Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975
Small Torso (Opus 240), 1958
carved boxwood
15 H ins


Provenance
Lady Jamieson

Exhibited
Gimpel Fils, London, Barbara Hepworth, June 1958, cat no.20
Gimpel Fils, London, Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, June-September 1990

Literature
J. P. Hodin, Barbara Hepworth, Lund Humphries, London, 1961, cat no.240



Hepworth’s work of the 1950’s is remarkable for its diversity in both forms and media. Always committed to the practice of direct carving, the supplies of appropriate wood and stone in the years following the war were unreliable and she had often used unsuitable but available woods, adapting to the characteristics of each, by for instance, incorporating the inherent deep cracking of holly logs into the sculptures.

In 1954, she secured a supply of Nigerian guarea wood which allowed her to move back towards large-scale wood-carvings and many of the resultant pieces have the sense of an artist exuberant in the rediscovery of her abilities. Although the present work is in boxwood, one of the traditional woodcarver’s materials, it shares much of this excitement, but also crosses paths with her concurrent works in bronze. The figurative references of the titles and forms of this work and the three bronze Torso works - Torso I (Ulysses), Torso II (Torcello) and Torso III (Galatea) - of the same year bring forward a much more overt concern with the human body, and succeed in being both specific and general. The subtle twisting forms and natural life of the present piece are, however, much more expressive in wood than in the bronzes, linking it with larger carvings of the same year, such as Figure (Nanjizal) (coll. Tate Gallery) and also harking back to works concerned with the totemic nature of the human form throughout her career.