This summer London provided the opportunity to see retrospectives of some celebrated women of modernism. Even in the bad old days, both Barbara Hepworth and Sonia Delaunay were part of the official story. No small accomplishment.
(There was also an Agnes Martin retrospective, which I skipped because it is coming to L.A. next April.)
The reviewers have panned the Barbara Hepworth retrospective at Tate Britain (the Guardian called it “cramped, frustrating, weirdly selected and badly displayed”) but it provided a lot of pleasure and provocation to me.
Hepworth began by contrasting big, exaggerated volumes with finely scratched lines, or tiny, odd details. Later she becomes fascinated with forms as dancers on a stage. I.e. forms poised on a base, interacting with each other ...
During WWII she carved hard shells so that light came out of them. This culminated in the Guarea series ...
All the contradictions are in play, and given full value: exterior/interior, dark/light, open/closed, natural/artificial. Some fault Hepworth's work for being genial and sly rather than aggressive. If that's provincialism, please sign me up for more, rather than blue chip international modernist triumphalism. She seeks equilibrium. She carved Apollinaire’s “beautiful fruit of light."
Meanwhile, across the river, a Sonia Delaunay retrospective was at the Tate Modern. Delaunay's accomplishment is more difficult to demonstrate. Her important work was in fashion and fabric design and decorative art, not, strictly speaking, the fine arts. She made some compelling paintings circa 1912, but the problem is that she kept repainting the same painting for 60 years. She didn’t evolve.
Fortunately--for us--financial hardship in 1918 led Delaunay to open a shop selling fabrics, clothes and accessories. The Tate reserved the biggest room for her fabric samples and clothes from the Twenties and Thirties ...
It was glorious. I want them all. A knit jacket for Gloria Swanson. A knit bathing suit! A simultanist parasol! There was an anonymous, silent, color film advertisement ...
Delaunay designed dress-poems. The Tate had a breathtaking Curtain with lines from Philippe Soupault embroidered on it. See the better pictures in the blogs of Kate Davies Designs and A Place Called Space.
It is all crazy beautiful. I love it, but I suspect I am guilty of viewing this through Jazz Age nostalgia--fantasizing how liberating, optimistic and fun it all was. But still, she made a go of bringing modern design to ordinary people for decades, rather than just jabbering about it like the guys in Moscow or the Bauhaus.
Her later work is often lovely, but more of the same. The sequence of prints, Avec moi-même (1970) provides a beautiful culmination.
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