(soft music)
- [Steven] We've come to the museum Tate Britain
to see a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth, Pelagos.
This was made just after the end of the Second World War.
- [Beth] Pelagos means open sea in Greek
and we know that Hepworth moved to Cornwall
just before the start of World War Two in 1939.
And Cornwall is a place that is known
for the beauty of where the land meets the sea.
- [Steven] But this is not a depiction of the sea.
This is not a landscape in any sense.
This is not taking a thing that she sees
and trying to mimic it.
Instead, it's a formal experiment in the feeling
that one might have in that place.
- [Beth] It's about experience and in fact
she says this in a famous quote from this period.
She said, "What a different shape and being
"one becomes lying on the sand with the sea
"almost above from when standing against the wind
"on a high sheer cliff with seabirds circling
"patterns below one.
"And again, what a contrast from the form
"one feels within oneself sheltering near some
"great rocks or reclining in the sun
"on the grass-covered rocky shapes which make
"the double spiral of Pendour or Zennor cove."
So she's referring to the bodily experience
of being either enclosed or lying on the sand
or standing upright and facing the wind.
How does one translate that into sculpture?
- [Steven] Sculpture had always been about the human body.
But she's after something that seems almost impossible.
How does one represent an internal feeling
in the vocabulary of form and mass and volume,
texture and color?
- [Beth] When we think about this
through sculpture, we think about sculptures
that celebrate heroes or battles or ancient Greek
gods and goddesses, or we think about sculptures
of saints and other religious figures.
- [Steven] So what has she done?
Well, first of all she's carving in wood,
which is a warm material, one that feels good
in our hands, one that we can imagine holding
that has texture and rich color.
She's used round forms, which give a sense
of sheltering, of protection.
And the scale of the sculpture is small, it's intimate.
It's about the width of our shoulders
and so it's something that we can come to directly.
It's not something that's put on a pedestal.
- [Beth] Even in this glass box I am drawn
to caressing the smoothness of that wood
or what I imagine to be the even smoother interior.
- [Steven] Which she painted a light blue
so that it feels cool in contrast to the warmth
of the outside.
It looks as if it might actually be stone
even though it's just painted wood.
- [Beth] And then you have the string,
which is the very opposite of these rounded forms
of the wood.
These are lines and they're also more fragile.
- [Steven] It's introducing a drawing,
almost a two-dimensional form, in the volumes
of this sculpture.
It seems to almost draw the wood back on itself
as if it were completely malleable.
- [Beth] Well, we could think about
a conch shell, a shell that's created organically
by the living form inside it.
- [Steven] Or a wave, but a wave that is crested
and has been held in stasis by those strings.
At that perfect moment when it's about to break
it's held there permanently.
This sculpture is so complicated.
As you move around it, you can't anticipate
what you're going to see.
- [Beth] The longer you spend with it, the more
you see how complex and sensitive
the relationship of those curves
are to one another and to the depth of the sculpture itself.
- [Steven] And I can't help but think about
how its ideal qualities function as a refuge
in the moment that it was made.
This is 1946, the war had just ended,
Britain was in ruins and yet here she is creating
this ideal representation.
She lived at a moment that we often refer
to as high modernism.
If you look back to the art historians
of her own era, they would rarely discuss
the circumstances that might have helped shaped this.
For example, the end of the war.
Instead, they would focus on the traditions
that she was breaking and one of those
was the idea of sculpture as a mass.
When she first pierced her sculpture
it was doing something fundamentally different
from what sculpture had always been.
One of the other issues that's often brought out
in talking about Barbara Hepworth's sculpture
and other sculptors of the same period
in England, people like Henry Moore, is the idea
of truth to materials.
That is rejecting the 19th century way
of making sculpture, building in wax or clay,
casting in bronze or having a marble sculpture
carved by somebody else.
Here instead the artist has taken a block
of wood that they've chosen.
- [Beth] And you get that sensitivity to the wood
when you walk around this sculpture
and you see these lovely rounded forms of the grain itself.
- [Steven] But the sculpture we're looking at
is more than 70 years old, and because it's an organic
material and it's been handled, it's no longer perfect.
The strings sag ever so slightly.
They're not as taut as I imagine they once were.
There's some slight cracking in the wood
and you can see that the paint has been redone.
The outside is dark and the inside is light,
which itself is unexpected.
And though she seems to have dismissed
the importance of color in her sculpture
in a later statement, we can't help but think
about the blue of the sea and the color
of the earth that surrounds the sea in the coves
in the Cornwall that she was living in.
(upbeat music)