When Barbara Hepworth died in 1975, fellow sculptor Henry Moore wrote an obituary in The Sunday Times with the headline, The Shaping of a Sculptor. Not only did it prominently feature their shared birthplace of Yorkshire, but the paper’s clever headline echoed the ways their respective artistic identities had been moulded by their early lives.
Almost half a century on, Yorkshire is home to two organisations that represent their legacies – the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and The Hepworth Wakefield. A recently opened exhibition in Wakefield, Magic in this Country: Hepworth, Moore and the Land, celebrates the connection between the two artists and Yorkshire.
The highly abstracted forms Moore and Hepworth favoured – while never fully abandoning association with the human body in Moore’s case, or becoming completely geometric in Hepworth’s – were based on ideas of a common object language that could speak across cultures.
