LONDON.- Barbara Hepworth is now acknowledged as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. This compelling new biography, published on the occasion of a major retrospective opening at The Hepworth Wakefield, offers new insights into the remarkable life, work and legacy of this singular artist, bringing together Hepworth’s expansive public statements with previously unpublished private correspondence.

An essential player in the history of modernism: Barbara Hepworth (1903—1975) was born in Wakefield and trained in Leeds and London. She was at the forefront of several avant-garde movements in her early career; a proponent of ‘direct carving’ from the 1920s, one of a handful of British artists to feature in the Paris-based Abstraction-Creation group in 1932-33, and central in the development of geometric abstraction later in the decade. At the outbreak of war she moved to St Ives, Cornwall, where she became the key figure in pioneering modern art in the UK, as her international reputation grew. In the 1950s, in addition to representing Britain at the Venice Biennale and featuring in the Festival of Britain, she collaborated with theatre directors and composers to create set and costumes designs. Her iconic public sculptures in later life, including Winged Figure 1963, for John Lewis’ flagship store in Oxford Street, London, and Single Form 1961-4 at the U.N. Headquarters in New York, remain lasting tributes of her vision for modern art and its place in contemporary society.

Hepworth was reproached for singlemindedness in her lifetime, with critics and commentators framing both the artist and her work as ‘cool and restrained’. This fully illustrated, authoritative, account of Barbara Hepworth’s life and work reflects for the first time the artist’s multifaceted and interdisciplinary approach, bringing together as never before her interests in dance, music, poetry, contemporary politics, science and technology; her engagement with these fields through friends and networks as well as her artistic practice; and the ways in which she fused sometimes seemingly conflicting disciplines and ideas into one coherent and inspirational philosophy of art and life.

Eleanor Clayton is Curator at The Hepworth Wakefield, where she has curated exhibitions such as Hepworth in Yorkshire and A Greater Freedom: Hepworth 1965-75, while bringing Hepworth’s work in dialogue with contemporary artists. In 2020 she co-founded the AHRC-funded Hepworth Research Network with the University of York and the University of Huddersfield. Clayton has published widely on contemporary and British Modern art. In addition to journal papers and reviews, she is editor and co- author of Lee Miller and Surrealism in Britain and Alan Davie & David Hockney: Early Works.

Ali Smith is one of Britain’s leading contemporary novelists. Her fiction has been translated into 40 languages.

Exhibition: Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life is published in association with The Hepworth Wakefield to coincide with a major retrospective, 21 May 2021—22 February 2022