Barbara Hepworth. the Hospital Drawings

'Barbara Hepworth. The Hospital Drawings' Hepworth Wakefield, 27 October-13 December, 2012, Pallant House, Chichester 16 February-2 June 2013 and Mascalls Gallery, Kent, 14 June-24 August 2013.Nathaniel Hepburn, Barbara Hepworth. The Hospital Drawings London, Tate Publishing in association with Mascalls Gallery, Kent and The Hepworth, Wakefield, 2012, 128 pp., 96 colour, 12 bw however, Hepburn asserts rightly that these works are synergic with the artist's other output. He argues that her hospital drawings are strongly connected to specific pieces of sculpture, observing that particular forms are distinctive to both. For instance, in capturing the circle of surgeons and nurses around the patient she is repeating a shape that she explores in other works, as in drawings of 'the spiral forms of shells ... as they coil towards the apex' (p. 42).This interdependence of represen- tational drawings and abstract sculpture is developed by Hepburn in both exhibition and catalogue. For Hepworth, this specific body of drawings illuminated for her the notion that she could work with both representational and abstract forms simultaneously, but that, when working at either, she could still solve the same artistic and intellectual problems. This realization occurred in direct response to her revelatory experiences in the operating theatres, a point Hepburn demonstrates by including in the exhibition a letter from the sculptor to her friend and commentator, Herbert Read. The sculptor expressed her delight at discovering that there need not be a schism between abstract and represen- tational work: 'The two ways of working flow into each other without effort & I have completed 3 abstract carvings concurrently with the paintings. I don't always know which way it will go each day' (p. 48).1Further valuable supporting material is incorporated in both the exhibition and the book. Included in the exhibition was Hepworth's only surviving sketchbook from this period, on loan from the Science Museum in London, which contains brief, frenetic notes as well as her expressive pencil marks. The 1953 lecture and Capener's accompanying article, 'The Hand in Surgery', indicates the surprising symbiotic nature of the relationship between surgeon and artist. Capener discussed how his medical understanding of how hands function in relation to the mind was enhanced by his interaction with artists. Both exhibition and book include a photograph of a carving made by Capener under Hepworth's tutelage, and Hepburn proposes that the sculptor and Capener worked together on at least one sculpture. …