Gallery Walk
Wakefield, West Yorkshire
WF1 5AW
This wonderful gallery has opened to the public today 21st May 2011. What a landmark occasion for the county of West Yorkshire! It is important because in many ways it symbolises the end of the percieved cultural desert here. Yorkshire is well and truly on the Art map of the UK at last, something that should have happened a long time ago. Largely responsible for this delay has been the long held stereotypical view of northern art as the second rate poor relation. This metaphor is illustrated by the widespread assumption that Barbara Hepworth must have come from an impoverished background simply because she was born and raised in Wakefield in t’grimy North. Read the following snapshot of her early life and make up your own mind.
1903 -Born 10 January in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the eldest child of Herbert and Gertrude (née Johnson) Hepworth. Her father was a civil engineer and County Surveyor for the West Riding County Council. As a girl, Hepworth accompanied him on the car journeys he made all over the West Riding of Yorkshire in the course of his work.
1909–20 - Attended Wakefield Girls' High School, Music scholarship, 1915, Open Scholarship, 1917. Summer holidays at Robin Hood's Bay, near Whitby, North Yorkshire. She often commented how these landscapes influenced her work.
1920–21 -Leeds School of Art; Henry Moore is a fellow student.
As you can see the facts speak for themselves: She came from a reasonably successful lower middle class family of the early 1900s who owned a car, and she enjoyed a privileged education, and why not? You see there was life beyond London even then but its taken many of us a long time to realise that.
Gallery Walk
Wakefield, West Yorkshire
WF1 5AW
T: +44 (0)1924 247360
E: hello@hepworthwakefield.org
No comments:
Post a Comment