Barbara Hepworth's Studio and Sculpture Garden

Anyone who visits St Ives often will be familiar with Barbara Hepworth's studio and garden, which is hidden away behind the busy high street. Tate St Ives runs the studio/garden and a small museum there.

Hepworth lived and worked in Trewyn studio from 1949 until her death in 1975. The Tate St Ives web site describes how she was drawn there and used the garden for her work:

'Finding Trewyn Studio was a sort of magic', wrote Barbara Hepworth; 'here was a studio, a yard and garden where I could work in open air and space'. When she first arrived at Trewyn Studio, Hepworth was still largely preoccupied with stone and wood carving, but during the 1950s she increasingly made sculpture in bronze as well. This led her to create works on a more monumental scale, for which she used the garden as a viewing area.

The bronzes now in the garden are seen in the environment for which they were created, and most are in the positions in which the artist herself placed them.

Hepworth could be a hard taskmaster and my favourite Terry Frost story relates to the time he was working as Barbara Hepworth's assistant - Here told by his son Anthony in Tate Etc - The Real St Ives Story:

The other story is about Barbara Hepworth. At the time Denis [Mitchell] and dad were her assistants. When journalists or photographers came round, she didn't want them to see that she had these people working away on her sculptures. So she would shut the workers in the greenhouse, where they had their morning breaks. Then Barbara would start polishing the sculpture, as if she'd been at it all day.

One time my father was bursting for a pee, but she wouldn't let them out, and the only thing he could find was a pot with a geranium with very dry earth in it - but the pee went straight through and trickled across the greenhouse floor, and out under the door, between the legs of the visitors. Barbara banned him from having biscuits for the rest of the week.

Terry Frost in the 1960s

Which brings me back to what started me on this post - A great set of photos of details from Barbara Hepworth's studio on the indigoalison blog. By way of contrast you can see some more conventional views of the studio in Alice's Quaint Living blog. In fact the garden and studio must be one of the most photographed and blogged sites in the whole of Cornwall. Take a look at Mondoblogo for an excellent collection of old photographs of Barbara, her work and Trewyn Studio.

Hepworth outside St Ives studio 1964 (Paul Schutzer)

Barbara Hepworth had a number of assistants who were later to go on and make their own artistic marks. Another of these was Breon O'Casey who died earlier this year (and who, incidentally, spent his early and middle years in Totnes and Torquay, Devon).

Peter Davies describes Breon's relationship with Hepworth in his obituary in the Independent:

Through the popular sculptor Denis Mitchell, O'Casey met the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, in whose studio he worked for two days a week between 1959 and 1963. What he described as "a tough apprenticeship" in Hepworth's workshop proved to be his real artistic education.

Hepworth could be challenging and a joke circulated about her assistants forming a workers’ fraternity whose club tie would be pierced by a hole. During O'Casey's time her old assistants moved on and she replaced them with new younger ones with fewer creative aspirations. O'Casey himself moved on and had to support his family with part-time work as a telephonist. However, he demonstrated his versatility by producing his best work in a diverse range of media: Jewellery, weaving, etching, prints, engraving, painting and, latterly, sculpture. He also retained the respect of Hepworth, who acquired one of his paintings and commissioned him to make a gold cross for her. 

The Hepworth studio/museum

You can explore Barbara's garden and its sculptures further by using the Tate Kids' online tool - or you can read more in this short review by Rachel Wilson-Couch. If you are visiting St Ives you can often find work by Breon O'Casey and Terry Frost at Westcotts Gallery (now closed unfortuantely - see my previous post about the gallery).

Oxford, the Ashmolean and Lucian Freud

At the weekend we visited Oxford with friends.

We did quite a bit of eating & drinking and spent some time rowing and punting on the Isis. Towards the end of the day we managed to fit in a brief visit to the Ashmolean Museum.

This was my first visit and I wasn't disappointed. While outside it retains its traditional classical look, inside the museum has been extensively renovated in recent years. The museum's full name is the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archeaology and its contents are wide-ranging. As we had less than an hour we focused on only a small part - the museum's collection of 19th to 21st century art.

Brazen Nose College - JMW Turner

This includes a couple of galleries devoted to Sickert and Pisarro, a 19th century gallery - which includes several Turners - and a Pre-Raphaelite gallery. Each of these has some fine examples and they are displayed in a relaxed user-friendly way (no trip wires to prevent you getting a good look at the paintings).

Cows at Cookham - Stanley Spencer

There is also a lone Modern Art gallery. Inevitably this is pretty selective but it includes good things, including a picture by Roger Hilton, a large piece of sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, a typical Cookham pastoral by Stanley Spencer and a perfect small nude by Lucian Freud.

Small naked portrait - Lucian Freud

Which gives me an excuse to write about Freud's recent death at the age of 88 ... Freud was described succinctly by the BBC as one of Britain's most distinguished and highly regarded artists - However, he was more than that.

As a refugee from the Nazis, his framework of experience is unimaginable for us baby-boomers and later generations, and this inevitably influenced his work. He was intensely private, eccentric and charismatic. His nude portraits, for which he was famous, were detailed and unforgiving. His best known paintings have been auctioned for serious money, rivalling the likes of Damien Hirst.

The following clip from ITN gives a flavour of his life and his art:

Here are some links to a selection of posts following his death:  Is Lucian Freud’s Death the End of Figurative Painting? from Bob Duggan;  some personal thoughts from indigoalison; an obit from the Independent; and a further obit from the Telegraph. Wherever he is now, I doubt that he is just resting in peace ...

Details of the 2012 exhibtion at the National Portrait Gallery are shown here.