Barbara Hepworth — Writings and Conversations

Barbara Hepworth, Writings and Conversations, Tate Publishing

Barbara Hepworth in her own words, from a 1933 visit to Brancusi's studio to a 1966 interview with Robert Hughes.

This is the first collection of what she wrote and said in public across almost her whole career: lectures and speeches, letters to newspapers, conversations with writers and journalists, radio and television broadcasts, and transcripts of film commentaries. Much of it had been out of print, and a good part was never published at all.

The editor is the art historian Sophie Bowness, Hepworth's granddaughter and a trustee of the Hepworth Estate. The book first came out in 2015, the summer Tate Britain opened Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World.

The sculptor speaks as a citizen as often as a maker. In 1956 she wrote to The Times against the hydrogen bomb. In 1961 she was one of 59 artists who signed a Sunday Times statement against nuclear stockpiles, and she gave a Daily Express journalist a list of her convictions: pacifism, the United Nations, nuclear disarmament, no capital punishment, no pollution. In 1966 she quoted Rachel Carson to Robert Hughes.

There are quieter pages too. In Brancusi's studio she noticed that he used old millstones as bases. And she writes about her Hospital Drawings, which began after one of her triplets fell ill.

Ali Smith, in the New Statesman: "a witty and satisfying read".

Paperback, about 300 pages, illustrated with manuscripts and photographs from Hepworth's own archive. English. First published 2015. Available online and in our shop at Vester Voldgade 106, Copenhagen.