{"id":2195,"date":"2016-04-21T10:03:15","date_gmt":"2016-04-21T09:03:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/?p=2195"},"modified":"2016-04-21T12:33:15","modified_gmt":"2016-04-21T11:33:15","slug":"1976-2016-40th-anniversary-of-barbara-hepworth-museum-and-sculpture-garden","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/sculpture-nature_local.test\/en\/1976-2016-40th-anniversary-of-barbara-hepworth-museum-and-sculpture-garden\/","title":{"rendered":"1976-2016: 40th Anniversary of Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s in 1976, a year after Barbara Hepworth\u2019s death, that the \u201cTrewyn Studio\u201d, located in Saint Ives in Cornwall, in which the artist lived and worked, was turned into the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden. The museum opened thanks to Alan Bowness, the artist\u2019s son-in-law and later director of Tate Gallery. Forty years after its opening, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Garden, which is part of the Tate St Ives since 1980, still attracts many visitors and displays the artist\u2019s work according to the instructions given in her will.<\/span><\/p>\n

Barbara Hepworth was born in 1903 in Wakefield (Yorkshire, England). She studied art in Leeds and then at the Royal College of Arts in London where she became acquainted with artist Henry Moore, among others. Barbara Hepworth started out by favoring human or animal marble figures, like Doves<\/i> (1927), Mother and Child<\/i> (1927) or Standing Figure<\/i> (1929-1930). Her first abstract shapes only appear in 1932, with the famous pink alabaster Pierced Form<\/i>, which was unfortunately destroyed during the war. By the end of the 1930s, the Hepworth workshop, which she shared with her second husband, the painter Ben Nicholson, had become an abstract art reference in England.<\/span><\/p>\n

It\u2019s only in 1939 that Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and their four children settle down in Saint Ives, in Cornwall: the Second World War had just been declared. For four years, the artist was forced to stop working for financial reasons, lack of space and mostly family obligations. She started working again in 1943. At that time, her artistic outlook visibly and tangibly changed: the Cornish landscape goes through her retina, travels through her body and translates into her sculptures. Her way of experiencing the landscape indisputably influences her artistic production: through her work, she tries to create space inside the sculpture, to open up the shape. She wants everyone to be able to project themselves inside her sculptures just as she projects herself into the landscape which surrounds her. Like the wind and the ocean shaping the landscape, her hands shape her work: spirals, movements, curves, empty spaces. <\/span><\/p>\n

In 1949, because she needed a lot more space to work, she finally purchased the Trewyn studios. She explains in an interview: \u201cFinding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic. Here was a studio, a yard and a garden where I could work in open air and space.\u201d<\/span> 1<\/sup><\/p>\n