Footnotes

Provenance
With Gimpel Fils, London
Dr Pierre Turquet
With Marlborough Gallery, London
Sale; Christie's, London, 10 November 1989, lot 379
With Marlborough Fine Art, London, where acquired by the family of the present owner
Private Collection, U.K.

Exhibited
London, Gimpel Fils, Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture and Drawings, June 1964, cat.no.49
London, Marlborough Fine Art, Summer Exhibition, 1965, cat.no.25
London, Tate Gallery, Barbara Hepworth, 3 April-19 May 1968, cat.no.218

Literature
Alan Bowness, Drawings from a Sculptor's Landscape, Cory, Adams & Mackay, London, 1966, cat.no.69 (col.ill.)
Mervyn Levy, Drawing and Sculpture, Studio International, Volume 171, Number 873, January 1966, Cory, Adams & Mackay Limited, p.28 (ill.b&w)
Abraham Marie Hammacher, Barbara Hepworth, Thames & Hudson, London, 1968, p.146, pl.123 (ill.)

This painting is recorded as D484 in the catalogue compiled by Hepworth.

Wave Forms (Atlantic) was created at a time when Hepworth was at the peak of her career. In 1964, her most important and famous commission was unveiled at the United Nations Secretariat in New York, the monumental sculpture Single Form. The following year, she was to be made a Dame Commander of the British Empire and also appointed a Trustee of the Tate Gallery, while exhibitions both at home and abroad further celebrated her work, with shows in London and New York, the Netherlands and Scandinavia.

The Cornish landscape continued to be an evergreen source of inspiration for her, the light, stone and sea informing so much of her work. Since first moving down to Cornwall in 1939 with Ben Nicholson and their triplets, and after several moves within Carbis Bay, in 1949 Hepworth bought Trewyn Studio in St Ives, where she lived from December 1950 until her death in 1975. Many of the paintings and drawings from 1960 onwards were made in Hepworth's Barnaloft studio flat, which had a view of Porthmeor Beach and the Atlantic Ocean.

In Wave Forms (Atlantic), one feels the intimate relationship between artist and the elements and the close proximity of the two to one another. As a viewer, we are immersed in the composition which is dominated by the deep blue water as it churns and moves turbulently through the pictorial space, generating through its energy and power the frothy whiteness of the breaking surf. The force with which the water is crashing and our proximity to it is conveyed through the thicker spots of white pigment that occupy the area towards the top of the painting, indicative of spray. Further complex colour tones have been used to describe the scene and Hepworth herself wrote particularly poetically of how, 'the sea, a flat diminishing plane, held within itself the capacity to radiate an infinitude of blues, greys, greens and even pinks of strange hues' and how 'the incoming and receding tides made strange and wonderful calligraphy on the pale granite sand which sparkled with feldspar and mica' (Barbara Hepworth, Drawings From A Sculptor's Landscape, London, Cory Adams & Mackay, 1966, p.12).

The medium of oil and pencil is one which Hepworth favoured and the contrast of strong, definite graphite over washes of colour something which she particularly enjoyed. In Wave Forms (Atlantic), we see the curving lines and shapes echoing and complimenting the rhythm of the sea. In this case the pencil has been rather subtly applied with the oil predominating but leaving a strong sense nonetheless of a sculptural impression on the surface. Hepworth has further worked into the surface of the board, largely apparent on the right-hand side of the composition, by scraping back to reveal the whiteness of the primed surface underneath, in turn echoing the light and rough, rocky surfaces of the coast. Drawings were for Hepworth a means of capturing new ideas for sculpture and, as she stated in Drawings from a Sculptor's Landscape in 1966, it was a life-affirming act. Hepworth wrote that, 'Whenever I am embraced by land and seascape, I draw ideas for new sculpture: new forms to touch and walk around, new people to embrace, with an exactitude of form that those without sight can hold and realize' (Ibid., p.11). Hepworth's important and large curved sculpture Sea Form (Atlantic) was conceived in 1964, the same year as the present work, with casts housed in the Dallas Museum of Art and the City of Norwich Museum.

We are grateful to Dr Sophie Bowness for her kind assistance with the cataloguing apparatus for the present work.