The artists Anish Kapoor, Veronica Ryan and Rachel Whiteread have backed a campaign to keep an important work by Barbara Hepworth in the UK. The Art Fund charity and the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in West Yorkshire have launched a public appeal to acquire Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red (1943), which costs £3.8m.
The Art Fund has provided £750,000 but another £2.9m needs to be found before the deadline of 27 August. Eleanor Clayton, the head of collection and exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield, told the Guardian: “If we’re successful, it would be pretty much on permanent display to the public, either in Wakefield or we would lend it to important exhibitions around the country.”
The piece sold for £3.8m at Christie’s last year to a private buyer, but the UK government placed an export bar on the sculpture in November. According to Christie’s, the wooden sculpture which incorporates multi-coloured strings was acquired by the collector Helen Sutherland in 1944.
A 2008 sales report highlights that the work was bought by the Pyms Gallery in London for £892,450 ($1.7m) at Christie’s London. Pyms gallery, which was founded by the late collectors Mary and Alan Hobart, closed in 2013.
Stuart Lochhead, a member of the reviewing committee on the export of works of art and objects of cultural interest which advises the government, said last year: “Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red embodies the Cornish sky, sea and rugged coastline in which she lived and which influenced her so deeply.” The piece is one of only a handful of stringed and coloured sculptures Wakefield-born Hepworth produced during this period in Cornwall, he added.
The Hepworth Wakefield says in a statement that it does not own any finished works by Hepworth from the 1940s, a pivotal period in the artist’s development. “If the funds are raised in time, the acquisition would fill this significant gap,” the gallery adds.
