Heavenly hands

The Hepworth has been garnering plaudits right and left as a new museum to be welcomed to the fold, and my first visit to this monolithic structure with its feet in Wakefield’s River Calder exceeded all expectations. Designed by David Chipperfield Architects, the ten linked blocks that make up this new suite of galleries are spacious and light-filled with excellent views out to the river and town. Restaurant, education centre and offices are on the ground floor, and upstairs the art comes into its own.

At the top of the stairs is a room of six classic sculptures by Barbara Hepworth (1903–75), whose name the museum has taken since this significant figure of British Modernism was born in Wakefield. The six starring works include a couple of beautiful early figurative carvings (‘Kneeling Figure’, 1932, and ‘Mother and Child’, 1934), when Hepworth seems very close to Henry Moore in form and ambition, before she moved away into a more rigorous abstraction of resonating clarity (see ‘Two Forms with White [Greek]’, from 1963).