Dame Barbara Hepworth

(British, 1903-1975)

Intersection 26 x 37.7 cm. (10 1/4 x 14 3/4 in.)

Footnotes

Provenance
The Artist, from whom acquired by
Serge and Barbara Chermayeff, thence by family descent to the present owners
Private Collection, U.S.A.

Exhibited
London, The Lefevre Gallery, Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture and Drawings, October 1946, cat.no.23

To escape the onset of war Hepworth and Ben Nicholson left London for Cornwall with their three young children in late 1939. They initially stayed with the painter Adrian Stokes but by the end of the year had moved into their own house in Carbis Bay near St Ives. The house was small and the lack of space, combined with the wartime scarcity of raw materials and family demands, meant that Hepworth produced no sculpture between 1940 and 1942. Instead, she turned her attentions to drawing.

Remembering the early 1940s, Hepworth would describe:

'In the late evenings, and during the night I did innumerable drawings in gouache and pencil – all of them abstract, and all of them my own way of exploring the particular tension and relationship of form and colour which were to occupy me in sculpture the later years of the war' (quoted in Herbert Read, (ed.), Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, London, 1952).

In 1943, Hepworth started carving again, exploring in sculpture what she had studied in her 1940-42 drawings. Works such as Intersection, executed in 1946, provided further means of exploring new sculptural forms and expanding the research begun at the outbreak of the war. Instead of being self-contained, the forms explored in this later group of drawings expand to the exterior, perusing the boundaries between space and object, surface and surroundings. In their pure geometry and dynamism, they pay homage to Hepworth's friend and artist Naum Gabo, who had also lived in St Ives in the 1940s. Meanwhile her use of colour recalls Piet Mondrian's gridded compositions, with whom Hepworth again enjoyed an engaging discourse.

Speaking of the drawings executed after the Second World War, Hepworth explained:

'Abstract drawing has always been for me a particularly exciting adventure. First there is only one's mood; then the surface takes one's mood in colour and texture; then a line or curve which, made with a pencil on the hard surface of many coats of oil or gouache, has a particular kind of "bite" rather like incising on slate; then one is lost in a new world of a thousand possibilities because the next line in association with the first will have a compulsion about it which will carry one forward into completely unknown territory. [...] Suddenly before one's eyes is a new form which, from the sculptor's point of view, free as it is from the problems of solid material, can be deepened or extended, twisted or flattened, tightened and hardened according to one's will, as one imbues it with its own special life'. (Ibid).

Intersection appears as a play of equilibrium between overlapping lines and curved arcs. The forms, which develop in a space that is abstract and purely geometrical, seem to be fixed in a precarious state of balance, ready to swing back into movement. Executed in pencil and gouache on gesso prepared board, Intersection is sparsely coloured with sections of sky blue and yellow, echoing in its restraint Hepworth's approach to colour in her sculpture whilst the two central fanned sections of lines also bring to mind her stringed works in the round.

The present work enjoys distinguished provenance, having been acquired directly from the artist (a close friend) by Serge and Barbara Chermayeff. Serge Ivan Chermayeff (1900 – 1996) was a Russian-born architect, industrial designer, writer, and co-founder of several architectural societies, including the American Society of Planners and Architects. In 1928 he took British citizenship and with Paul Follot headed the Modern Art Studio at Waring and Gillow department store in central London, where he ensured that Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood were given prominence in their exhibition rooms.

Sculpture mattered greatly to him and figured in buildings he designed and lived in – indeed he commissioned the 1938 Recumbent Figure in green Hornton stone (now Tate Collection) by Henry Moore for his own 1935—38 house overlooking the South Downs (Bentley Wood, near Halland, East Sussex). Serge opened an architectural practice in 1930 and three years later, arguably one of Germany's most famous Modernist architects, Erich Mendelsohn, arrived in London fleeing racism. Chermayeff recognised the power of the moment and went into partnership with him and their projects together were De La Warr Pavilion, Cohen House and Shrubs Wood. He is also credited with the design of Shann House and the headquarters and factory complex of Gilbeys Gin in Camden, London. In 1940 Serge moved to the United States where he worked briefly as an architect before becoming an academic, first as the Chairman of the Art Department of Brooklyn College and then teaching at the California School of Fine Arts. In 1946 upon the recommendation of Walter Gropius, he became President of the Institute of Design in Chicago. In 1953 he moved to Massachusetts where he opened a practice with Haywood Cutting in tandem, he also took up the role of Professor of the Architecture Department at Harvard School of Design until 1962 when he moved to Yale (where Sir Norman Foster was one of his students), retiring in 1971.

It is easy to see how the sculptural qualities of the present work would have appealed to him and given the date of execution (1946), it was painted after Serge and Barbara had left England for the US, therefore likely acquired on a return visit to England. A testament to their enduring friendship.

We are grateful to Jenna Lundin Aral and Sophie Bowness for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.