Gorringe's Auctioneers Fine Summer 2022

Lot 492
§ Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975)
‘Girl (Pillar) 1949’
oil and pencil on board
signed and dated October 1949 and inscribed
‘Standing girl’
68 x 22cm
£50,000 - 80,000
See Lyon & Turnbull, Lot 28, October 28, 2021 &
Christie’s, Lot 167, May 14, 2019 for related works.
After the outbreak of WWII, Hepworth and Nicholson
moved down to Cornwall at the invitation of Adrian
Stokes and Margaret Mellis. With triplets to look after,
materials becoming scare and space limited, Hepworth
found that her opportunities for carving were becoming
fewer and thus in the earliest part of her time in Cornwall,
she ‘could only draw at night and make a few plaster
maquettes’. However, the possibilities of drawing soon
became apparent to her and she found that they could
be produced relatively quickly and provided a useful
source of income during the war years, and virtually all
her friends and collectors acquired examples, including
Margaret Gardiner, Cyril Reddihough, Leslie Martin and
Alastair Morton. Once the privations of the war began to
lift, Hepworth found that drawing was now solidly established
as a key element of her work, and several themes
began to emerge from this corpus. Although always
described by the artist as drawings, the careful building
up and working of the base surface, often gesso, the
coloured washes and painted details make them more
than simply drawings. The conscious lack of idealization
in the pose of the subject is typical for Hepworth at this
time, and indeed she tried not to use professional models,
preferring people such as dancers, whose movements
appealed to her.