hepworth would remain until 1939. Between 1930-32 Hepworth and Skeaping became members of the London Group and the 7 & 5 Society.

In 1929 Hepworth and Skeaping's son Paul was born. However, their marriage was slowly deteriorating and they were divorced in 1933. In 1931 she met Ben Nicholson. Three years later she gave birth to triplets, Simon, Sarah and Rachel, and finally married Nicholson in 1938 who was first married to Winifred. Hepworth and Nicholson became members of Abstraction-Création in 1933 and Unit One in 1934. After some joint exhibitions with Ben Nicholson, Hepworth held her first one-person exhibition in 1937 at Alex, Reid & Lefevre, London.

At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Hepworth-Nicholson family took refuge in St Ives, at the invitation of Adrian Stokes and his wife Margaret Mellis. In 1942 they moved to Chy-an-Kerris, Carbis Bay, where Hepworth was able to make sculpture again. In Cornwall, Hepworth became an active member of the modernist artistic community. In 1949 she bought Trewyn Studio in St Ives, where she lived for the rest of her life after her divorce from Nicholson two years later.

Retrospective and other major exhibitions at Leeds 1943, Venice Biennale 1950, Whitechapel 1954 and São Paulo Bienal 1959, where she was awarded the Grand Prix, confirmed her post-war national and international reputation. An increase in commissions and greater demand for her work led to the employment of assistants for preliminary work, such as Denis Mitchell, Dicon Nance and Tommy Rowe, and to produce bronze editions. In 1961, Hepworth acquired the Palais de Danse, a former cinema and dance hall, opposite Trewyn Studio for use as a workshop, especially for works to be cast in bronze, and as a store.

Major commissions include 'Meridian' for the State House, London, 1960; 'Winged Figure' for the John Lewis Building, Oxford Street, 1961; 'Single Form', a memorial to the Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, erected outside the United Nations building in New York in 1964; and 'Theme and Variations' for the Cheltenham & Gloucestershire Building Society Head Office, 1972.

From the 1950s onwards the distribution of her sculptures also became more far reaching when Gimpel Fils Ltd became her exclusive art dealer. A series of international and national exhibitions followed, such as the British Council European Tour, 1964; retrospective exhibition at the Rietveld Pavilion, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, 1965; retrospective exhibition at Tate Gallery, 1968; and an exhibition at the Hakone Open-Air Museum, 1970.

In addition, this period was marked by official acclaim; Hepworth was awarded the CBE in 1958, the DBE in 1965, and received various honorary degrees and memberships, such as Honorary D. Litt. from the University of Birmingham (1960), University of Leeds (1961), University of Exeter (1966) and University of Oxford (1968), and Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Furthermore, in 1968 she was made a Bard of Cornwall and received the Honorary Freedom of the Borough of St Ives with her friend, the potter Bernard Leach.

Hepworth also served as a Tate Trustee (1965-72), and donated six works in 1964 and a further nine in 1967. From 1965 onwards she suffered from ill health which led to increased immobility and reliance on her assistants. On 20 May 1975 she died in an accidental fire at Trewyn Studio. ['Barbara Hepworth'/Matthew Gale, Chris Stephens. London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1999.]