The Hepworth You Haven't Met: Colour, Carving and a Quiet Revelation at the Courtauld

We tend to picture Barbara Hepworth in monochrome. The smooth white marble, the silvered bronze, the pale wood polished until it glows — these are the surfaces that made her one of the towering figures of twentieth-century British sculpture. So there is a real jolt of surprise in walking into the Courtauld Gallery this summer and finding Hepworth in colour: scarlet hollows, deep blues painted into carved concavities, sea-greens that seem to hold light the way a rock pool does. Hepworth in Colour, open from 12 June to 6 September, is the first exhibition ever devoted to this overlooked thread in her work, and it gently rearranges how we think about an artist most of us assumed we already knew.

Why colour matters in a sculptor’s hands

Colour in sculpture is not a decoration tacked on at the end. For Hepworth it was structural to the experience — a way of deepening space rather than filling it. From the 1940s onward she began painting the interiors of her pierced forms, those famous hollows that opened her solid masses to the air. A carved cavity left in plain wood reads as absence; the same cavity washed in blue suddenly reads as depth, as water, as sky glimpsed through stone. The colour does not sit on the surface so much as it pulls your eye inward, turning a piece of wood into a small landscape you can fall into.

This was no whim. Hepworth had trained her eye on the Cornish coast around St Ives, where she lived and worked for much of her life, and the palette she reached for is unmistakably that of the West Penwith light: the bleached greens of the Atlantic, the chalky blues of a clearing sky, the warm ochres of the moorland. Bringing roughly twenty of her most significant coloured sculptures together, alongside around thirty drawings, the Courtauld show lets you trace how a Yorkshire-born modernist absorbed a particular English coastline and gave it back to us as abstract form.

Drawings that explain the sculpture

One of the quiet pleasures of this exhibition is the decision to hang the sculptures beside her works on paper. Hepworth’s drawings are sometimes treated as a sideline to the carving, but here they do real work. The innovative coloured sculptures of the 1940s are shown next to the most important drawings of that same decade, and the conversation between the two is illuminating. In the drawings you can watch her thinking — testing how a band of colour might describe a curve, how a line of string stretched across a void might catch the eye and pull a flat sheet into three dimensions.

For anyone newer to looking at abstract art, this pairing is a generous way in. Sculpture can feel forbidding precisely because it refuses to tell you what it is “of.” The drawings act as a kind of translation, showing you the questions Hepworth was asking herself, and reminding you that abstraction is rarely cold. It is, more often, an attempt to get closer to something felt than a picture ever could.

A second discovery upstairs

The Courtauld has paired the main show with a smaller display in its Project Space, Hepworth and Nicholson: The Hampstead Studio Photographs, running slightly longer, from 6 June to 4 October. These images were taken between 1932 and 1936 by the photographer Paul Laib, and they capture Hepworth and her then-partner Ben Nicholson in the Hampstead studio years before the move to Cornwall — a period when London was briefly the crucible of British modernism. Seeing the early works in their original setting, surrounded by the clutter and light of a working studio, grounds the polished gallery pieces in something human and slightly precarious.

Worth the trip — and the wider lesson

For visitors, the Courtauld remains one of London’s most rewarding galleries precisely because of its scale. After its handsome refurbishment it is large enough to hold a serious show and small enough that you can absorb one without exhaustion — the antidote to the blockbuster crush you might meet at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition or the Frida Kahlo crowds at Tate Modern this season. An hour with Hepworth here is an hour genuinely spent looking.

There is a broader takeaway for gallery-goers and new collectors, too. Hepworth in Colour is a reminder that even the most familiar artists hold unexamined corners, and that the pleasure of looking often lies in the detail everyone else walked past. We file Hepworth under “white marble” and move on; the show asks us to slow down and notice the blue. The same habit pays off in any independent gallery up and down the country — the willingness to look twice, to ask why a maker chose this surface, this hollow, this exact shade of green. Hepworth spent a lifetime teaching herself to see the Cornish coast clearly. This summer, the Courtauld offers the rest of us a short course in the same attention.