Barbara Hepworth Art & Life

Published on the occasion   of The Hepworth Wakefield's 10th anniversary exhibition Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life.

Written by Eleanor Clayton.
Foreword by Ali Smith.

A richly illustrated biography on the life and work of Barbara Hepworth, one of the twentieth century’s most inspiring artists and a pioneer of modernist sculpture.

Barbara Hepworth is one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, and her organic sculptures have come to exemplify three-dimensional modernist art. Published at a time of increasing interest in her work, this biography moves beyond the traditional narratives of modernism to provide comprehensive insight into Hepworth’s remarkable life, work, and legacy.

In her lifetime, Hepworth was reproached for single-mindedness, with critics and commentators framing her work and demeanour as “cool and restrained.” Moreover, most exhibitions of her work in the twentieth century focused on Hepworth’s modernist abstract sculpture of the 1930s and its relation to her male contemporaries, leaving vast swathes of work overlooked, such as her largest and most significant public commission, the sculpture outside the UN building in New York.

This fully illustrated biography reflects Hepworth’s multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach, shedding new light on her interests in music, dance, poetry, contemporary politics, science, and technology. Author Eleanor Clayton uncovers Hepworth’s engagement with these fields through friends and networks and examines how they show up in Hepworth’s artistic practice, and how the artist synthesized seemingly conflicting disciplines and ideas into one coherent and inspirational philosophy of art and life.

Eleanor Clayton is curator at The Hepworth Wakefield and a Barbara Hepworth specialist. As a freelance writer on contemporary art, Clayton’s reviews and features have appeared in Frieze, Art Monthly, and The Burlington, among other periodicals. She is the editor and contributing author of Howard Hodgkin, Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain, and Viviane Sassen.

Ali Smith is a Man Booker Prize finalist and one of Britain's leading contemporary novelists. Her fiction has been translated into 40 languages.