Hepworth sketches display surgery’s ‘surprising beauty’

Concentration of Hands II, 1948. Private Collection. Bowness, Hepworth Estate, Image courtesy of Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert.

Barbara Hepworth was one of the most important sculptors of the 20th century. What she is less well-known for are her drawings.

But over a two-year period between 1947 and 1949, Hepworth sat in operating theatres in Exeter and London, recording the surgeons and their teams through a variety of surgical procedures.

In exquisite detail, they show the large, long, delicate hands of the surgeons, the close details of their eyes as they concentrate, the tools they use, the fine threads of the sutures.

Now Barbara Hepworth: The Hospital Drawings have for the first time gone on display. At the Hepworth Wakefield until 3 February, they show a different side to the artist, not least her skill as a draughtswoman.

Picture gallery: Barbara Hepworth - the hospital drawings

‘Grim idea’

The idea for this recording of life in an operating theatre followed a long period when one of her daughters, Sarah, became ill with the bone condition osteomyelitis, in 1944.

Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson became friends with her surgeon Norman Capener at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital in Exeter.

When Capener first suggested the idea, Hepworth’s first reaction was “one of horror”. She said “it seemed to me a grim idea”. Indeed, she insisted that the only operations she would watch would be reconstructive and that she could not contemplate watching any “element of catastrophe”.

Instead, she later said that the operating theatre was not horrific. What she found was an atmosphere of “concentration and rhythm”.

Sculptural forms

Although Hepworth was an abstract artist, these drawings and paintings often come close to portraiture. Yet the forms of the bodies of the surgical teams and the curve of the arms of the surgeons are sculptural.

A Tate publication to accompany the exhibition brings all of the known works of this series – the exhibition has about 30 of the drawings and paintings. It also includes for the first time an unpublished lecture in the early 1950s that she gave to surgeons about her time in the operating theatres.

In it she said: “From the very first moment I was entirely enthralled by the classical beauty of what I saw there: classic in the sense that architecture and function were perfectly blended and purity and grace of exhibition were in complete harmony.”

What she found, too, in those theatres was “a close affinity between the work and approach both of physicians and surgeons, and painters and sculptors”.

‘Beauty and grace’

She explained this further by saying “the medical profession… seeks to restore and maintain the beauty and grace of the human mind and body… Whatever illness a doctor sees before him, he never loses sight of the ideal…”

“The artist… seeks to make concrete ideas of beauty…”

In the operating theatre, she said, “one can observe the highest intention and purpose; one can see the most perfectly attuned movements between a group of human beings”.

Frances Guy, head of collection and exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield, said that this was the artist rediscovering the role of figure drawing as a means of developing sculptural ideas at a time, post Second World War, when materials and funds were in short supply.

They are also in the context of a time when the national health service was being formed. There is nothing political in the drawings and yet she supported the social reconstruction of Britain and the development of a fairer, more inclusive society. Her paintings and drawings, Frances Guy said, also represent unity.

Hepworth’s grandson, Paul Bowness, is a professor of experimental rheumatology at Oxford University. He said: “Barbara’s operation drawings and paintings show us the surprising beauty that can be found in an operating theatre.

“Even for practicing doctors like myself, who have assisted in many operation, she strikingly captures the intensity of concentration of hands and eyes, and the harmony of all members of the operating team.”

Barbara Hepworth: The Hospital Drawings, is on at the Hepworth, Wakefield, from 27 October.