Dr Alexandra Gerstein is the Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at London’s prestigious Courtauld Gallery. Her curatorial eye is shaped by a cross-disciplinary understanding of visual art, informed in part by her 2003 architectural history PhD at the Courtauld’s prestigious Institute of Art. She has been part of the institution ever since, as a curator and the person responsible for responding to Nazi-era restitution claims. When we speak ahead of the opening of Hepworth in Colour, Alexandra tells me that her approach to curation is about “asking questions that seem obvious but haven’t been asked yet. That would be the thing that characterises what I bring to an exhibition.”
Hepworth in Colour reveals a lesser explored aspect of the late British sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s oeuvre. Working through the middle of the twentieth century, she was one of the defining British sculptors of her time, creating abstract, modernist forms inspired by natural structures and the wild Cornish seascape that surrounded her. The show homes in on the bright bursts of colour that slice through the interiors of her sculptures and her surprisingly contemporary-feeling geometric drawings. “I love to understand how an artist made things,” Alexandra says. “Usually, [my curated exhibitions] are about how an artist develops their distinctive forms. Here, the forms have already been studied deeply. We know Hepworth created forms that responded to the landscape and wanted to convey the feeling of being within the landscape. I was curious about what the colour does then.”
As a university museum, the Courtauld Gallery’s curatorial team enjoy “the advantage of having colleagues and research students working on all kinds of subjects, from medieval to contemporary.” Through conversations last year with a professor of 20th-century art and sculpture, Alexandra was introduced to Stephen Feeke, who was completing a PhD on Hepworth's bronzes, and he sent me a proposal focused on “undervalued or unnoticed aspect of Barbara Hepworth’s work”. “It was irresistible. It’s a subject that in some ways is not immediately obvious, but once you start to consider her preoccupation with colour, it runs across her work.”
The show centres around a series of sculptures made between 1940 and 1948, which Alexandra describes as the “high point of her colour adventure.” “In those years, she explored colour in a way that was quite radical and unexpected.” Many of the pieces have not been shown together since the 1950s, and some never were as they left the studio almost as soon as they were made. Hepworth’s rich understanding of colour is inherent even in her specific choice of stones and wood, which she often catalogued with a shade descriptor such as “pink alabaster”, and the varied patination on her bronzes. She was, in every way, “alive to colour”.
In Eidos, 1947-48, a golden yellow concave is surrounded by sweeps of grey stone, evocative of a glaring sun or gooey egg yolk. Sculpture with Colour (Deep Blue and Red), 1943, features a conical form of white painted wood with a rich navy centre, cut through with harp-like deep red strings. Hepworth’s refined forms are set off by clean dashes of colour, adding a playful note to the typically weighty shapes of modernist design.
In 1970, Hepworth told her son-in-law, the art historian Alan Bowness, “in a way my colour has been accepted, but never understood”. Alexandra understands this to mean that it was never seen as a major part of her practice. “No one has paid attention or noticed.” But, she notes, this acceptance could be seen as a “compliment”, as it meant it was viewed as “integral to the form instead of applied”. Hepworth worked in a tradition of sculpture which was “honest” about its materials, where forms were used to highlight rather than hide their natural properties. “She uses colour not to conceal, but as part of the interiors of her sculptures – in the cavities, shallows and curves.” This corresponded to a concept of inner vitality which could be seen throughout her work at the time.
Colour, for Hepworth, meant an “invocation of something personal”. Sometimes “it’s there to give an idea of the mood and time of place”, perhaps conjuring how light might fall on the surface at a particular moment and how that might make her feel. Hepworth’s was a “poetic and unspecific use of colour”; she referred to her paintings and drawings as “personal surfaces”, full of texture or beautiful finishes that played off each other. Her colour visualised the contrast between interior and exterior, used in a similar way to architecture, to highlight the form, or to project a psychological feeling. “She was doing something very new at this moment,” Alexandra reflects.
Hepworth’s use of colour could also be understood within the context of the artists and creatives she was surrounded by. Before moving to Cornwall, she shared a London studio with her husband, the painter Ben Nicholson. This “led her to become very familiar with his painting techniques” which she carried forward into her first sculpture with colour in 1939. It was the only work she took with her when she moved to Cornwall to escape the bombing of World War II. Materials were scarce, with wood reserved for war use, and stone becoming very expensive to buy and transport. She made five plaster carvings during this time, eventually interpreting them into a larger wooden sculpture in 1943 - we have managed to unite in this exhibition for the first time.
Working with conservation scientists and specialists from the V&A, the Courtauld, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, Australia, Alexandra and her team have discovered a range of sources for Hepworth’s colour. A particular shade of green was revealed through technical analysis to be the copper-based phthalocyanine green, marketed at the time as 'Monastral' green by Winsor & Newton. She also used household paints such as Dulux. “What we found was quite interesting,” says Alexandra. “The pigments go across mediums; she embraced modern materials.”
Her colourful drawings are geometrical, some with an almost digital use of clean line and form. “I think at the beginning, that use of colour related to Nicholson’s paintings – the shapes, the adjacency of colours, the ideas of complementary colours – but she wasn’t a purist, that’s for sure,” says Alexandra. “She’s not adhering to a script.” The possible influence of Piet Mondrian can also be seen in both in her wall-based works and in her three-dimensional interpretations of primary colour. The great Dutch painter was a friend and neighbour in Hampstead who gave the couple a work of his. She also admired the US sculptor and kinetic artist Alexander Calder. While inspiration can be traced to the art scene that surrounded Hepworth, “it becomes personal very quickly.”
Hepworth also networked with architects, and Alexandra explains how her use of colour mirrors the way it was used in civic space. Some walls in the exhibition are drenched in powerful tones of red, blue and yellow, her small-scale pieces visually popping out from them. “We didn’t want overwhelming colour,” says Alexandra. “These blocks evoke the modernist constructive colour that you might see in architecture, like that of Le Corbusier with his units of colour. Then her really good friends, the architects Leslie Martin and Sadie Speight, brought those ideas to England through their own designs and teaching.”
Hepworth in Colour ultimately highlights an artist who was committed to exploration and evolution. Some coloured surfaces were repainted decades after they were first made. “Why shouldn’t she, 20 years later? Maybe she’s reimagining it or maybe her style has changed,” Alexandra poses. Even the brushstrokes used to apply colour were subject to change. Some works have visible brushwork while others use a smooth airbrushed style. “It would have been a lot of effort to make them that way. There’s more [to Hepworth] than meets the eye, and that’s what’s interesting to me.”
Alexandra wears the Alda Maypole Stripe Cotton Easy Tee and Cotton Linen Poplin Box Pleat Skirt.
The Joseph Hage Aaronson & Bremen Exhibition: Hepworth in Colour is on at the Courtauld Gallery until 6 September 2026.
Words by Emily Steer.
Photography by Aloha Bonser-Shaw.
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