Join us to explore key themes arising from the Barbara Hepworth Art & Life exhibition in an inclusive, supportive and friendly environment across three modular day courses.
Session 3. The Artist in Society
‘.. she [Hepworth] became an early environmentalist, a socialist and anti-nuclear campaigner, and this commitment and her art practice were indivisible from each other as organic to her a breathing.’
Ali Smith
Hepworth held the passionate belief that artists had a moral role to play in society. In this session we will explore the drawings she made in the operating theatres of hospitals, which express the commitment and harmony that exists between a group of people working together with a common purpose, and can be viewed as a metaphor for a social paradigm.
We will also study a selection of her commissions for public sculpture in the post-war period, such as Contrapuntal Forms, an Arts Council commission for the 1951 Festival of Britain on London's South Bank, and the ways in which these addressed her utopian desire as an artist to improve society.
Also considered will be her commission Single Form, 1961 – 64, for the UN Headquarters in New York, inspired by her close friendship with Dag Hammerskjold and their mutual commitment to nuclear disarmament.
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