In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge her passion for abstract form. But her commitment deepened. The solid ovoids she sculpted carried the weight of grief and the hope of eggs. To Hepworth, they became ‘forms to lie down in, or forms to climb through’. They were
a means of retaining freedom whilst carrying out what was demanded of me as a human being… a completely logical way of expressing the intrinsic ‘will to live’ as opposed to the extrinsic disaster of the world war.
References to Hepworth roll all the way through Ali Smith’s new novel, Winter, offering Hepworthian consolation to those struggling to process the shock of current world events, just as the lively brushwork of the pop artist Pauline Boty invigorated its Booker shortlisted predecessor, Autumn.
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