The Courtauld's first exhibition devoted to Barbara Hepworth's use of colour set her painted 1940s carvings beside the drawings and bronzes that carried the idea into her later work.
The Courtauld Gallery on the Strand showed Barbara Hepworth’s painted and coloured sculpture from Friday 12 June to Sunday 6 September 2026. It was the first exhibition built entirely around her use of colour.
Born in Wakefield in 1903, Hepworth studied at Leeds School of Art and the Royal College of Art. She married the sculptor John Skeaping in 1925, then left him for the painter Ben Nicholson in 1931.
In 1939 she moved with Nicholson to St Ives, Cornwall, among a colony of modern artists that included Naum Gabo. She is best known for abstract forms drawn from the Cornish coastline.
From the 1940s she also carved colour directly into wood and stone, working blues and yellows into hollows and curves. “In a way my colour has been accepted, but never understood,” she told her son-in-law, the art historian Alan Bowness.
The colour continued into her bronzes of the 1950s and 1960s, in painterly surfaces and unusual marbles. The Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries held around 20 coloured sculptures and some 30 drawings, some lent from Australia and Hong Kong. Several had never been shown side by side.