Focus on Figures

This week the 100 Objects exhibition looks at another fascinating aspect of the work of Jacquetta Hawkes.  The featured object (no. 39) is a 1953 film scripted by Jacquetta: Figures in a Landscape, a poetic documentary about the sculptor Barbara Hepworth.  Find out more on the exhibition website, which includes a link to see an excerpt of the film online.

Figures in a Landscape goes to Wales

There is so much interest in Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, and post-war British sculpture at the moment!  Very much reflected on this blog, as Jacquetta Hawkes had many connections with these artists and was also inspired by British landscapes and geology.   The latest event takes place in Powys: Dr Christine Finn will show Figures in a Landscape, Jacquetta’s 1953  film about sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and discuss the British post-WW2 arts scene at the Bleddfa Centre on 8 October.

Yorkshire Sculpture Spring

As regular readers will know, Jacquetta Hawkes was inspired by the work of modern artists and sculptors, particularly Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.  Spring 2011 has seen celebrations of Hepworth and Moore in their native West Yorkshire:

• The Hepworth Wakefield is a new art gallery on a riverside location in Wakefield.  It opens on 21 May 2011.
• The Leeds Art Gallery is showing the recent Henry Moore exhibition from the Tate, which took a new look at the darkness in his work.  Finishes 12 June.
• Moore/Hepworth Conference, 3 and 4 June, “critically examines the relationships between Moore and Hepworth in the county of their birth. It aims to explore the specificity of place, re-examining the imagery of landscape …”  Dr Christine Finn, Jacquetta’s biographer, will discuss Figures in a Landscape, Jacquetta’s film which sets Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture in a poetic landscape.

Henry Moore at the BBC

A collection of rarely-seen archive BBC programmes about Henry Moore is now available online, to complement the Tate Britain retrospective.  The programmes include innovative documentaries by John Read,  Monitor with Huw Wheldon, and a view of Moore’s 1972 Venice exhibition.  The Read documentaries in particular help the viewer understand Moore’s working methods and how he developed individual works such as his Festival of Britain sculpture.   There is also great emphasis on the inspiration of landscape, which is where Moore’s work meets Jacquetta’s ideas, to stunning visual effect in “A Land”.

A Poet in Stone

A new exhibition at Tate Britain takes a fresh look at sculptor Henry Moore, whose work has perhaps become over-familiar through its ubiquity in public spaces. The exhibition, which opens on 24 February, brings the sculptures to new indoor settings, and finds a darker side: “The trauma of war, the advent of psychoanalysis, new ideas of sexuality, primitive art and surrealism all had an influence on Moore’s work”.

A Land, by Jacquetta Hawkes

Jacquetta Hawkes greatly admired Moore’s work, particularly his feeling for the individual qualities of the stones he used.  In her best-known book, A Land (1951), she praises his  “understanding of the personality of stones, allowing their individual qualities to contribute to his conception”.  She compares the way he uses the echoes of past creatures and climates (a fossil squid in the thigh of one of his figures, the two colours of Hornton stone) with the way a poet may “take fragments and echoes from other earlier poets to sink them in his own poems”.  Moore contributed remarkable colour drawings to the book.  Our Writer Fellow, Christine Finn, studied Jacquetta’s ideas about stone and sculpture and her links with Moore and other sculptors in an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in 2004, Partners in Stone.

The Hawkes Archive contains several social letters and postcards from Henry and Irina Moore, about birthday parties, music events, travels in stone, and tennis!