Barbara Hepworth

Exhibited by Piano Nobile

Material Bronze

Dimensions 72.4 × 5 × 5 cm

Place of Creation UK

Price Price Upon Inquiry

Status Vetted

About the Work

Idol is a polished bronze version of an eponymous boxwood carving that Hepworth made in 1955–56 [BH 206]. Writing in 1978, the curator Douglas Hall stated that Idol is ‘essentially a grainy shape following the curvature of the slender block available to the artist.’ The title of Idol implies that the sculpture is a ritualistic place-holder for some divine being. Certain dominant types of sculptural form recurred throughout Hepworth’s creative lifetime, and she proactively conceived and made work that satisfied certain typologies: the standing form; the closed form; the two forms. Idol is an example of the standing form, which Hepworth frequently associated with the presence of a human figure in landscape. And as she explained in 1946, ‘[t]his relationship between figure and landscape is vitally important to me.’ The elongated upright form of Idol is animated by three small, eye-like apertures at the top. The form tapers at the waist and an ovoid indentation further down creates an echo of biped morphology.

Hepworth began to use bronze regularly in 1956, and from 1959 she treated some bronze sculptures with a highly polished, unpatinated, mirror-like finish. The art historian A. M. Hammacher noted that the quality of polished bronze was ‘lacking all the organic naturalness’ that had characterised the artist’s bronze sculpture of the mid-fifties. This marked an intentional shift in Hepworth’s handling of cast bronze, away from gestural, hand-finished qualities towards precious, precise, self-contained ones. These qualities enhance the ritualistic, hermetic, semi-divine aspect of Idol. They invest it with a greater dignity and untouchable separateness, and they amplify the solemn, supernatural aspect of Hepworth’s idea.

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Provenance

The Hepworth Estate
Private Collection, by descent

Literature

Barbara Hepworth, Volume of Sculpture Records: 1971, Tate Archive, BH 535 (TGA 7247/42), pp. 59–60 (illus.)
The Journey of Things: Magdalene Odundo, exh. cat., The Hepworth Wakefield and Sainsbury Centre, 2019, no. 45, n.p., figs. 45a and 45b (col. illus.)
This work will be included in the forthcoming revised catalogue raisonné of Barbara Hepworth's sculpture by Dr Sophie Bowness under catalogue number BH 535.