A public campaign was launched on Thursday to raise £3.8 million ($5 million) to buy a rare Barbara Hepworth sculpture and keep it on British soil.
A private collector bought the wooden work, which incorporates multi-colored strings and is titled Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red (1943), at Christie’s London in March last year for £3.8 million (including fees). However, last December, the UK government slapped a temporary export ban on the work due to its “outstanding connection with our history and national life, its outstanding aesthetic importance and its outstanding significance to the study of Dame Barbara Hepworth’s working practice and the evolution of her work,” the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) said in a statement. “[The] export bar is to allow time for a UK gallery or institution to acquire the sculpture.”
“I hope a UK buyer can be found for this sculpture so the British public can continue to learn and engage with one our most important artists for generations to come,” UK arts minister Sir Chris Bryant said at the time.
The Hepworth Wakefield museum in West Yorkshire (where Hepworth was born), supported by the national Art Fund charity, initiated the appeal to acquire the work for its collection. Art Fund has put £750,000 ($1 million) into the kitty. Another £2.9 million ($3.9 million) is required before the August 27 deadline. If the money does not materialize before then, the private collector will be free to export the work.
“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,” Eleanor Clayton, the head of collection and exhibitions at the Hepworth Wakefield, told the Guardian.
Stuart Lochhead, a member of the reviewing committee on the export of works of art and objects of cultural interest (RCEWA), which advises the UK government, said in a statement in 2024: “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.”
Hepworth and her husband moved to Cornwall at the outbreak of World War II in 1939, and she lived there until her death in 1975. The Hepworth Wakefield does not own any finished works by the artist from the 1940s, which is regarded as pivotal period in her career.
The campaign is backed by artists and creative figures including Sir Anish Kapoor, Sir Antony Gormley, Jonathan Anderson, Richard Deacon, and Dame Rachel Whiteread.
Kapoor said in a statement: “Barbara Hepworth’s Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red must be saved for the nation. Art fund has put up a quarter of the value of this important sculpture in an extraordinary bid to keep this work in a public collection and accessible to all. This sculpture comes from a period of work by Hepworth in which she explores form and emptiness and looks forward to radical modernity.”
In the same statement, Gormley described the work as “a luminary example of both an engagement with modernism and a return to direct carving.” “The opportunity for the museum named after her to acquire this important work is precious and should be supported,” he said.
Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red was purchased by London’s now-closed Pyms Gallery in 2008 at Christie’s London for £892,450 ($1.7 million). It’s current owner bought the lot during the house’s Modern British and Irish Art evening sale on March 20, 2024. Its high estimate was £3.2 million ($4.3 million).
Hepworth’s auction record was set by The Family of Man: Ancestor II (1970), which sold for $11.5 million at Christie’s in 2023.
Christie’s declined a request to comment from ARTnews.
