A major work by the artist Barbara Hepworth, Sculpture with Colour (Oval Form) Pale Blue and Red (1943), will stay in the UK after a public appeal raised £3.8m to save the piece, including 2,800 donations from members of the public.
A raft of foundations and trusts also contributed to the fundraising effort, including the Deborah Loeb Brice Foundation and the Forster Foundation. The National Lottery Heritage Fund gave £1.9m, while the Art Fund charity awarded an “exceptional grant” of £750,000.
The Art Fund and the Hepworth Wakefield gallery in west Yorkshire launched the appeal in June backed by artists including Rachel Whiteread and Anish Kapoor. The sculpture will now go on permanent public display in Hepworth’s hometown at The Hepworth Wakefield.
The artist Richard Deacon says in a statement: “I first saw the sculpture in 1968 when it was included in the Barbara Hepworth retrospective at the Tate. I was still at school and made a special trip from Plymouth to see the exhibition and buy the catalogue. Both the show, and this work in particular, made a deep and lasting impression.”
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.
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 [Hepworth] lived and which influenced her so deeply.”
