Barbara Hepworth – Cool Moon

1971

'Cool Moon' was the first composition in the second group of lithographs that Hepworth drew. She began work on the prints in 1970, working at her studio in St. Ives and then completed and editioned them at the Curwen Studio in London in June of the following year. In the introduction to the prints she explained how she wanted to work in the prints on ideas on which she was then working in sculpture. This is particularly apparent in the attention that she paid to the way that the transparent films of colour and tone are made to float over the 'sculptural structure' of the image, creating the effect of the eye moving over the contrasts between smoothness and texture in the wood and marble sculptures.

Hepworth was one of the greatest British sculptors of the mid 20th century. She studied at the Royal College of Art in London in the early 20's and in 1924 she married John Skeaping, a leading British sculptor with a particular interest in work in stone. However in 1931 she met Ben Nicholson, who was to become her second husband. Their association over the next 20 years (the marriage was dissolved in 1951) was to be the source of the most inspired thinking and creation in the development of British avant-garde art of the era. Through their involvement with the Abstraction Création movement in France, and through their own inspiration, they were really to establish the British Modern Movement. Like Henry Moore, with whom her art although totally different in style has many links (they first met in the 1920's as students), Hepworth's art links the essentially British sensibility to landscape wuith an abstract sense of space and structure. But landscape was not only a source of structure it was also a 'human environment', and this relationship between man and nature is a core element in her art.

Medium: Lithograph onto wove paper
Date: 1971
Dimensions: 81.4 x 58.2cm
Sign: Signed and numbered 30/30. Published by Marlborough Fine Art, London, with the printer’s blindstamp